A Walk in the Neighborhood

I was out for a walk in the neighborhood the other day, not on my way to the library or Mettina for lunch, just a walk. I heard the raised voices about a block away -- a couple arguing. The tones sounded young, not unlikely living as close as I do to the university. Another eruption -- voices of vituperation, but I would be beyond their vortex in about a minute and out of earshot in one or two more. They were really no more annoying than the diesel belching recycling trucks.

Then she shot out the front door, down the steps, trailing a string of accusations. She whirled on the sidewalk and stared back at the house. He swung open they screen door and hurled a one word invective. "Bitch!"

The word must have stung, she backed across the sidewalk to the grassy apron before the street. I was only thirty feet from her and now I would be walking between the young combatants. Clearly it was just a lover's spat, no firearms, probably no real offense; but I was either going to awkwardly detour around her into the street or just walk on directly through the demilitarized zone. 

I walk straight through, only three feet from her. I felt the tension but no hate, nothing real just a lover's quarrel, they would be back in the same bed tonight or sooner. She sat down on the strip of apron grass as I passed and I heard her tears begin. A few steps later I was about to cross the property line and be officially beyond the tableau, when I sensed a question. I slowed but did not stop and turned to the young man on the porch. Certainly he could have spit out a "what are you looking at" but he quietly said: "What would you do?"

I pointed at the porch, "I'd sit down on the steps and breathe a bit."

As he folded his lanky body down, my walk continued through the neighborhood and I wondered why those recycling trucks were not converted to solar.

How Do You Mend?

[Content Disclosure: 0% Poker, 0.3% The Book, . . . 99% other things like love and loss]
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"Eventually time passed and had its way with him; not so much a matter of forgetting as of bleaching, or numbing. We look at the past through the wrong end of the telescope, he thought one day; eventually the things we can see in there become simply too small to hurt us." --Kim Stanley Robinson

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I like the word bleaching as used here. The slow inexorable loss of color and vitality. When it comes to matters of love or more specifically love lost--the emotion drains away like it is being bleached by time. You can conjure the pain or the sense of loss almost endless, until you can't. Eventually you pick at the scab and find it is gone and the new smooth skin heals. But does the heart callous?

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I am not so fond of the image of looking at the past through the wrong end of a telescope. In fact, like Sartre, I think we can alter our past by acting in the present. One man's poison is another man's bread (from my formative years working in the pharmacy). What was once evil may become light as wisdom and experience build but you have to be alert for what is new growth and what is scar tissue.

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One wonders about reanimating the bleached dessicated memories and should be warned against it despite the siren lure of once again into the crotch of the beast. What is that writing competition where the winner strings together endless disembodied imagries? And what is the 96th most popular Biography on Amazon.com right now?

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The sodden, somber silence of the what-might-have-been.

"Lost chances."

"Right, The fate of chance."

"Some fate is character."

"Sure, But most fate is fate. It's what picks you up and carries you off. Who you meet by accident, what happens--what you feel inside, no matter what you think. And it affects everything. Everything! Every thing. People argue about politics, and policy, the reasons why people did this or that--but it's always the personal stuff that mattered."

"It's always the stuff they don't write about. The stuff they can't write about. The look in someone's eye."

"Right, the way something catches you..."

"The way it carries you away."

"Like falling in love. Whatever the hell that means."

"That's it, sure. Falling in love, being loved back--"

"Or not."

"Right, or not! And everything changes."

"Everything."

"And no one knows why! And later on, or from anywhere on the outside, they look at your story and they say that story makes no sense."

"When if you only knew--"

"Then it would make sense."

"Yes. Perfect sense."

"It would be the story of the heart, every time."

"A history of emotions, If you could do it."

"It would be the heart's story." --Kim Stanley Robinson

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I gotta learn to write like that.

Olde Friends

[Content Disclosure: Relationships, Love, Marriage, Life and General Human-like Goofiness]

I'll wait for you

And should I fall behind

Wait for me

Springstein

I have these two friends. I met them in 1971 when they were a new couple. They did typical 20 year old kid stuff, like arguing about nothing and fighting about air. He slept on my couch half a dozen times when he couldn't or wouldn't go home. I was at their wedding in 1975 but turned down any official position in the wedding party. I thought I might be needed to referee.

They moved. I moved. Diana visited me in Hermosa Beach in 1985, a couple of years after their divorce. She was older, wiser and still had no clue why she and Paul were either at each others throats or genitals with nothing in between. She had always been the stable one in those early years, at least that was my perspective, but then again, she never got booted to my divan.

I saw Paul several times in the 90s, he had a new wife and then he didn't. But in both cases he talked about Diana. I heard they made an abbreviated attempt at round two or round seven right around the millennium and apparently had a major shouting drama at a fund raiser for the Cleveland Art Museum, complete with thrown champagne.

My point?

I got an invitation to their re-marriage coming this June. Fortunately, I have other commitments that month and this year and for the next decade but I am considering a new sofa. I think it is only fair for aging friends to have a more comfortable place for olde love warriors to fall.

Emotional Drive-By

[Content Disclosure: 55% Life; 38% Memories; 19% Lust; 9% Love; 7% Long Forgotten Pain; Stir in a bit of Nostalgia and a Smidgen of Insight; .5% Poker]

When you live in Las Vegas, a lot of old friends come to town for meetings, conventions, trade shows and junkets. I have several variations of my "guided tour" depending on how worldly my old chums are these days. At the end of one such visit this fall, I found myself upwind from a cigar on the balcony of a garden suite at one of more elegant hotels on the Strip. Yes, some of my old college friends have done right well in the world of corporate America and some of the perks are quite interesting for an evening. The client's expense account had paid for a very nice dinner after which I had given my high end poker tour (Venetian & Bellagio). We even did and interior drop by in Bobby's Room as I had to bug one of the players about a interview we had been putting off.

Later on the balcony my college buddy and I were discussing olde thymes and olde friends, when Steve said: "Tell me again about your crazy girlfriend."

"Well Chris wasn't really crazy." I remembered that Steve had been around a few times when I was with Chris in the 70's.

"No not Chris, your actually crazy girlfriend."

Oh, right Steve had never met Barbie, but at some long ago college reunion, the boys had stayed up late on another balcony of that bed and breakfast in Kalamazoo and told tales of our lives since graduation. I had told of a Barbie weekend in Los Angeles with the drugs, the overtly sexual Sunset Blvd. excursion and the broken picture window at the Coldwater Canyon house.

"I have the impression you are not looking to hear just another love/war story, what is it you are asking me? You got a crazy person in your life Steve?"

"As a matter of fact I do. And you are the guy with the Ph.D. in psychology and some experience with crazy women, so how about serving up a side of insight for me."

I remember a very similar talk Steve and I had forty years ago on that big front porch of Harmon Hall. Older and wiser, we thought we were, but still having late night dorm room conversations about life and women. Some things really never change, just the cost of the balcony.

As it turns out, Steve's crazy woman had been running an African photo safari compound for the past ten years, so it had been email only for a long time. But she was back again and too close for comfort to his fully functional life in Atlanta. While he finished his cigar and we both emptied several bottles of wine, I gave what clinical advice as I could and we judiciously did not see the sun rise over the Strip. But that night has been rolling around in my psyche since then and I have come up with the highly theoretical and anecdotally tested construct of the Emotional Drive-By.

Ladies please feel free to reverse the gender roles in this theory, it works equally well with crazy boyfriends.

The Emotional Drive-By consists of an ex-lover dipping themselves into your life, yet again! The essential symptoms include most if not all of the following:
-they are not staying, this is not an attempt at permanence nor reconciliation;
-they are adventure addicts, action junkies and/or lost souls;
-you can't save them and they will harm you;
-you know that re-involvement is a mistake; yet often that knowledge does not translate into rational behavior;
-the entire encounter is overwhelmingly seductive;
-the moment they are gone again, you look at yourself in the mirror again and ask: "Why did I do that...again?"

If all of the above makes completely rational sense to you, I am sorry because none of the above will do you any good since this is not and never was a rational relationship.

You have several choices: Don't take the phone call, no really, don't take the call. I know, I know but the other option is to store up better emotional bandages than you had back then and carve out some time in our life for yet another emotional recovery. Its always a balance between the chaos in your life after she is gone and the junkie release you get while he is there.

For those who find this scenario way too familiar; my deepest, most insightful clinical advice is: Run Away!

Please pay the receptionist on the way out, remember I have a therapist who costs me a lot more than I charge you. And good night Barbie, wherever you are.