a boys' and girls' history of the future

What should young people do with their lives today? Many things, obviously. But the most daring thing is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured.

— kvj

Bluebird

there’s a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I’m too tough for him,
I say, stay in there, I’m not going
to let anybody see
you.

— Charles Bukowski

Going Home

I drank coffee at 4pm today, which goes against many things I stand for (things like aiming to be more than a nominal pragmatist, remembering/honoring the consequences of my actions, i.e.: having any shot at sleeping tonight before 2am).  I am sitting in the dark in “my” apartment, marveling at how strangely efficient my siblings can be at getting shit that seems impossible accomplished, sipping on a gin and tonic (which is actually a knockoff/wannabe screwdriver), while thinking of my unwritten, unkempt Future.

I am reading Bukowski, again.  I feel an affinity for his dirty realism, but I don’t particularly like his line length, rhythms or sounds (they’re so clipped and staccato, so brusque and pushy, all elbows and chin jut).  I keep moving to the next poem, shivering with a visceral disgust, sighing disappointedly when something doesn’t hit like I want it to, succumbing to a slight nausea (Big Night On The Town does that to me—the nausea), and I finally find what I didn’t know I was looking for:

Alone with Everybody

the flesh covers the bone
and they put a mind
in there and
sometimes a soul,
and the women break
vases against the walls
and the men drink too
much
and nobody finds the
one
but keep
looking
crawling in and out
of beds.
flesh covers
the bone and the
flesh searches
for more than
flesh.

there’s no chance
at all:
we are all trapped
by a singular
fate.

nobody ever finds
the one.

the city dumps fill
the junkyards fill
the madhouses fill
the hospitals fill
the graveyards fill

nothing else
fills.

I go home (home in my head = Knoxville, where Chad is in grad school) in less than two days to see my husband, giver of much distress and delight to me over the many years we have been together.  And I am pleased to say, that after 13 years of marriage, I still don’t believe in the romantic ideal of The One.  Too territorial, too fatalistic, too boring, too not-the-world-I-want-to-live-in.  There is a darkness in this poem that feels like the darkness that has continually stirred up the lower waters of my own psyche and marriage over the years.  It’s the “trapped by a singular fate” bit.  In the poem, it’s not that there is no hand of fate that guides us.  It’s that the hand of fate has seen fit to deny us all of what we want and to let us die trying to get it.  So it goes: All of us.  Both of us.  Not the one to the other.  Not the one to any other.  Filled up—as we are—with all sorts of what we don’t want and not near enough of what we do.   

One could try and argue that after a month of being away from my husband, my standards have stooped or slipped or just ceased their striving, but my-hand-on-the-Bible: I don’t care that he isn’t the one.  I like very much that he is the one I have/am about to have again.  I like that he will be waiting for me in Tennessee sunshine when I exit the airport at noon on Wednesday.  I like that his own life is too big to be eclipsed by mine.  I like that at this point in time, I still don’t know how to solve my way of being in the world with his. I like that the distance between us is both a threat to our union and the chosen space we’ve negotiated for us both to be/do what we think is best.  I like that if/when I expire, he will go on: eyes bright and open to love another.

Nothing else fills except what fills us up and then empties itself again.  Love rushes in and rushes out, always tempting us with what seems like satiety, only to leave us hungry. Nothing else fills.  Sure.  So what?  I’m the kind of girl who chooses coffee over sleep, a bowl of soup over my birthright, a lover who is 1000 miles away over any of the ones who might be here and now.  The reason is simple and for long stretches of time, unsatisfying: It’s because so far,

nothing else
fills.

a quick thought before i run out the door...

tonight, i get to do the thing i like best with some of the people i love most at one of the clubs that makes me the happiest in a part of the country that even with all its charm is too far from my love and too far from my family.  and like always, i am too far from knowing how any of this effort makes sense beyond the way it feels in the moment(s) it happens: that familiar trembling, palpable, thank-god thank-god thank-god that turns my heart into a furnace and my voice into a song.

i forget sometimes to be thankful.

not tonight.

I’m a man. I wear pants.

— Lyle Brewer, on discussing the demerits of hanging out in pajamas.

Please, notice that in the one, they tagged us along with 4 Non Blondes and Stevie Nicks.  Take that folk music!  Also, I love being loved/hated…