Every Fucking Day

Originally Posted Wednesday, January 23, 2013

Sometimes people put an idea in your head, and you begin to think about it.  Too much.  To your own detriment.  Someone asked me yesterda "Do you think you want to get into a relationship again?" 

"Oh, sure, if she has her own place and likes to be there and we can see each other a couple times a week and talk on the phone some but not a lot.  I like having my own space and controlling my own time.  I wake up and don't have to worry about what someone else wants to do.  I don't want to be with someone 24/7 again.  It is just too horrible. 

"'Do you want to go to the Science Museum today?' 

"'No, I don't.  I wish you would go.  You should go.  I just want to be alone.  I'd like to masturbate sometime other than when I'm lying beside you trying not to wake you up while you sleep!'

"That is how it always ends up.  I am addicted to having my own time.  I'd love to have someone to go see a movie with, sure, or to go out to eat or even to travel with, but I don't want someone around on the day to day to day to day." 

That is what I told him--he who is married with two boys, three and one and a half, with whom I stayed in Yosemite this summer.  We used to go out in the mountains and play.  This summer, he got away long enough to show me the house they were building in Mariposa that they would rent out to tourists.  Then we went grocery shopping. 

I was asked again today by a twenty-nine year old woman who has some interest in me.  She is cold about love, so I had to wonder what she was getting at. 

"Really?  You don't want to push someone around in a wheelchair when they become infirm.  I can't see you changing out colostomy bags with gleaming eyes full of love.  You'd see that person as an alien, a polyp.  You would be miserable.  These things aren't like old movies.  Not now.  Best to know when to put a bullet in the brain pan, you know?" 

"Well. . . thanks for cheering me up," she said. 

"Whatever." 

But the question has stayed with me.  It is hardest, I think, at dinner.  Dinners alone are the most difficult if you plan to cook and eat healthy as I am doing once again.  You stop and do the marketing--for one which is impossible--and then come home to an empty house and a manic cat and begin putting things away.  You open a bottle of wine and then begin to chop vegetables and season meat and measure out the rice.  And when it is all done, you fix a plate and sit in front of the television with something DVRed and eat and give some to the cat, and then you pour a whiskey and decide to clean up.  Then there is that, the emptying of pots and the washing and putting away and wiping counters and stove tops.  Then another whiskey and. . . . I used to love making dinners together, drinking wine, talking about the day, and sharing duties.  Eating was better, too.  Yes, I think that is the best part of being with someone other than those days when you can eat and drink in the afternoon, then come home and take off your clothes and grope and get aroused, make sleepy, drowsy love and then fall asleep. . . .  Perhaps I'd reverse the order. 

The twenty-nine year old called while I was at the gym, but she didn't leave a message.  I told her another part of the observation today as well.  I told her about going to Q's 35th birthday party that he and his model friend whose birthday was the next day held in a small club in the E. Village.  The boys were all thirty-five year old D.J.s.  Their girlfriends were all twenty-nine (Q--don't refute any of this--it is MY story).  The group had been together for years, had been famous and owned the galaxy, and now they were trying to decide what to do with it.  But I could see it in the women's eyes.  They could still hold a man's attention as they had always and easily. . . until the new twenty year old walked into the door.  Oh. . . that look.  Just then it was decided.  They were ready to get serious, to get married and have babies and move out of the city and into the suburbs.  I wrote this all to Q the next week.  They would begin the new life and, once in a while, they would all have a reunion in the city where they would relive the Glory Days and talk about who they had been and who they were now in sage tones as people do always and forever for eternity ad infinitum.  It is genetically programmed, perhaps.  It is just what they do.  It is the conformity of age, the sort of thing that Sherwood Anderson writes about in "Winesburg, Ohio," or Fitzgerald after him and Hemingway and the rest.  It is the sad way of the world. 

That is what I told her, she who is twenty-nine, and she had that knowing look in her eye.  She's had that night already, I could tell, when the young girl walked into the room and suddenly she disappeared. I know it happens.  I remember the night it happened first to me. 

But I have not returned her call.  I have just finished cooking a dinner alone and eating in front of the television and then cleaning up and drinking a second whiskey while I wrote this hurriedly before I forgot it. 

I told this to another person today, too, a creative writing teacher at a local college.

"Jesus Christ. . . are you writing this stuff down?"

"Every day," I told her.  "Every fucking day."