grrrrr!
The words just won't come out today. I have a couple of things I want to record here,
(you know, for posterity, when I reread this journal as I have done exactly two times in my life)
but language is letting me down so much you'd think I was dating it.
March ended much as it began, with a number of small and pleasant surprises to help wipe away the memory of the year to date. After countless months of promising, I finally took a road trip to see my friend Brian at grad/priest school. Wisely, Brian had taken the necessary step to ensure action on my part: he involved somebody else. See, when it's just me I can say, "Sure, I'll come up to visit in a couple of months. Seriously. Any time now. Sometime in the next semester. I have a bag packed and waiting by the door. Swear ta Gawd," on and on into the foreseeable future. Stout-hearted health nuts with Viking blood in their veins have died of decrepitude waiting for me to visit them.
Is it my deep, flushcheeked hatred of travel?
Is it my passive-aggressive response to all these muthaph***as who tricked me into being friends with them and then left me here?
A little from column A, a little from column B.
Do I feel bad about it? No, I sure don't. (This month, the bill on my “going out and having fun” credit card was $15.63. My long distance bill was $145.00. This is not the way I envisioned my life.)
Still, I miss my friends. And most of the time I mean it when I say I'll come see 'em. I still owe somebody a trip to Minnesota (now that's love.) I meant it when I promised to visit Brian. It's just that life gets in the way a lot of the time. You know how it is.
My indefinite procrastination was finally put to an end when Brian invited Adam to come up as well. Adam is one of these odd people who says he’s going to do something and then, for some reason, begins making plans to do the thing. These ways are not my ways; I have been living alone and single for so long now that obligation has slowly become an alien concept to me.
Adam is also a handy motivational tool because he is somewhat down with travel, certainly more than I am. I say this not because of anything we’ve talked about, but because once he up and moved to Hawaii. (In a rare stroke of good fortune, he eventually moved back. Obviously.)
(His time in Hawaii, incidentally, was spent in a monastery. So, yes. I went to visit a Catholic priest with a Buddhist monk. The three of us are quite a team. How did that “Sesame Street” song go? “Two of these things belong together!/ two of these things are kind of the same!/ but one of these things just doesn't belong here!/ now it’s time to play our game...!”)
(The first person to read this and write, “Wow, Jimski, all of your friends are living a lot more interesting lives than you are!” gets a special prize, the rare and elusive Pointed Non-Reply.)
So, with Adam as a motivator, I eventually took an afternoon off and took a road trip in my brand new vehicle. (I never would have made the attempt in the previous car, which could have been counted on to puke its transmission onto the highway about two hours into the trip. It was the only thing that hadn’t broken yet.) We got in rather late; I’m not one of these penis jockeys who tries to floor it until time blurs outside the car. “But officer, by driving 30 miles faster per hour, we would have shaved fifteen minutes off the trip. That’s why I rolled the car over the median into a gas tanker. We were making excellent time.”
Also, once again, the one day I needed to leave work early was the day that a crisis of radioactive-meteor-hurtling-towards-Columbus-Ohio proportions sprung up at 4:57. Why doesn’t one of the salespeople do something boneheaded at, like, 9:30? Wait wait waitwait, I’m sorry; that would mean one of them had gotten to work on time. My fault.
The trip was nice. It went the way my trips often do. I’m not in town to see the town; I’m in town to see the townies. So we didn’t do much and didn’t need to. We toured Brian’s campus. We met the members of Brian’s community. We went for some coffee, where some of us did homework and some of us graded homework and some of us sat there and were going to plow through that goddamn Harry Potter if it was the last friggin’ thing we ever did. We ate the luscious free priest food and watched the free priest cable.
(I was very impressed at how relatively simply Brian’s community lived, considering they were several dozen men living on a college campus theoretically run by them. My school was run by “””Jesuits,””” and everything about them screamed through a bullhorn, “Vow of poverty, my ass!” When I was still in good graces with the VP, I used to go over to the penthouse of Jesuit Hall for dinner sometimes, and it was amazing how the same company that ran our student cafeteria/gulag could somehow locate among their supply of grade L meat some filet mignon for the only people on campus who weren’t paying them anything. And oh, the fun we’d have listening to them explain it: “Well, see, the vow of poverty means we all get the foie gras stuffed with truffles, but none of it really ever belongs to us. It’s not ours, you see. The provincial could call and send me to Borneo any minute, and none of this stuff would be mine. It’s commuuuunal, you see. Poverty. Could you pass the oysters?...”
The president of the school was a Jesuit priest who lived alone in a mansion and drove a brand new Lexu$ with gold detailing and personalized plates. Since Brian was also a Jesuit and hence ostensibly this man’s peer in communal poverty, I had a standing bet to donate $100 to the charity of his choice if he would one day burst into the president’s office with his hand out and say, “Quick, Larry, I need to borrow the car!” That offer, sadly, still stands.)
I had never visited Brian since he took his vows, so during the trip I was given the rare chance to see him interact as a member of his new adopted family. This was an experience not to be missed, because being a part of a Jesuit community puts Brian on a level playing field with a lot of people who would not be his brothers in any other context and the results are hi-larious. A venerated and sage theologian will walk into the room, a man who has more Ph. Ds than I have pairs of underwear, a man who works on philosophical theses the way I work on crossword puzzles, a man who has glowered and whipped generations of private school boys into Men For Others. This man will walk into the room oozing depth and absorbing respect from buildings across campus, and Brian will walk up, slap him on the shoulder and shout, “Whattup, Yoop Dogg?”
There is something about eating breakfast with the former president of Creighton University while your best friend cracks “yo mama” jokes as his expense that takes some getting used to.
The pinnacle of the trip was probably our extended jam session. I knew we were in for a treat before I even packed up the car when I saw Adam’s guitar. I was stoked for what was ahead, “oh yay” I said, because Adam can really play guitar, and Brian can really play guitar, and I... Two of these things belong together!/ two of these things are kind of the same!...
I had a lot of fun with the whole thing because, as I do most of the time, I’d brought my camcorder with me. So I got to play moviemaker on a rare occasion that wasn’t spent with a chorus of, “God, would you put that thing away?!” Quite the contrary. In fact, the next night, everybody wanted to watch themselves, and when I didn’t have the appropriate cables to hook it up to the TV, they gathered around the camera and watched themselves on the little screen.
I’ve watched that tape fifteen times already. Love those artifacts. If I could surgically implant a camera into my brain, I’d be over at the hospital right now.
*****
My birthday passed with much more fanfare than I anticipated. It wasn’t that nothing was planned; it was that I planned to do nothing, and my plans fell apart. In a good way.
The older I get, the less fuss I make about another page turning on the calendar. Being the center of attention, having a lot of noise made over me, and for what? 26? “Hey, congratulations! 26! That means you can finally get to... uh... divide your age by 13! Or 2. Again.” Woo.
It’s just not the same when you’re old. There’s no gift I really want. I’m an adult. If I want something, I buy it. It reduces the gift exchange to a financial transaction; when my mom asks me what I want for my birthday, I think, “Hmm, the Zip drive just broke. If Mom and Dad buy me a new one, I can go wild and spend that money on rent and groceries. Or perhaps I can wait until my tax refund and get that mail order bride. Or maybe I can just cover the high gas bill that will result from me sticking my head in the oven.”
Shrug. There’s the year 26. A prolonged hike of the shoulders. Not a whole lot to get excited about.
Luckily for me, the local remnants of my friends are doggedly loyal and love me fiercely, making the kind of doldrums in which I’d normally indulge myself out of the question. Chris in particular began asking me what I wanted to do for my birthday approximately eight months ago, and as the day approached I grew increasingly skittish about the whole thing. Not because people wanted to be nice to me or anything, although that was disorienting. No, I was skittish because it became clear that Chris was rallying hard to make this the bestest birthday ever, which meant that Chris was rallying hard to bring Group II and Group I together for the evening.
This had to be stopped at all costs.
This may be an odd way to exist, but I don’t care. I happily live a TV dinner life. Everything gets its own compartment. The work friends don’t hang out with the non-work friends. The high school friends didn’t hang out with the grade school friends. The college friends didn’t mix with the high school friends. And nobody ever hangs out with the family. It’s just better that way. The people I love are simply too diverse to coexist. I don’t need my dad talking about the sin of homosexuality while my gay roommate is over for dinner. I don’t need to have my liberal, diversity-minded friend hanging out in my living room the day my racist cousin decides to expound on why “spooks” don’t play soccer. (This actually happened the one time I invited anyone over in high school.) I don’t need the people who knew me as a charitable optimist breaking bread with the people who knew me as the foul-mouthed misanthrope. I’m not a big fan of forcing people to be around people they don’t get along with for my sake. (Although I’ve been told in retrospect that I’ve done this repeatedly, since as it turns out no girl I’ve ever dated has been acceptable to a good 80% of the people mentioned above. Apparently, I have the taste and discernment of a blind and genitally electrocuted Pepe le Pew. I’m just glad they all feel close enough to me to repeatedly belittle my judgment. What, after all, are friends for? But I digress. Almost constantly.)
I have just always had this Thing about worlds colliding. The only time my parents ever even met one of my girlfriends was when I was 100% positive we were going to get married. (Ha! Good one, God! Got me again, there!) So when it became clear that plans were in the works for the Chris & Joe Etc. Crew to meld with the Ken & Adam & That Whole Side & Co., I got a little uneasy. I confess. I envisioned the dinner conversation between the Knights of Columbus and the Republican state rep candidate and the Buddhist monk English teacher and the professional actor, and I conveniently forgot to share a couple of phone numbers. So sue me. Chris and Ken all by themselves are terrifying, because they are complete equals in demeanor and strength of personality while being complete opposites in philosophy. It’s not so much oil and water as it is oil and lit cigarettes.
“Who are you to play God Almighty Big Shoes like that? Where do you get off deciding who your friends do and do not get to hang out with? Who do you think you are, buddy?”
I think I’m the one who has to live with all these fucking people, that’s who. Nice to meet you. I think I’m the Birthday Boy.
And admittedly, post facto, I think I’m Mr. Doesn’t Give People Enough Credit, esq., because my birthday happened anyway and it all worked out just fine. We went out for the powerful combination of sushi and trivia, new experiences two times over for some of the people there, and it turns out that other than a few gustatory errors (word to the wise: if you dislike cooked tuna, don’t try it raw) worlds can collide pleasantly so long as no one at the table says something like, “So. How ‘bout that death penalty?”
The trivia contest was, in a word, lucrative. The addition of some new blood definitely put Team Hubris in the zone, and once the newcomers got used to our stomping, shouting, in-your-face style of smashmouth x-treme trivia question answering, they were on board for life.
(Invariably, when you tell people you and your friends make the rounds on the church basement trivia circuit, they all look at you like you’re mentally infirm in some way. I find that by the time you’re finished describing the Team Hubris experience, though, they’re usually hurt and sarcastically saying, “Well, thanks for inviting me!”)
This was one of those nights where not only did we win, but everybody at the flippin’ table went home with an attendance prize. (Our first place victory was taken from us when we lost the tiebreaker, but the Fabulous Grabulous Book of Cutout Paper Airplanes Ken won made second place go down smooth. That and the ten bucks.)
It occurs to me, just now, that we’ve been going around doing this trivia thing for over a year now. Started last February. I am suddenly sad for myself, and also for humanity.
Then again, I’ve won like $50, $80 in gift certificates and a blue shirt. So maybe I’m sad for everybody but me.
Anyway, it was a great birthday, and trivia was an ideal component. Concentrating on who the Winkies were in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz prevents you from a night of too much self-destructive reflection.
What will 27 bring?
...
Hmmm...
...
You know, frankly, I’m not really sure I care.
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