I am the proud owner of an impractical sense of fear. I am petrified of hurting people, and even more petrified of doing what it takes not to hurt them, so the math wins out eventually. Bad karma all around.
After I got home on Sunday, she asked me what was eating at me.
"Ohhhh, nothing."
"Okay, I'm glad yo---"
"WELL, IF YOU MUST KNOW..."
And then I went into a long aside, starting with 1982, listing all my complaints, naming all the injustices, pointing at the pictures on the wall and generally emoting my way back into her good graces. Secretly, I harbor the belief that she adores me when I suffer, and so we feed on each other eternally, like an Ouroboros, which is a reference I have used in every one of my 20 blogs and each time I had to look up the correct spelling, by typing into google "ETNERAL SWALLOWING DRAGON." Yes, I wrote 'etneral.'
This may sound contradictory, but if I realllly like you, I will do one of two things: ask you endless questions because if you keep talking I can pretend I am listening and not staring at the sharpness of your profile and the highlights in your hair and the length of your fingers, or, prate on and on and on about my first job as a paperboy, back in 1984, when I worked because I wanted a bike, but now I realize I worked because I wanted to stay away from home, and maybe I worked because I wanted to be kidnapped, since no matter what you say about an abductor, at least you can say that out of all the kids in the world, HE CHOSE YOU. That is so sick, so, yeah, it was because I wanted a bike.
We moved, I continue, but that didn't keep me from getting another job, and soon I was bagging groceries at the commissary, and when you were real good, the manager would let you bag in the express lane because you never had to cart the bags out to the car, and you could simply gather your tip right there at the checkout stand, and even though the tips were smaller, MY GOD THE ECONOMICS OF TIME REALLY HIT HOME. I could turn 5 $1 tricks in the time it took another poor fool to pull a single $2 job. We were worse than cheap hookers, because at least hookers get to have sex, and when you are 12 years old, sex is nearly as alluring as a new bicycle. And maybe that's why they refer to old age as the second childhood. I dunno.
When I get started like this, she sends the kids to their rooms, and she just listens, and it is her best quality that I don't mention and/or stare at, because the quiet ones still need to get some things off their chests, but it takes awhile. And it is like a flood, and there are messes to be made and cleaned up, and the sleep is so resoundingly peaceful. One day I want to spend an entire year in solitude and silence, just so I'll know how good I have it.
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6 comments:
For writing that is such a joy to read, it does not seem just to ask, but I am curious: how does this relate to your sense of fear? Or am I being too linear or simplistic...
oh, no, this is just what i do. it's related only to a comment that my wife had made on sunday that's not referenced in the post. the vagueness is in the details...
My ex girl friend (she's czech) tells me stories about how eastern european women expect their men to be emotional, narcissistic, impractical, self flagellating and fragile. Unable to bear weight.
She says these qualities are romanticized culturally. She says it is the same way japanese men romanticized the hobbled feet of their girls and women. She says eastern european women participate in the emotional hobbling of their men in the same way the japanese men hobbled their women: at first, in person, and eventually they enable them to hobble themselves, providing a sense of purpose. Mutualism.
i wish my wife were as narcissistic and self-flagellating as me. we could take turns hurling insults in front of the vanity mirror when it got too tiring. but i don't think i noticed a singular eastern european identity in this regard when i lived in romania. the example you give reminds me of passages in unbearable lightness of being, so it might be true of czechs, but emotions among men in transilvania were held in, er, check. plus, the languages, ethnic and cultural groups in 'eastern europe' are just so diverse it's hard to paint in brush strokes.
i think it was the chinese who were adherents of footbinding.
vagueness in the details...
damn, i love the way you write, good sir.
merci, merci!
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