Saturday, January 11, 2003

I feel like giving everyone on the block bad parking tickets tonight. Taking up that unecessary few feet here and there that adds up to a few extra car lengths. It's an unenforcable law, but damn. It's just another little tragedy of the commons, right out side my front door. Going back to work tonight felt like doing a swim meet after tapering. Except swimming doesn't really involve fine motor skills. I was fast, I was focused, but I couldn't balance anything for shit tonight. Glasses were wobbling on trays like I was my own San Bendreas fault. Erupting. One of the new guys, and this was so foreign to my experience of impending accidents, elbowed a glass of wine I was carrying so swiftly and so forcibly that the ultimate explosion of Woop Woop Shiraz all over seats one and two, who were people, not just numbers, but dehumanizing them makes it easier to deal with the wanton slaughter, didn't seem like slow motion at all. It was like watching some experiment in relativity, it happened in what must have been faster than the speed of light, like it happened in the future, and just happened to meet the people sitting there in the past. I think if Dan and I had just kept moving on like nothing had happened - especially since most of the wine remained in the glass, by some accident of skipping over the inevitable worsening of the situation by trying to recover the glass,everything happened so fast, the table might have thought some phantom wine just splashed all over them, and think the place was haunted by ghosts rather than incompetence. They did not, as the bartender said, renew several people's contracts. I'm pleased to be among the living, especially since it means that there will be much more for the remaining to feast upon in these lean times. I realized to tonight, maybe again, that I always have the best tables. Always. And everyone always comments on the fact that I always have the best tables. It's one of those facts that makes me wonder again about solipsism. I think, regardless, that attitudinally, if we're occupying our own little pockets of space and time, we can will solipsism. But it only seems to work for me when I'm not concious of it. This is a night where I am embarrased by how much money I made for so little work. I have a really hard time dealing with the fact that I like someone. Even though I've stopped trying to Zenify the experience, trying to make myself believe that I'm so totally focused in the moment that it doesn't matter if the moment passes and never comes again, I'm not comfortable enough with the vulnerability of just calling her on the phone, just because I'm thinking of her, to not construct elaborate rules and outcomes to not call. Fortunately, and this may just require some evolution, some release of the past more so even than release into the present, calling won out. I wasn't planning on meeting her, wasn't planning on trying to talk her into coming over, as much as I'm so comfortable with her physical presence that I'd love to just have her near, which is so hard, I guess, to make believable, without seeming as if I'm on the make. I dialed the phone after deciding not to, almost as if, with the tension released, I forgot all the voices. And just called to say hello. And tell her I was thinking of her. And that I was tired. And going to bed. These are such basic, authentic things, but they're frightening. I keep thinking about C.S. Lewis and his wife, and her words that the trade off for real joy is pain, but that that awareness can make the joy even more intense. It's hard, after working so long on being happy, and indeed being happy so much as just me, to start entertaining the possibility of opening myself up to the joy of being with someone. Especially with all the issues surrounding the essential authenticity of that experience wth Samantha, which, even though they had nothing to do with me, when I was so deeply in love with her, make me worry that I can't discern the actual from my desired reality. When it shouldn't matter at all - that all I can hope to do, and this will be questionable itself, is perceive the reality of my feelings, wherever they lead. Even if it's something as crazy and compulsive as picking up the phone to call a girl, just to say hello, just because I'm thinking of her. I am so sophomoric, these days. 1:09:28 AM