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Dire Straights - Expresso Love |
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I posted this to my Facebook back in July and could have sworn I posted it here too. It's kinda a "state of the person" address for my life right now and I keep thinking that everyone just knows that:
Buckmister Fuller, one of the pioneers in the field of geodesic domes decided to kill himself on the beach of Lake Michigan, in Chicago. 1927, bankrupt. Just lost a child. Decides he's worth more dead than alive.
Then he stops and decides to have an experiment. He will live every point in time forward as if he had died, killed himself. A man with nothing to lose. At that point, to him, it's all gravy. Win or lose, either way, it's a bonus. I had that very same moment, coincidently, earlier this year. Didn't find out until later that R. Buckmister and I had made the same pact in our heads about life.
You can beat me, take it all from me, call me names and such. Go ahead, if you can. I'll still be breathing. Strip it all away and I'm still alive, that much I know. As for what comes next, I am wondering what sort of wondrous disappointment it's going to be. It's going to be like a Tim Burton movie, you get all excited about it and then find out there's no Johnny Depp, oh it looks the same but it's got not quite the same soul. And if ain't gots soul, well.....we all know how the rest of that goes.
Anywho, so.
I have a 5 bullet point scale that I rate my days on from that point on: 5) Bottom, absolute horrible, no good day. It's a children's book and a learning experience that only happens after having it repeated for hours, nights on end. "Oh now I get it.....get it....get it out of my head!!!!! I hate you Doctor Suess!" That is my lowest layer of hell to me, now on Earth at least.
4) No harm, no foul. Three words; walk it off, slugger. Well, four words. Dammit! See, it's that kinda day.
3) The day I found out Becky was pregnant was a Saturday. Saturday morning, second week of my new job. The same place that I'm at now. The same place I left to go to New York and grow up and all that. For some reason, servers no doubt, I have to go into work that day. Becky has work too. She's not a nurse yet but she has started working in nursing. A new start. The marriage was slowly falling apart like hundreds of years of standing architecture that was poorly built but could stand a couple centuries.
She's at the top of the stairs calmly explaining that it says she is. That going away party they threw me at IBM at that bar downtown seemed to have done the trick. Oh yeah, that was 4/20/2000.
We have barely any time to hug before I'm rushing out the door, totally seeing everything falling back into place. I drive to work, it's May....no June. Has to be June, started after memorial day. June, Saturday morning. No one around. It's foggy from the rain the night before and cold and humid. The sky is pink and purple and all the colors in between. The plant is creepy, dead yet with office workers in casual clothes getting work done instead of screwing around. There's a smell of chemicals that only wore off my nose once I lived in NYC three months. When I started again, it took two weeks to contain my nausea.
I get in my car and Porcelain by Moby starts playing on WXRT. I can feel one page of my life separating after the other as I drove there. New jobs, no, new careers. An actual family. That's a 3
2) I'm going to see Jaws 2 on the opening day. It's my dad and I going on a day I had been talking about for weeks. We go to Yorktown's old theaters, in Lombard, outside the mall. Afterwards, we walk over to Montgomery Wards and walk in through the back way to where the toy section was relegated to after X mas. A guy is putting Star Wars figures, a new series. My dad: What's the difference between this Jawa and that Jawa? He holds up one carded figure and points with to one the guy is putting on the spikes. Guy: Um, nothing. My dad: Why aren't you putting those up? Guy: What? Nothing. My dad takes one of each, a cloth caped Jawa and a plastic caped Jawa. If you are action figure person you know what that means.
If you are a son, you know what the rest of it means to you.
I just realized this action figure/mall story with my dad, I have like a dozen more. I can see why this day is a two.
1) When I was between fourth and fifth grade I watched a lot of Looney Tunes cartoons. At one point, late in the summer CBS started promoting a late Sunday afternoon show of Looney Tunes. Yeah, it was just the Saturday show that I drooled over for hours, in smaller doses but I was looking forward to it.
My grandparents, my dad's ma and dad, were over. I lived in Elk Grove Village. We went for a walk beforehand. We walked past Linda Schultz's house. She came out to say hi to me when we walked by.
Heh, the cartoon program turned out to be the gravy from that point on.
Gravy on gravy, more like cheese on gravy. Like disco fries. My life is slowly becoming a series of disco fries.
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