Friday, April 28, 2006
This was not that weird of a night for me, which is important to remember beforehand, not because I think that this night would really be weird for anyone. But it was kind of weird.
Something I didn't mention, this particular friday being april 28, is the day after my birthday. This is not something I would consider an important fact to the story. But there is one tiny detail that is potentially relevant. I got drunk on my birthday, which is by no means news, and then I had a dream that night. The night of my birthday I had a dream about a girl who broke my heart. I can't even remember the last time she was on my mind before that. In the dream we started a new relationship, which in the dream was accomplished mainly by her forgiving me for all the pointless and destructive things I did. Why do I need to be forgiven? I don't. But in the dream I did, and we started a new relationship. Note: In the dream I wanted the relationship to happen. Note2: You must be fucking kidding me. But I understand why I felt that way in the dream. When someone stomps on your heart what you really want is for them to take it all back. Just to preserve your ego. As a general rule I should know better than to listen to my ego. But it was just one dream. And all the dream really means is that some part of my subconscious is lonely. No problem. Loneliness is easy to fix, lucky for me there is such a thing as sluts.
What matters is that in the dream I didn't remind myself of something very important that you always must do. Always remember that every lie you tell, especially the ones you tell yourself, and every foolish path you start to walk, you must tell yourself in your head. You choose how far you go with this.
At around midnight I leave my house, I am driving, hurrying, heading south to return a DVD to the video store before I head back north to the party neighborhood to try and track down some girls. I am speeding down a 2 lane street and I discover something I suppose I would have assumed to be true if it had ever occurred to me. A midget dressed in black riding a child's sized BMX that has no reflectors is practically invisible in the dark. I just about ran the bastard over before I even saw him. I swerved to avoid running him over and after the initial shock I became irritated. What was going through that guy's mind? Cloaked in darkness riding a BMX on the road is a form of camouflage that rivals The Predator.
After dropping off the DVD I hit an ATM and head back north. Heading back north I witness the same invisible midget dart across the street immediately in front of a huge truck and miss being killed by about a tenth of a second. I would have been impressed with his incredible control and agility if I wasn't totally certain the fact that he survived that decision was pure luck and nothing to do with skill and coordination. He should have been a dead man, he could have been pushing up daisies, appropriately half the full sized amount of daisies I guess, but still 100% dead.
But he survived and that was the last I saw of him. I got to the party district and parked my car. I started walking towards the bar where I normally hang out and where the girls I was hoping to run into told me they were going. I pass by all these parked cars, and as I go past this halfway piece of shit, like a 1998 Grand Am or something, I see two guys sitting in the car. One guy looks like a classic nu metal bass player, fat, long frizzy curly brown hair puffing downwards over his shoulders. The other guy is a skinny just out of high school kid in a track zip up. The kid is snorting lines off the back of CD case. I say to myself, what would your mother think? This can't be what she wanted for her little baby boy, so full of promise but also an invisible capacity for evils she would be shocked to hear of.
I walk into my favorite bar, its insanely crowded, and the crowd is more terrible than usual. As I am passing by him I recognize a guy I haven't seen in years. I stop and he goes "Heeeyyyy!!!" and I go "Hey dude, how are you doing?" He's smiling hugely, maybe drunk, probably not just drunk.
"Pretty good, you still living with those dudes?" He asks me, big smile.
"No, I moved out of there a while ago" I say. It was 5 years ago.
"You still doing your poker thing?" He asks. I have never done anything related to poker in my life. I realize that he might actually think I am someone else, which is pretty funny.
"Not anymore." I say.
"Hey! I'm selling drugs now, so if you want any just give me a call." He says. Big smile. I don't have his phone number, I don't want it either.
"I already know like 10 guys." I say. It's a lie.
"Well guys who tried my stuff says its the best, they say its awesome." I'm beginning to think I stepped into a Bret Easton Ellis novel. Or something more corny. This whole conversation so conveniently and impossibly imitates network TV's version of an out of control urban life that I can hardly figure out how to get out of it.
"That's okay, I am good." Don't want to buy drugs, no thanks.
"I'll take the pepsi challenge with anybody's stuff, you'll be impressed with it dude!" He says. Smile.
"I'm good, but thanks."
To my relief the subject of conversation changes. He tells me that he doesn't go out much anymore. I hadn't seen him in a really long time so if for some reason I actually cared, I couldn't confirm or deny if he did. But from what I know of drug users I believe him. He does not actually seem like a bad dude, although I think he might be mixed up in things that aren't going to have the best results. At one point he says something but his face is pointed away from me and I have no idea what he says.
"What?" I say.
"I sell everything except heroin. I won't touch that stuff." He tells me.
"That's probably smart." I don't care. This is becoming repetitive. I wander away from him.
Something I should mention, I am not a fan of drugs. I understand that a lot of people always want to get a buzz, but drugs suck. Anyway, back to this guy, before I got to know him he seemed like a pretty okay guy. That impression may have been made possible by the last few ounces of his personality draining out like a battery. It will all burn up, and he will be long gone. Goodbye, so long. Nice to know you, please forget you know me. People will tell you there is no right way to live a life. Criminals, hippies, narcissists. The awful truth is that there is a right way to live a life. And the wrong way is easy to spot. It usually looks fun, and it also looks exactly like the kind of thing you hide from the people you want to respect you. Smoke meth, beat your kids, shoot smack, lie, steal, listen to Toby Keith. All wrong. Which leads me to wonder. Why I don't think I am a big hypocrite.
I am a misanthrope.
I am a drunk.
But I can still see there are lines you should not cross.
You choose how far you go with this.
I read something today. In March a college professor in England was driving his car when he had a heart attack. He lost control of the car and it smashed into a tree. The collision threw his chest into the steering wheel which acted as a defibrillator and restarted his heart. If the car had an airbag he would have died. 2 wrongs make a right.
I look around the bar and I see all kinds of people going about their business. A girl is wearing a skirt that actually doesn't go far enough down to cover her whole ass, and her ass is awesomely perfect. She's with some bar star mall girls and a couple of big gorillas, they might be talking gorillas, they are probably boyfriend gorillas. I get a drink.
A lot of the people I know hang out at this bar. On my way through the bar I see a girl that I know. I think she is a pretty cool girl, she's smart, funny, not insane. She is carrying a torch for a friend of mine. That particular friend of mine who she is in love with is there also, but he doesn't carrying a torch for her. He loves someone else. She knows it, but it doesn't seem to undermine her stubborn commitment to this lost cause. Whenever they're in the same place she sits next to him. Usually I can't talk to him when she's around because she's always right there next to him. I would be surprised if she realized that it annoyed me. I wonder if she annoys him. I wonder if I annoy him.
What I never say out loud is how I am mildly disgusted by the greediness of sexual attraction when the infatuated person becomes desperate. The one who is coveted is focused on in the center of everything and at the same time is ignored. To the infatuator, the things the person they desire want that don't directly involve them are usually seen as either irrelevant to them or obstacles to their bottomless desires. I am just as guilty, and I have been just as awful. Not surprisingly however, I am totally forgiving of myself. It's the human condition, we're all flawed. But I know that your love is a burden you foist on another person. By making them the source of all your happiness, your happiness becomes their responsibility. If they love you they want the responsibility, if they don't love you they don't want the responsibility, and you have given them no choice but to hurt you.
You choose how far you go with this.
The worst thing about being a midget is that you are so short. You are half a normal persons height. The other worst things are that nobody is looking out for you, because they can't see you since you're too short to look out for. They usually don't look down to see you there, standing next to a piece of furniture. Your head level with the bar.
I learned later that the midget was drinking at the same bar that I went to. When I saw him riding his BMX like a bat out of hell he was coming from there. I am not a mind reader, or a midget psychiatrist, so I cannot say what was going on with this man. Did the liquor fuel a deathwish, or was it always there? Who can see the inscrutable motivations of the drunken midget? Only he can. Maybe he had a fight with his girlfriend, maybe he lost a game of darts? Maybe he feels that people let him down. Whatever it was, I hope it doesn't hurt him too bad. Should I get another drink? I look around.
I leave.
As I am walking away from the bar I run into some guys from school. They are heading to another bar. I consider going home, its like 1 am already. I decide against going home and I join them(surprise). The bar is a club, plays house music, highballs are double the going rate in a normal bar. Probably to cover the high overhead, my guess is the presence of cocaine as a large invisible element of the miscellaneous line item in the overhead.
None of the guys from school are from Edmonton. They're all smart dudes, I'm talking to one guy who is pretty funny and a pretty cool guy. We are talking about girls and he tells me that girls in Edmonton are weird. I say they're less snobby than a bigger city.
He says, "They're still snobby but they're snobby about weird stuff. Like they're snobby about whether a guy is a skateboarder or something. Girls here care about weird stuff about guys. Stuff that doesn't make sense. They don't make sense."
"It's a flaw with the species." I say.
A girl in a sports bra is dancing to the house music. Semi retired raver. Dancing in that unsightly aerobics class raver style. An awkward and graceless dance style that is also pretty out of date. She might be hired by the bar to dance and make the bar look fun. Its not having that effect on us. If it were up to me she would slow her feet down and put her hips and head in motion. As nice as her bare abdomen is I find that I instantly get tired of watching it jerk around.
The problem with midgets is they remind me of something I prefer not to think about. People come in all shapes and sizes, that is true, but sexually popular people come in pretty much one shape and size. Symmetrical, lean, young and tall. The world isn't fair, and like the song goes, we are the world.
Me and the guys from school decide to call it a night and we all head home. Somewhere a small man is sleeping off a hard BMX ride in his bed, maybe its a shoebox. A girl I know is wishing she had said the perfect thing to make my friend love her, but he never will. Another girl may still be dancing to house music in a sports bra, maybe in a house, maybe in front of a mirror. I can't wait for tomorrow. That could be a lie.
When we are at our worst we rely on one cookie cutter idea of beauty. We have one xeroxed idea of a happy life, we expect constant bliss and never feeling depressed for one second. We have one attitude towards the attention of others, good or bad, everyone look at me! Sure we aren't always at our worst, but how much of the time aren't we? Look at me on my high horse. Watching, documenting, reporting, and judging the way people are living. What gives me the right? I don't know, so the answer is probably that I don't really have the right. But am I wrong? It isn't irony, is it hypocrisy that I feel entitled to judge them? I hang around bars, and a lot of the people in these bars are complete scumbags. I don't want to know what number of them in 10 are drug addicts, drug dealers, cheaters, thieves, low lives. Doesn't hanging around with them make me a low life? What happened to my moral compass? Maybe I could say I'm there for a different reason. I could try to imagine myself as an embedded journalist. I'm just doing research on how the young and promising are deteriorating their brains listening to endlessly looping tracks of Mariah Carey and Madonna, hoovering blow off toilet seats, trying to convince themselves they are a rock star. This is research. Bartender! Another pint of research!
I choose how far I go with this.