RELATIONSHIPS, DATING AND JEANS PART3

The rise:
The lord works in mysterious ways. Not sure exactly why, but he does, and we are left with one choice only: to accept, since we have nobody to take our complaints of being toyed with to. Maybe this is a problem with monotheistic religions: it’s a monopoly of power.
Anyway though, in the general spirit of acceptance, after several misadventures in the dating arena, yours truly had finally arrived at a certain state of peace with his bachelorhood, when one fateful Saturday night my cell phone rings. it’s my friend, his voice brimming with the sort of pre-going out inflated energy that causes people to see each Saturday night impregnated with endless possibilities of bliss and happiness and running-into-one’s-soul mate in seedy downtown bars and clubs. regardless of the fact that every Saturday is a disillusionment that lasts till right about next Saturday.
-“let’s go clubbing tonight man”, he says with frightening enthusiasm, at which point I know resistance would be futile, but like Andy in Shawshank I feel like I still have to try to resist even if it’s to no avail. “I don’t know if I feel like clubbin’ tonight man” says I.
“oh c’mon dude we haven’t done this shit in such a looong time” he insists.
“well yeah ‘cause I told you last time we went out there man, I’m sick of that shit, that’s why we haven’t been out there in so long”
Next thing you know though, we’re in the car and I’m begging people to turn the stereo down so that the subwoofer wouldn’t smooth out the last remaining wrinkles on my cerebral cortex. People don’t even talk in the car anymore. I hear by announce my disgust with people gathering in one place to be distracted by the same overwhelming sensory stimulus, be it TV, deafening music or blink-preventing video games, and calling it “hanging out”. No amigos, essential to hanging out is fulfilling conversation.
howeve, like I said , the lord has a penchant for being all mysterious and surprising the shit out of you, so that night I drink enough to transcend the self (i.e. borderline blackout) and become one with the universe and start vibrating with all the right vibrations … and meet this girl.
I’ll be honest with you, I don’t remember how I started talking to her (the levels of toxicity in my blood were high enough to give a vampire a hang over), but I remember upon waking up the next day of this mental note I had made to myself that she was very interesting and that I should definitely call her. I remembered that she had said she was into freelance writing and that something about her demeanor was cheerful and energetic but with a certain inartificial, real, somehow charming, feminine reserve.
So I call her, and she calls me back. And we go out on a few dates, and things are good. Better than good in fact. It’s so hard to point out what makes people click. Of course it’s never one thing, but a range of things that create some synergy that culminates in attraction. And what is attraction? Ah, let’s not get philosophical about it: simply, shit felt very good. It’s like musicians jamming, improvising. Sometimes they just sound good, sometimes they don’t, and sometimes the resultant music tickles your brain in ways that result in intellectual orgasms, which make the physical ones much more fun also.
So we start dating.
After a while, One day I take a mental look at the situation. Expecting, based on experience, to see something wrong. Some chink in the armor of this forming relationship. I see nothing. I squint, and nothing still. Of course the answer to the question: was it a perfect relationship? Is that perfection is nothing but a construct of the human mind, kinda like unicorns. Because if by perfect you mean whether we had no differences, I’d have to say no, we did have differences, but that is only natural. Just as friction is both a necessity and a hindrance to movement, so are differences, intellectually and those of opinion, necessary and intrinsic to relationships. But, the point is that I was content: and that was almost alarming, since it was so unusual. Usually by now some sign of decay was peeping from behind some wall. But I told myself, like any brave man should: “fuck it, go with it. This could be good”












The fall:
sometimes i feel like if i think of a disaster before it happens, then as a rule it can't happen to. for example when i'm moving into a new apartment all of sudden i'd think "will i ever lock myself out of this apartment" and then i think with relief "well i thought about it now, so it can't happen". it's wired but it's probably because it seems like disaster always takes you by surprise, so if you have already thought of it then you can't be surprised by it, so it can't happen to you. unfortunately as you'll see, this principle doesn't really hold. it's probably just another wired game that my obsessive mind has created to quiet itself.
i hadn't seen her as much as usual in the past week, she'd been sick and stressed out at work, and i think she had a friend visiting also. i remember we hung out on wednesday though, pretty low key, we just laid on the bed and talked: no signs of trouble that i could see. i could even tell she was happy to see me. then that weekend she went back to her parents' and so we didn't hang out over the weekend either. apparently her parents were having some relationship issues so she felt compelled to go back and be there for them, which i totally understand, and appreciate. i did get a wired feeling when i didn't hear from her all weekend though, but then i told myself i'm trippin'. but was i?
So, all is well. the weekend rolls by and on Monday I get a message from her on my phone that includes a deadly phrase: “… so I need to talk to you … “. I felt something drop in my belly right when i heard it. I had allowed myself to become quite attached to her, and now I really did not want to “TALK”. So I call her, and there is her voice telling me from some darkness beyond my understanding that she has too much on her plate (with her parents and work and various other causes of distress), and her emotional forces are being stretched too thin with all that is going on in her life and she really can’t keep up a relationship … .I understand . I say “well, we can slow down a little bit, I’ll try to be there for you instead of being an extra emotional weight” but somewhere, in some completely secret chamber in her mind, the decision had been conceived, debated and solidified into titanium hardness, all without any warning sign or attempt at sharing whatever it was with me.
Imaging a pie in the face, but imagine the pie having been in the freezer for 48 hours and being hard as stone. That’s how I felt. Imagine slipping out of a bungee harness and beginning to free fall while you catch a glimpse of the cord that was supposed to pull you back up, recoiling without. Imagine your emotions as passengers on an airplane and imagine a small meteorite hitting the side of the plane and the passengers being torn out of their seats into the freezing, low pressure altitude outside, blowing up like bubbles bursting: an Emotional vacuum.
Daydreaming is a very dangerous activity, mainly because it seems so harmless. When you like someone, you allow yourself these reveries where you imagine both of you sitting outside a cafe on a sunny Seattle summer Sunday, sipping on mimosas, talking about a book, or last night, or a friend, or throwing little witty jokes back and forth, while you’re waiting for that omelet that is gonna taste good due to the mimosas anyway, regardless of the cook’s aptitude. you see yourselves at a party mingling, talking to different people, but every once in a while making accidental eye contact that brings about a pleasurable surge of a feeling of familiarity, that caresses some primal social instinct, a sense of belonging. And it is these reveries that fuel the fire to which the initial attraction was the igniting spark.
But, I guess this is where the phrase “emotional investment” comes from, Since it is only natural that the taking away of something that feels very good, would feel very bad. So when all the “good times” that you day dreamed (the investment) are suddenly wiped out of your imagined near-future, since the person you imagined present in all the episodes now refuses to make even a cameo(the market crashes), it is simply a law of nature that you are going to feel like SHIT. And so, you are left with a screenplay but an incomplete cast. The horrible thing is, the better of a screenwriter you are, the more you would adapt the story to the actress' style and personality, which makes finding a replacement almost impossible if you are really good.
The lord indeed does work in mysterious ways. Not sure exactly why, but he does, and we are left with one choice only: to accept.



The jeans:
See, this is like one day you go to the mall not for shopping purposes, but more to hang out with a friend who's there to actually shop. And while he’s walking around the store you see this pair of jeans and you decide to check’em out. You try them on in the fitting room, and they feel great and fit nicely, but you’ve had previous pairs of jeans that felt fine in the fitting room but ended up returned to the store, or gathering dust on a shelf or ripped, so you can’t help being skeptical. But what’s life if you don’t take any risks: boring, and besides corduroys are fine but you are kinda getting sick of them. So you buy this new pair with stoic pessimism expecting by default that soon some fatal flaw is gonna jump out of its hiding place and you’re gonna have to part with another pair of jeans.
So the first time you are going to get into your friend’s SUV, you are secretly getting ready for not giving a shit if it rips, building all sorts of emotional fortifications, coming up with a list of clever quips you can spatter out in the case of rippage so as to maintain your cool persona with your friends, but it doesn’t.
ok.
And then you keep wearing it thinking that some evil, previously innocuous-seeming tag or seam is going to reveal its true demonic nature any minute and make each step that you take in that pair of jeans into the coming down of a hammer that slowly drives a nail into your skull, aimed dead-on for your frontal lobes, to completely drive out any notion of comfort. But no. they keep feeling fine. Hmmm.
Well, you think to yourself, what do you know? Maybe nothing bad is going to happen. Maybe the fact that my last two pairs of jeans were disappointments does not mean that all pairs of jeans, universally, are so. Damn, this time this could actually be nice. A smile starts to from across your face as you saunter happily by the strangers that pass you by on the sidewalk. Finally, a pair of jeans for me.
but it is at this moment exactly, as if your happiness excited the wrath of gods, or as if you have been the subject of a cruel psychology experiment all along, that you feel a strange sensation of movement on your stomach. (and this is where the whole girl/jeans metaphor shatters completely as is clear by what ensues) you look down and see the button on the jeans is wriggling around as if trying to unbutton itself. WHAT? You think.
W-H-A-T, question mark, indeed.
As you look on with amazement, the jeans, which seem to have suddenly come to life, unbutton themselves, pull themselves off your waist and legs and fall around your ankles and then with a violent jerk that makes you fall on your ass completely detach themselves from you. You hit the pavement hard but the shock of what just happened hits you much harder. You look on, unable to think or talk as the jeans rise up like legs without a body and run off into the distance leaving your butt naked, your reality shattered, your jaw slack and your eyes forgotten how to blink. and there they go, the one pair of jeans that lasted you two months without disappointment.
You never fully recover from the shock, rather you carry it around like prisoners in olden times that carried around a lead ball tied to their ankles. Now you find yourself completely fed up with the search for a good pair of jeans that 1-do not rip when you are getting in an SUV, or 2-do not have a tag that makes them feel uncomfortable just enough to slowly drive you insane, or worst of all 3-do not come off your legs by themselves and run off into the distance, leaving you butt naked and shivering in the cold winter night of your discontent.
Afterword:
so what do you do, sick of corduroys and fed up with jeans and done with pants in general? How do you keep on functioning within the context of a modern, civilized society with no clothing from the waist down? It’s simple. You will get on the internet. You will do some research on nudist communities around the world, you will be surprised when you find one much closer than you thought. You will pack your bags, choose next Friday for the relocation and move down south. And on Saturday you will open your laptop, under an umbrella’s shade on the beach, and begin to write.