Heirloom

The rain wouldn’t stop. It drummed its wet fingers on the window’s glass as if itself bored, but no sign of it ceasing. It didn’t bore him though. He had learned how to tap into the coziness of a rainy Seattle afternoon, plug into its reservoir of cerebral, meditative hours, laying on the sofa reading a book, or just thinking, taking his mind for a walk, letting it run around and sniff and explore, he standing a few steps away watching it play.

The melody of silence in his high-rise apartment carried itself against the backdrop harmony of the occasional cries of sirens and the humming of tires on asphalt down below and the rain on the window, until it was suddenly interrupted by the door buzzer. It was Mona, showing up earlier than she had said.

“Man, it’s fuckin’ pouring out there” she said as she shook the umbrella in the hallway before entering the apartment. “I know” answered Mason.

“You’re early, I thought you said you’re going to be here at seven” he continued

“Yeah” she said as she took the raincoat off to hang . “The meeting at the none-profit I told you about ended early”

“Ahhh” he said mockingly “It must be hard, another day passing without any not-for-profit do-gooding, ha?”

She was the social activist, he the metaphysical stoic. She was driven by a mixture of guilt and responsibility collectively felt by a certain cross section of the American youth to help the less fortunate ,or inform the less aware, and divided her time between none-profits helping African and south American children, local grassroots green-initiative campaigns and youth reform programs. He on the other hand was more inclined to philosophize than to take action, lacking sufficient faith in the human race to take part in bettering it, yet having enough to appreciate those who did. But so, to harvest this dynamic for maximum dramatic tension, this was one of the games they played: he mocked her about her “humanitarian endeavors” and she retaliated:

“Nope, not today” she said, feigning seriousness … and then came the blow “but at least I didn’t sit on my cynical ass, growing like fungi in my little dark humid corner all day either”

“Ouch, you don’t have to take it out on me Teresa” he said. She laughed.

“Hey, we’re meeting John and his girlfriend at eight, right?” she asked.

“Yeah”

“In that case” she said as she unbuttoned her jeans, her back to him “I think I’ll use your washroom facilities for a hot, refreshing shower ma’ friend”

He looked at her shapely, well toned thighs and calves emerge as she took now one leg and then the other out of the jeans. She exercised regularly and kept in good shape, but he knew it was the familiarity of her flesh, the intricate nebula of countless memories, moments where she had truly understood what he was saying, had held him, had joked with him, had followed him into the kitchen telling him about her day while he went to the fridge, had allowed him to see her with all guards down, he knew that it was somewhere deeper in the dark dense jungles of dendrites growing into each other, that he and she really began to grow into each other as well, and it hadn’t been like that with many others. Here, the soil was ripe for the jungle to grow. So when she said, with mock soap opera delivery “would you like to join me honey” he felt an old and familiar, faint strobe light of feeling he couldn’t quite put a label on: horniness, Familiarity, comfort, kinship? flash somewhere in a deep dark corner of his mind, and echo first in a tingling in his stomach and then a few inches bleow.

--------------------------

He hates it when the phone rings during sex. It brings him out, pulls him, to the surface like a fish on a hook. A hook of noise that he can’t choose not to bite. it’s like someone pulling out a flash light in the darkness of a cinema and choosing the most suspenseful part of the movie to waive it around, every once in a while catching you in the eye, your irises’ sphincters jerking violently to a smaller perimeter. He wishes for sphincters that he could shut tight inside his ears. That’s a weird thought he thinks and that annoys him further. He looks down, her eyes are closed, her mouth half open. she doesn’t seem to mind.

The ringing stops. He hears the answering machine’s beep and then it’s his mother’s voice: “Mason are you there? … Mason?”. Oh he’s really wincing now. Their hips slow down and stop. She looks like she is trying not to laugh. He finds the situation annoying but comical and somehow likes the fact that she is finding it funny as well. It gives him a sense of complicit comradery.

He decides to wait it out, inside her. Waiting for his mother to say “ok then call me back when you can Mason” and hang up, but she doesn’t. “Mason if you’re there pick up I need to talk to you”. This persistence is unlike her.

Hmmm, maybe I should pick up, ahhh, she probably just wants to invite me to some silly little get together at the … what was their name …the neighbors, ah the Berjinski’s. What if …it can’t be an emergency, I’m a 100 miles away, she’d be calling someone else. Just wait. A little more, any second now... Hang up!

“Mason just give me a call …” Finally! “just give me a call back when you get a …” and she breaks into a sob. She’s crying!

His face changed in an instant. Eyes opened wide, jaw went slack. Their eyes met for a moment, his countenance a contagious mix of confusion and wide-eyed shock. She felt a strange rush inside her as he suddenly pulled himself out and dashed into the other room where the phone was.

She could only hear his parts of the conversation: “hey mom…hey, mom why are you crying? … mom what’s going on, what’s happened?” the anxiety in his voice increased with each sentence like a balloon being inflated to limit making her cringe in anticipation of its popping. She wanted him to come in the room wearing a smile, saying that it was nothing but a cheesy prank, or that the dog was ran over and her mom was being overly emotional about it, but the anxious tide did not subside. “What?” he said quietly “WHAT?” he screamed. It made her jump. “mom, is this a joke? it’s not funny … look, if it’s a joke you have to tell me … wha... I can’t believe …” his tone had changed, his voice sounded deeper in the way some people’s voices get deeper right before they burst into tears. “when? …. Look is this a joke? Is he there laughing with you? … mom?”… he came out and stood in the doorway, leaning a shoulder against the frame, dazed, like he had just emerged from a coma and didn’t quite know where he was.

“She says my dad’s killed himself” he said, looking at her as if he was looking through her.

Her mind went through shock, denial, speculating on elaborate prank schemes and putting the phone conversation in context in one passing, million-simultaneous-threads-of -thought moment. She was about to burst with questions but before she had time to say anything, still standing in the door frame, his legs seemed to suddenly give in. He fell down on his hands and knees, heaving.

-------------------------------

Twenty five year old Hunter Milancol is sitting on his third floor balcony, enjoying the irregularly warm 2005 Seattle summer, on a languid, sauntering, Thursday. Two days before he would meet Sophie, his future wife and Mason’s future mother for the first time. He slowly places his forearm on the wicker chair’s armrest and exhales in pleasure at the warm touch of wicker against his bare skin. The balcony is not big but it is big enough for the two chairs: one is a tan colored wicker and the other is a folding canvas chair with wide stripes of blue and white, bearing different colored stains here and there from the passing of the seasons. In between the two chairs is a round, white, inexpensive plastic table the surface of which is presently occupied by a scattered bunch of empty beer cans, which glint here and there in the sun. On the other chair, facing Hunter from across the table, sits Dan: one of Hunter’s favorite people to spend a warm summer Thursday with, drinking beer.

“… so I don’t know man, what if the whole thing is a flaw?” Hunter continues, while hitting the beer can he is holding with the back of his index and middle finger nails, making a drum roll. “I mean people are born with no eyes, or one arm or weird psychotic conditions all the time man, these are all flaws in the system, the only thing is that the chances of these flaws are low because you have natural selection so you got the normal people in the belly of the bell shaped curve and the flawed ones at the two extremes” Dan is smoking a cigarette and is looking over the edge of the balcony at the view of the city, eyes squinting to avoid the smoke while he takes a long puff, the cigarette making a sound barely audible as it burns. Hunter takes a quick sip of his beer and continues “not even obvious stuff like missing a leg or anything like that, schizophrenia man, people are wired with it at birth and don’t know it till they are 30 or something and one day they start hearing voices, You know? So maybe having a metaphysical angst, I mean whatever the fuck that is, granted it’s somewhat of a worn out umbrella term but you know what I mean, so what if that is also some genetic condition, some predisposition that makes you extra sensitive to things like melancholy, or gives you obsessive thoughts about the transience of the existential moment that is your existence…” he twists and flutters his hand that’s not holding the beer in the air as he says the last sentence as an acknowledgement of the fact that it sounds cliché and pretentious but that he found no better way to put it.

Dan, done with his puff, leaning forward to ash his cigarette, shakes his head from side to side while laughing quietly in what sound like a series of short hushes “see man, I know what you’re talking about, I get it, but here is what : (he has a growing library of these trademark semantically wired things that he invents or picks up here and there to say, like “here is what” which he uses as introductory phrases) yeah, people go around doing their thing, without really thinking about the “ultimate causes” (as his fingers mark the air with invisible quotation marks) of their existence or the purpose of life, some people talk about’em ‘cause they’re fashionable in some circles, I guess, but they don’t really chafe their psyches with them” Hunter, still laying back in his chair across the table, now a half smile forming on his lips, nods and moves his beer in the air as if to say “cheers” but says “right” instead. Dan continues “you need to be careful though not to blow shit out of proportion, when you say “condition” (aerial quotation marks again) as in a clinical condition, there is a definition for that, which is that something, like depression, is a clinical condition if it is disruptive to the subject’s life. Now if you wake up one day and you aren’t in the best of moods you can’t go around bawling, telling everybody you are clinically depressed, I mean you know this stuff yourself…” he pauses and looks pensively down at the beer can and rotates it tentatively in his hand, and continues, with eyes still downcast and the level of his voice consciously controlled “now, I mean, you were talking about the bell curve…” he pauses for a moment, searching for the right words, then shrugs and continues “I don’t know, what I’m trying to say is that it’s not binary, it’s not like you are either a philistine or suffer from debilitating melancholy. Because, I mean, the curve is a range and you could be anywhere along the spectrum and still fall within the normal, I don’t know, functional range of the curve” another pause, another shrug “but then if you do think that metaphysical angst is actually ruining your life, then maybe it is a condition, maybe you got to go take pills or something”

Hunter sucks both lips into his mouth for a moment, pondering, then he releases them and says “but that’s where is gets weird man, if your condition actually makes you think more, look deeper, feel more intensely, even though it might cause unhappiness, I mean it could be a disease in the sense that it makes being just a little harder rather than easier, but should you really take pills? Sedate it? Dampen whatever neural 12-tone symphony that’s going on in your brain? Or should you just go with it? It’s like ignorance is bliss but is it? I mean fuck, I’d rather kill myself before choosing to be a happy mushroom... “

He turns to the right and looks over the balcony, the trees on the other side of the street are green clouds swaying in the warm summer breeze, he thinks of an electron cloud … unpredictability. He turns back and continues, as if suddenly revitalized by the momentary rest in the conversation “you know, the main problem, or I mean I don’t know if it’s a problem, the main thing is this: the questions, those philosophical questions that cause the angst, or whatever, they feel so right. I don’t know if there is an intention behind our existence, or if we are just some weird machine that no god or anything is looking down at, you know, just us at the end of the spectrum of consciousness, I mean imagine that man, that’s pretty lonely, I don’t know, but designed or not designed the questions, the melancholy, they just feel so right, so real.” He frowns for a moment and shakes his head as if reflecting on what he just said. “But I mean, let us be merry man, and on that note, fuck all this, let’s chug these two and go for a walk on the Ave, I have that buzz going that makes me want to just jump on some Thai food right now man.”

The two beer cans make a PSSSt sound when opened, and then a clink when the two friends hit them together: “cheers”, “cheers man!”.

--------------------------------

The clouds have cleared, for a while. The mild autumn afternoon sun shines slanted through the half open louvers, producing alternating strips of light and shadow on the hardwood floor. Mason's sprawled on the sofa. A book lies neglected on the floor close by, from a few days ago when Mona’s buzzing at the door had interrupted him and he had laid it face down to mark the page.

His limbs are heavy, the air viscous. He wants no movement. His eyes are swollen from the crying. It was as if a dam broke once he reached his parents’ house. His mom had held him, pressed him against herself, and he had felt her tears seeping through his shirt, wet against his skin.

Flashes of memory are shrapnel, appearing from nowhere and leaving in their wake a deep pulsating pain: His dad dancing around the dinner table, the night mom had dared him to make dinner. He had failed horribly and they ordered pizza instead, but he refused to take off the apron and went around the dinner table with a grin and a bottle of wine, pouring drinks for him and Mona. His sister was there too, with her husband, and mom who laughed the loudest out of everyone at his jokes…and now, there it came, like a big poisonous blob of mercury that pushed against the inside of his chest and then throat and rose still, until his face felt warm and his eyes were wet.

why? Why? Was he manic depressive, and somehow hid from us the depressive cycles? He could have gone to the doctor, he would have researched it, maybe he did. Did he think about it, with a clear head? Did he see mom crying? She was, oh, she was wrinkled. He knew she would be devastated … he loved her, and still did it. Why? Is it real? Oh, this must be what being in denial is like. Turn back time so I can talk to him.

Another surge, another single, tired tear rolling down.

Did he see me, try to imagine the agony, the fucked up-ness? I want to scream, should I? No. Control. If you slip you’ll keep falling. Too dark of a place. Too deep.

Will I ever do it?

At the end of a rope, in his room, in the familiarity … dangling. Uh, Dangling! Slower and slower to stillness. A pendulum that doesn’t move, for keeping time that has stopped. His face ,no expression. Dead expression. His laugh, uh I remember his laugh, so full hearted, so close, so fucking close I can hear it… but I won’t.

Something is wrong. Something is wrong with the way all things are put together. You can’t just give something and take it away. If you want to take it away, don’t Give it. The transience of it. God betrayed us. Evolution betrayed us. Our brains overgrew the niche that spawned them, we became too human, too conscious, and now something inside yearns too much, feels the transience, the loss, too strongly.

Or maybe it’s me? some overdeveloped nostalgic tendency … Somehow some strands of neurons running deeper than normal, causing a vulnerability, some obsessive tendency to dwell on emotions … of loss, some hypersensitivity to pain.

He stared absentmindedly at the stucco ceiling: miniature upside-down mountains casting light grey, afternoon shadows on adjacent valleys. Thoughts roamed, idly, aimlessly, in his mind like dust particles in the sunlight in the still air of a quiet room … but suddenly there was a draft:

A connection … genetic maybe … some influence on the embryonic wiring of the brain? Some initial mark on the supposedly blank slate … Is this how he felt? My face took after mom, but perhaps my mind … took after his. Is that why he did it? Thought about it, the weight of being … too heavy, maybe even guessed that he was obsessing, thought about his thoughts being caused by chemical imbalances, but went through with it anyway? He was thorough, so thorough, he must have thought of it, researched it …but he didn’t stop…

The buzzer was an emergency break, pulled mistakenly by an unknowing passenger, stopping his train of thought. It was Mona. She waived at the camera’s lens with a tired half smile. Something about her made him feel she had prepared herself, she had a game plan: her face acknowledged the grief, but her smile was a symbol of resistance to it, a flicker of a pink neon sign in the vast darkness: “BUT LIFE MUST GO ON”

It was the first time he was seeing her after his father’s suicide. When he opened the door, she looked in his eyes with genuine, warm concern. “How are you doing?” she asked. “Eh, I don’t know … devastated … there’s a lot of shit on my mind” she stepped forward, wrapped her hands around him as though he was cold and she was trying to warm him by holding him. “That’s natural Mason” she whispered, her head on his shoulder. “it’s natural” she repeated as she lifted her head and moved away from him towards the closet to hang her overcoat “it’s natural, but that’s what life is … and it goes on” she said it softly, with kindness and empathy. He laid back on the sofa and put an arm under his head “Yeah I know, you’re right, that is what life is but it feels more like a bad joke that’s so bad you can’t even pretend you’re laughing”

“Oh don’t be like that, don’t let yourself go” she answered “you know, I was watching this program on the discovery channel about sharks and it was saying how there are certain species of them that never stop swimming. They have to keep swimming because that’s how they breathe, instead of inhaling fresh water they swim through the water. If they stop they’ll just use up the oxygen in the water around them and suffocate so they have to constantly keep moving, and you know, that’s how life is, you just have to keep moving, keep experiencing new things. It’s like experience is the oxygen for our minds but we can’t inhale it so we have to swim through it, keeping the water around us fresh. So, I know you’re sad right now, but you have to keep going, think about the future. You know what it is basically, you have to stay interested, even if it seems like you can’t. You have to want to experience, see even This as an experience, take it in, think about it, grieve, but let it be a part of you not you a part of It.” She was now going into the kitchen to make coffee “how’s your mom doing by the way?”

“She’s doing better now” he answered, staring at the ceiling, noticing how the shadows were becoming longer as the day waned. “Just coping I guess, my sister is flying in tonight so that’ll be really good for her”

“you know” he continued “that’s a good metaphor, I mean the shark metaphor. I agree, you have to keep going, and on a primal level that’s what we’re programmed to do. And you have to stay interested … like you said.”

“Exactly” her sound echoed from the kitchen and moments later the gargling of the coffee maker started.

“yeah” he continued “but I was thinking of my dad. He was sixty five. I think it’d be a lot easier for me and you to stay interested in life than it was for him. I mean you start to age, you start to fade, not just your body, but your mind. My aunt, my dad’s sister, she has Alzheimer’s, I don’t think you’ve ever met her but it’s one of the saddest things you can see. I mean she doesn’t recognize me sometimes and she gives me this look, Uh, her eyes are like the windows of an abandoned house. I mean its Sad. And she used to be so funny …and witty … and kind before.”

He was silent for a moment, and he suddenly sat upright in the sofa. “Fuck, I never even thought about it. Maybe my dad had found out that he had it too.”

She appeared in the kitchen’s entrance holding a cup, looking at him and obviously interested to see what this last theory would lead to.

“I don’t know, I have to talk to my mom about that” he continued and lied back down on the sofa, this time tucking both hands behind his head. It was getting darker but neither of them turned on the light, and so the room was filled with the deep dark blue of the dusk.

“But anyway” he continued “the sharks have an advantage: they are not aware of themselves and their condition as we are. They are oblivious. But in our case, it almost seems like an evolutionary flaw Mona … we are aware. Fuck, it's almost like the anesthetics have worn off but the operation doesn't stop.” She was leaning against the kitchen door, her right shoulder against the door frame, her right hand holding the cup, listening. “I read my dad’s journal and there was an entry from three weeks ago that he hadn’t shown me, I don’t think he wanted me to see it, maybe it was his version of a suicide note. It was a four line poem, it said” he cocked his head back looking at a different part of the ceiling as if that helped him remember. “It said:" he continued

"The fruit will ripen and then fall

As if in answer to some call,

But I see while still on the rise

The outlines of looming demise”

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.

RELATIONSHIPS, DATING AND JEANS PART2

Not many will argue against the fact that a sudden death is much more desirable than one brought on by attrition. I personally much prefer my brains being bashed by a piano free falling from the 113th storey of a sky scraper than being torn apart slowly on the rack.
However, sadly, the tale I am about to share with you, is one of attrition. it is one of constant annoyances that individually are quite manageable but it is the constancy that makes them unbearable. See, even a healthy relationship has its rainy days, but this, was Chinese water torture.

If you haven’t read part 1 of this story you should because that will explain some of my phobias that I’m going to bring up in a few lines. But so, I met this girl at school in an English class. I liked her poetry, I did think it was sometimes overly romantic and sentimental, but it was ok, besides she always had a smile on and seemed really nice, AND I simply found her attractive.
So we go out on a couple of dates and everything is great. Great conversation. and we both enjoy each other’s company. And then one night we go out drinking. I had my fingers crossed 67% of the whole time (33% of the time I was holding my drink) hoping that I wouldn’t witness another unveiling of an angel to expose the demon within. Every drink that she finished, I closed my eyes and opened them one by one like watching a scary movie, but no, she drank and laughed and kept acting normal (normal,of course, redefined to compensate for the drunkenness). Beautiful.

So ok, the drinking night went well too. At this point we’ve been dating for a couple of months and one night she kinda sits me down and asks me if it’s ok for her to call me her boyfriend now. I found it kinda odd, somewhat awkward. I’ve had girlfriends before but it just somehow happens usually, you don’t really fill out forms for being someone’s boyfriend or girlfriend. But hey that’s my experience, and if there is something I believe in is that you can judge people eventually, but you shouldn’t judge them before you know them well enough. So I said yes and we were pronounced man and girlfriend by the holy church of formalized relationships.
Now, one of the commandments of the aforementioned church is now that you are out of one box(dating) and into the next (relationship) (where is the out of the box thinking?) you should hang out more. Ok. She’s fun, and smart. We’ll hang out more.

One night we, and a bunch of her and my friends all go to this bar. We’re sitting around the table, all talking and mingling when I feel the weight of this stare on me, I look across the table and find her staring at me, with a shining smile and unblinking eyes, so I give her a little nod and smile back to acknowledge the eye contact, which is what people usually do in these situations to avoid being awkward since you are sitting too far away from each other to say anything so an eye contact lasting more than a couple of seconds does tend to be kinda awkward and lala landish, almost zombiesque. But to my surprise, she nods back but keeps staring and smiling with the same intensity, so I keep smiling back for what must have been 40 minutes or something and eventually dismayed by her seemingly frozen-in-time countenance I give a little awkward puff of a smile that sounded almost like a cough and turned away.

That was a little strange, but I let it go. However, the frequency of awkward incidences only increased. If time is a trellis, and me and her are each standing on one side of it, these little awkward situations were like vines creeping up the lattice work, and eventually I couldn’t even see her anymore. All I could see was the constant awkwardness wrapped around the time we spent together.

Another time I’m talking to my friend, at some bar again, and I really have to go pee, and all of a sudden she wraps her hands around me from behind me and rests her head on my shoulder. I mean that’s a nice gesture, very sweet no doubt, but if somebody puts a funnel in your mouth and pours a whole bucket of sugar in there, I bet you won’t ask for more, no matter how sweet.
So finally I come out and tell her, she listens and nods and smiles and says that she understands and that I’m doing a good job of communicating with her (Where are you dr phil). But from then on it was down hill and the relationship slowly faded away, or got lost in the vines, in about a month or so. I WAS really bummed out though, I mean there were so many things that I really liked about her but it was just the over-sweet awkwardness that took a shit in it all. I sulked for a while indeed.

You know this is sorta like you go to the store and you see these pair of jeans that are exactly what you’re looking for. You go try them on and they feel fine. Besides you really need a pair of jeans since your last pair got ripped in the behind, and you don’t have the passion for long extensive shopping sessions. So you buy them. you come out and wear them for a couple of days and whoops, there right on the waist there is this little tag that really irritates your skin. You put up with it for a while, but it’s too annoying so you get a pair of scissors and cut it. But then what’s left over from it is even more annoying.

So you finally give up…take the jeans off and put them on the shelf and bow before you turn your back like a samurai that has lost a challenge, and go in the other room for some quality seppuku.

To be continued.

RELATIONSHIPS, DATING AND JEANS PART1

achtung: the following is all purly fictional, not to be taken seriously

you know what's so funny about dating and relationships, a lotta people don't realize it but dating is so much like shoppin for jeans.

I met this girl a while ago. she was beautiful. Tall, a nice body and a likable, smiling face. ok. so far so good. then I go out on a couple of dates with her. she dressed meticulously well (as in hours in front of the mirror) so I kinda assumed the dates are gonna be boring and we are just gonna end up talking about the latest Hollywood comedy, and killing time with the dull knife of casual (catatonic) conversation. but no, to my surprise she truned out to be a great conversationalist. Not only she got every little joke and allusion, but we also ended up talking about politics, books, quality cinema. we even hopped on little cynical, self-admiring tangents about the absurdity of the predominant pop culture in the capitalist vastness that is America.

so cool, wow, this seems like it's gonna be a lot of fun.

and then one night we go out drinking. i could see clearly, as the alcohol level in her blood rose it was almost like somebody was slowly pulling back a veil. it's amazing how much you can know about books and cinema and the current socio-economic misfortunes of african countries simply as a sort of fashion accessory. now, that somewhat explains why at her apartment she had books somewhat ostensibly arranged on the table in the livinng room. i'm not saying that everyone who does that is a phony, but in her case it served as a corroboration of my initial hunch. anyway though, the night goes on, we both get drunker, and now i can see, through the foggy windows of my imbibed brain certain signs of hitherto unseen tensions in her. certain compulsive, kinda rude, almost intentionally provocative checking the phone every 5 seconds for received text messages ... the conversation that on previous days flowed as gracefully as a glider on a sunny sunday was now a colossal stone, and i Sisyphus ... flirting with our male server with mannerism so tacky that it even made him uncomfortable.

well, i thought to myself as she sat across me hunched to be able to read a text without taking the phone out of her purse, i guess i misjudged her...it was fun while it lasted. but had i the ability to see into the future i would have known that for the short amount of time that our acquaintance was going to last she was gonna make me pay for the fun i had while it lasted

my car was parked at her apartment, so we took a cab. she asks me to come in, and i comply, not wanting to act wired and be forced to confront her while we are both drunk, tonight. i go in and sit at the sofa, she goes to the bathroom. i kinda don't know what to do. definitly don't feel like doing what i would have felt like doing in the pre-unveiling era of my friendship with her. so i sit there in a limbo, kinda tipsy.
she goes to the bathroom, and i sit there some more, and some more and she doesn't get out so i get up and knock on the door ... nothing. i slowly open the door and there she is standing over the sink, i look closer, squinting. she's crying ... What The Fuck? hey, wtf, are you crying?...why are you acting so wired tonight? she says (now let me repeat myself: What The Fuck? I was acting wired?)
-I was acting wired? i ask in amazement.
i did not see this coming.
-you know what, maybe i should leave. we'll talk about it tomorrow.
-yeah, leave, fuckin leave, be a man and leave.
she has lost it, what is this? so i go towards the door, i am stopped by her:
-don't go, lets talk about this tonight.
i stop, more like a deer in headlights than anything else, she hugs me and goes back in the bathroom. FREAK, i think, ok. i wait for i don’t know how long it was, I was nodding off at this point. She comes out, in tears and say:
-look what do you want from me, what is it you want from me?
I look at her. Who is she, I have no idea.
I leave

and you know what this is kinda like: you go to the store, there is the rack of jeans that says sale in big red letters on it. you're like fuck it they are probably all extra large but i'll give it a shot. you go take a look, and there it is, a pair your size, on sale. you go try them on, they are a little tight, just a little, but you think that will be ok once you wear them a couple of times, and indeed, you wear them a couple of times and they start feeling great. and then one night you go to get into your friend’s SUV and ghrrrrrt, there they go rippin all the way along that line that goes from your butt to the zipper, and you have to walk back home, one hand covering your arse to keep your whitie tighties from being exposed to the strangers on the sidewalk, and get into the good old unglamorous corduroys. if it felt a little tight at first, it was waiting for the most awkward moment to rip.

to be continued.