Which Is To Say, I'll Be Real Have

08/29/2006 6:25 AM – 6:46 AM

Maybe I’ll set myself up in some out-of-the-way where the rent is cheap and the food is cheaper, just me and my laptop and a coffee maker and an ashtray. Yeah, that’d be sweet. It’s fun to play with the imaginings. The problem comes when you start to base your happiness on reaching the imaginings. Any success will always have that tinge of not-quite-enough. Any living, though, will always have that sense of it’ll-do.

The aloneness of the Spike is directly proportional to his ability to spend his time as he wishes, limited by the constraints of eating, smoking, paying the rent and toiletries. What a rat bastard. It’s good to be hermetically inclined. Except for the part where you never get any. Ha. We travel on. Better to be alone and somewhat free than tied up in satin sheets. Three doors down, they gave up on it. They compromised intent for convenience. If one falls, who will pick him up? Hunger. Fear. Anger. They’ll get you back on your feet. So be it. And, laughing at your lies is better than being constrained without warrant. In the knowing sense.

Pick it up. Put it down. Rummage through the piles for stuff to build an areoplane out of. In the cold light of the bright summer sun, you do stupid things. The yellow street lights look right on the wet asphalt. On days when your strength runs over the top, you become cocky. Better to be cocky than compliant. After they’ve beaten you down, you still know that you can rise up to a certain height. But it must always be Them that beats you down. If it’s life or yourself, you’re fucked. Them can’t beat you down. Them don’t give a damn about you. If you fly by night in a single engine plane, there’s only enough room for a few personal belongings and a parachute. And why fear death-in-life? Because death-in-death is more than enough to grind you down to a cheap suburban life. Perhaps that’s where I connect to my narrator. In the inability to conform to the cheaper way. But more than likely, that’s another justification. No. Like the pirate said, a merry life, if a short one. He sat at the keyboard, typing his memoirs in no discernable order. Occasionally, light dawned and he remembered the ineffable presence of the sublime realization. Like the Get Out Jail Free Card, it can only be used once. But, you know, in the end, it’ll do. Rain-wet streets have always been my glee’s calling card. Strap on yer guns. Slap in yer flask. It’s gonna be a bumpy ride.

On Who Picked Up the Cards

08/28/2006 6:21 AM – 6:42 AM

Wake up on a Monday morning and you fell alright, feel okay. The clouds are thick, the air is warmer than it has been but you awake and you fell alright, feel okay. Where’s that coming from? The last time we did something, there was snow and such. Lift it up. Lift it up again. Let it down. Let it down again. You grew up. What do you want to be? Apperently, this.

If it’s all about forgetting and remembering, where are we now then? Where we always were, driving away from troubles and driving towards the waterside dawn. Running away always make more sense. Staying is only for the brave and bold and boring. So you get up before first light and put on your driving clothes and sit down and type. There. That was a nice neat fade through. Bleed out. When last we were together, the air smelled of freshly mowed grass and falling rain and rising dust. We sat there on the bench that overlooked the pond and wondered why things turned out the way they did. Then the song came and we remembered that nobody really knows how they got to be this way.

Where do you go, my lovely, where do you go? What is love, baby, don’t hurt me, don’t hurt me no more? I let you go a long time ago. Love is something left in the toybox with the rest of the imaginary friends. There’s just this, and this is alone with a cup of coffee and a pack of Camels and a thing to type on. Grow up, get up, get going. Time to be your own father again. Take me out, Dad. Take me out for Texas Hots on a rainy day when all true detectives are thankful for the repreave from heat and melancholy thoughts. Watch the pretty bunny, bet on the ponies, normalicy eats away at you. Keep telling yourself that. Forget it. No use remembering impossible things if you imagine yourself in the story. Remember the impossible things, but take yourself out of the picture. The whole picture will be about you anyway. Somewhere around the four hour mark, they started talking again. They don’t remember what it was about. Nothing important, we can assume. That is the nature of the thing, forgetting that you were not speaking and forgetting what made you speak again. After the cards are scattered, everyone was angry and refused to pick them up. Then someone picked them up. No one is positive who did it, and each one secretly thinks it was themselves, but that’s fine. The cards got picked up. It’s time to start building a house again. The man behind the curtain is still the one that has to tell you how to get home.

The One Where She Kills Her Husband

08/21/06 6:14 AM – 6:34 AM

I watched their marriage from my backyard, curious to see what would happen. It was spring when they moved in and the cherry tree had not yet started to bloom. Whatever interesting would transpire would occur slowly, I hoped to see the signs of what was to come by late summer.

She killed him to the sound of snowflakes battering against their bedroom window in late February. The change was subtle to see. They were a quiet couple to begin with and you had to know their routine to know that it had changed. When she left in the morning, he was still asleep. When he went to sleep at night, she had already been asleep for hours. She was a veterinarian. He was a competent musician, but whatever it is that makes someone a creator was absent from his makeup. If he was playing covers, it was a good show to see. On the nights where he performed as himself, you went home tired.

It wasn’t that his songs weren’t any good. It was that there was nothing in them that made them work their way inside you and pop out as you made your daily rounds. What good is a song if it doesn’t catch you up? She didn’t have an ear for that sort of thing though, but there is some small thing in the bottom of the well that flies off at tangents to the conversation and paints the walls in soft blues and canary yellows. Even she, competent as she was, had to have it. The real trouble started in October, when the trees die with brilliant nonsense. I sat in my lawn chair, obscured from their view by a screen of peas and morning glory vines. She was calling the dog. “Charlie! Charlie!” she yelled, “Godamnit, Charlie!” That was the note of violence that I was listening for. I’d thought this through. The plant needed to be subtle yet heavy. When I dropped it over the fence, no one noticed, but the sound of the shovel on the frozen ground was too loud not to be.

The One With the Green Cat

08/20/06 8:39 AM – 9:11 AM

The way she sat on the bench, I could trace the outline of her hips ten years later while I sat watching a boxing match in Las Vegas, eyes wide open, but I wasn’t there for a girl and the scent of her perfume blew back with the forward progress of the boat. I moved towards the prow to smell the breeze in its own visceral state.

The big cat was rumored to come here to drink, contemptuous of human presence. They claimed it was crazy because it never slept. Its size and color distinguished it but also by an odd tuft of fur that grew straight out from the back of its skull, like a cowlick. The explanation for that tuft was usually given as the mark of a former hunter’s bullet that had grazed and scarred the skin and mind of the cat. The hunter that gave it its cause for fame was rumored to be its first human meal.

This was all legend. There was no record of a disappeared hunter, but there were quite a few mauled cattle, three maimed villagers, and one dead white man. The last was the reason for my being there. It was the color of the creature that made it notable. They claimed it’s hair was green flecked with dark brown. A perfect camouflage for this territory, but odd for a mammal. My own guess was that, if the creature’s fur was green, it was not an inherent quality, but the effect of regular bathing in this algae-choked water. That was why I had chosen to take the long sweating boat-ride instead of the quick air-conditioned plane-flight. It’s strange to come upon the power plant after spending the previous five hours slowly meandering upstream through primordial jungle. I think that there was a reason that they situated it in the center of several zigzags. Either way you came upon it – upstream or down – it was jungle, jungle, jungle, then like the looming prow of charging warship, a monument to twentieth-century industrial baroque set in the middle of a freshly mowed lawn of Kentucky blue-grass. Out on that manicured fairway, surrounded by jungle that had ruled the earth since before the days of the dinosaurs, they had found what was left of the body.

The One With the Keys

08/19/06 7:05 PM – 7:33 PM

So they asked me. They asked me, “Jeez, Pauly, don’t ya give a damn?” And I didn’t have answer, this answered for me: twelve steps down from the Colonel’s porch, one of the flagstones is loose. If you pick it up, you’ll find a key. You take the key to the shack in the woods on the east side of town.

You can smell the marsh water there. Filtered through a mile of pine tree needles. The wildflowers –I don’t know their names – grow in the field to the left like great big puddles of yellow blood. The sun’s blood, I suppose. You take the key and you go inside the shack. You don’t use it on the front door. The front door isn’t locked. You take the key inside the shack and find the thing that looks like something that was taken out of the insides of a skyscraper. It was. You find that thing and you reach around behind it. You won’t be able to move it. It took eight strong men and a mule to put it in that shack.

Reach around behind it and you’ll feel a little hole. Put the key from the Colonel’s walkway in the hole. Turn it. You might have to jiggle it a little. The rust builds up even on as fine a piece of engineering as that thing that came out of the inside of a skyscraper. I don’t remember which way you have to turn it. You might have to try both. You’re not looking to unlock anything. Underneath the hole is another hole, but it will only open if you turn the key. Turn the key until something falls out of the other hole. It will look like a key with a very long neck. It is. The key that you got from the Colonel’s will stay in that hole in the piece of the inside of a skyscraper until you put the long key back in the hole it fell out of. When you put it back in, put it back in nose first. But you’re not going to put it back for a while. Take the long key. You’re going to need a boat of some kind, now. A small one like a rowboat or a canoe, but nothing like a kayak, you’ll need something you can move around in. Take your boat down to the pond in the middle of town. From the boat launch that’s next to the fountain, you need to paddle north, out towards the marshes. There’s probably a better way to get there, but I don't know it. What we’re doing is not apathy. Apathy implies that you don’t care. We care. That’s what makes us good at it.

Wherein We Eventually Arrive at the Smell of Salt Marshes

8/17/06 8:58 AM – 9:27 AM

So when they asked him, he had to admit that he would rather see people angry and ready to act than mildly happy and content. The list of things that are an opiate of the masses grows longer every year. Thou shalt not do this, because then you are no longer effected by my rhetoric. It is not apathy, though I don’t really care what you call me, it is the realization that any grouping of men is an attempt at marketing.

Do this and thou shalt be cool. But cool has too many contexts to be meaningful. Mindless obedience to a charismatic dictate is one cool. Sneakers might be another. Elmwood cool is another. And yet all cool can offer is acceptance into a group. But groups don’t exist. Groups don’t die. Whether that group is called a corporation or a co-op, it isn’t really there. Cool is an acceptance of a social norm. Those that ask, “but why?” are shunted off to another group. All reasons are rationalizations, set on an unprovable primal axiom.

What do you want then? What should one want? How then should I live? You stop asking questions after a while, unless you’ve suffered some great trauma, then questions are all that you have. And that’s as pointless as accepting dictates without question. So forget everything and sit down. Stop your whirring mind and look again into the universal word of Silence. It is not “no” nor “yes.” It is no answer at all except the only one you will get. All that there is, while you are alive, is living, and no one can tell you what living is. Eat your bread with joy. Drink your wine with a merry heart. Whenever you find work that turns your whirring mind away from itself, do it with all your heart. There is only this day and then matter reclaims its own. That which animates departs and where it goes we can only hope and pray and then forget that the question was bothering us. To see a girl sleeping on a blanket at dusk, as fireflies move above her like ghosts of Christmas lights. To tell a tale that surrounds you so completely that you forget to question and worry. All of this. All of this and the smell of salt marshes besides.

Which Concerns Early Autumnal Fantasies

8/16/06 5:30 AM – 5:51 AM

How little I can understand of the underlying mechanics of being, but that will do. Where does that nagging unattached sense of not-quite-rightness rise up from and then fall away to? Ah well, perhaps it is a morning for daydreams. If I were a little more free.

If I were a little more free – for English class with Mr. F. No. Not really. I doubt he would have assigned something like that. But he would have graded the grammar and composition of it excellently. I can say that about the ol’ bastard. If I were a little more free – what does one mean by that? I suppose it would be something similar to what I was for that brief time when I was mooching of my mother but still had a car. But without the mooching. Money, I suppose. Mark Twain said, “the lack of money is the root of all evil.” There is something to that, I think. Of course there is still the underlying issue of the state of one’s soul, evil would seem to find its root more honestly there, but still, practically speaking, the lack of money does seem to be the root of evil. Is that actress still married to that actor?

If I were a little more free, I would have a little more money, no job and a car. Those are a powerful combination. I like how that imaginary place feels. Of course, desire is the root of all suffering, but, fuckit, Jesus make me a Buddha, just not yet. So there I am with a little more money, no job and a car. I would have awoken at four in the morning and driven with the windows down until the sun came up. Then I would stop and write for a few hours. How weird. This is the same autumnal fantasy that I’ve had off and on for hmm… eleven years. Well, there’s this one and there’s the one where I’m hiking. And the one where I’m in my cabin in the woods. Ooooo… they’re all such happy places. But really now, that actress, what’s her name, the blond one, is she still married to that actor, the femininely beautiful one that isn’t Jude Law? So I get up and I drive. That’s really where that “Sunrise In Late Fall” story came from, I think. I wanted to spend a few hours inside that fantasy and found a story that let me. And, of course, the girl is asleep in the back, so I get to be alone but don’t have to be lonely. Brilliant. Every morning should be a morning for daydreams.

On Being Fine

08/15/06 6:45 AM – 7:11 AM

It is there in the subtle work of forgetting that we are remembering the action that must be taken now. Where are you going? Is it away from what must be done now? There is no difference between sitting at the desk at home and standing at the desk at work – both fall into the category of “things the dead can’t do.” So remember that. You’re alive and memory is a mysterious process.

How do you write? You sit down and write. If the first daft, you just write. You can’t tell the story until you tell it. There is no plot until the story is told. Any invocations of archetypes or higher criticism or lower criticism are bullshit. If the story you want the story to tell were actually being told, it would be a lot more boring. There is the story and that is all. Read it. Write your own if you don’t like it. So there. Coming back to this, remember the better process of forgetting that which is not present. Just write the words as they flicker into your mind and stop wondering where they came from. Woohoo. You’re an “artist.” Woohoo, let me repeat.

For the Little Boy in My Line Who Was Scared of Ambulances and Will Never Read This – no, you’re not fine. Your mom was lying to make you feel better. Actually, she was lying because she didn’t like the effect that your fear was having on her. No, the paramedics will not always be able to take care of whoever it was that needed them. You are not fine. You are going to die. Your mom is going to die. Everyone and everything is going to die in some way. And we have no proof of what is going to happen after that event. Forget about it. You can’t stop it. Let it go and get on with the realities of being alive right now. You’re what, seven? You’ve got ten more years of school at least. When you get home from school, do not immediately do your homework. Go outside and play. Give the best hours of the day to playing, give the crap that they require of you second or third best. If you’re scared of ambulances, then you’re smarter than average, and your second best will score pretty damn well on their grading system. My time limit is up so here’s my parting advice - drink booze, take drugs, have sex, eat meat, but in all of this, be tied to nothing. It’s all going to get taken away at one point or another. You will experience many small deaths before the big one takes you. Life is short, it just takes a long fucking time. You might as well enjoy it. So, on second thought, yes, you’re fine.

Where the Telling Resides

08/12/06 6:30 AM – 6:55 AM

Open your eyes. Wake up and open your eyes to delight. Follow where it leads. The images of the character. The proclivities of the story. What’s funny? What’s amusing? What entertains? Pick up and start again. Drink your coffee. Yes, later you will need to do your laundry and clean the bathroom. But be here now.

Hard-boiled is the gentle cynic. Don’t ask where it’s all going or what it all means, just copy down what comes next. There is this and that is the thing that is worth doing right now. So. So what do you do for the next fifteen minutes? Disgorge words. Right then. The color of the walls is white with blue permeating. The door out is closed. The closet door is open. What is in the closet? The same thing that’s always in the closet, Pinky. Monsters. Are they the friendly ones? No. The friendly ones only teach you letters and numbers. They’d be eaten in a second by the things in the closet. But amnesia is still a fascinating story device.

Forgetting those things which hover like bees in the past, we press on toward the things that flicker in the foreground. The color of the sidewalk is beige smothered in gray. And Grey is the name of the day. What happens next? Won’t know until we write it, will we? Hee, hee! And there we are, me harties. Nothing here but old salts for new wounds. That’s like three in one. Pick it up and start again. Nothing here but words and hints and allegations of a whole. When we walked down the street, we assumed it would be for the day. The adventure of seven months was not in our minds. But the possibility was. The nature of the spaceship is its limited imitation of earth. We try to comprehend the thing, but that is the way to stop writing. Only words poured fourth in the service of characters in situation. So. So what comes first, the characters or the situation? Essense or action? Faster now. Pick up speed and loose the day in these odd squiggles. Not quite absolutely true is it? Everything they told you about writing fiction was fiction. You make it up as you go along. Except that you don’t, exactly. When I was sixteen and still believed in love, I mowed the lawn without a shirt on, clipping the Walkman to the back of my shorts. The wire of the headphones tickled the skin between my shoulders. The smell of fresh cut grass. The reluctance to act submerged by the necessity of action. Finding yourself there, you find the will to forgetting and finding.

On the First Scent of Autumn

10/11/2006 5:30 AM – 5:54 AM

Sitting alone in the mingling scents of cigarette smoke and cool fall air. It’s not true fall. It will probably get warm again before we slide into winter, but this is the best time for the idea of autumn. The false early hint being more persuasive than the present fact. When it is time for a thing, though, it is enough to be there.

The morning glories have finally bloomed. Though the vines were thinner than last year and the green wall is more of a few thin strips, they are pleasant to look at. Remembering those forests breaks the heart when buildings surround you. The wanderlust sets in this time of year. “Go. Look,” this time says to me, but one must be content with what is attainable. The view from the bedroom window, sitting on the fire escape, walking to work – these are real and possible, so these are what should be done. If the day comes when I can climb into the car at 4 in the morning and drive with the windows down until it’s time for bed, I’ll snap it up like Halloween candy. But what is will do for now.

The times come when I’d like to settle down to the rest of my life. Odd, when reflecting that this is all times. Siren songs of comfort and joy. But these are here, too. The object of desire is the emotional reward for desire achieved. These keep the species alive, but, when observed from a distance, are thin compensation for the effort and seldom what we bought from selling ourselves. If one could have the emotion, there would be no object for attainment. So we let go of the desire for desire achieved and come back to where we are, knowing that, in all things, reality will do. This does not stop the tendency of the mind from running towards fantasy. But that is what I do. This is how you make a story. What is it that you want? Throw that desire onto a bag of bones and make it animate them. Topple trees in the path and see how they overcome it. If the desire is achieved, a comedy. If the desire is left unquenched a tragedy. Tragedy blows and comedy is cheap. Just tell the tale as it unfolds, carefully as you can. We’re just here; splashing in the river that carries us to the sea. Consume the autumn breeze while it’s there; let it go when it’s gone. This is enough.

Which Ends With A Sexy Nymph

08/09/06 7:45 AM – 8:08 AM
The infinite is unfathomable, so we can stick to the ground. When in Gotham, remember to doff your hat in Crime Ally. We are not the sprites, merely mind wrapped in meat. It is enough – we go further than most.
The daylight creeps up in its city form of rectangles, climbing rectangles. The day progresses and it is more comfortable than it was. We find it better to apprehend the smells of water when there is less humidity. The sides of the rectangles are rough. Looking closer, the picture of the whole is lost and complexity emerges. Upon closer inspection, the complexity gives way to simple forms again. The theory is useless if it has no application. We return to Newton, looking for new tools. But Newton was a madman, never loving, only working. But that is a misrepresentation. Newton loved more basically, and died the man that fought the counterfeiters.
When in the East End, look at the rooftops at night. The feline form jumps from roof to roof. Are we merely what we love, or does our existence grow beyond the bounds? We stick to the ground. If the questions are answerable, we will find answers in time. Let me alone, let me alone, cries the sullen. But existence is the substance of the interference. We are alone when we die, and not before. But that’s only on this side of the gray curtain. Where are you going, oh, man? Where is your vaunted mind? It goes where I go. Its sadness is in the muscle, its joy in the bones. We are ourselves, are we not? We are all turtles, carrying our house with us, wherever we go. You cannot escape it; the shell is sewn to the skin, the skin to the muscle, the muscle to the bone. Go ye therefore and sweep out your house. Ha. The impossibility of the task is overwhelmed by the fact that it can be done. Only one little bit at a time. Climbing from the pond, she glistens in the moonlight, and the stars stick with surface tension, dappling her skin.

In Which Dante Is Infringed Upon

08/08/06 7:05 AM – 7:31 AM
When in the foggy dewed seat of the bench, you look up and see green hills surrounding, and then you remember the better place. Is this a wrong thing? To say better is to say desire, to say desire is to say suffering. But there we are again, back home amongst the sheltering hills.
Forgetting those things which have passed, we press on to those things which are here. Then this too will pass and we are arriving each moment on a new shore. We see in it the imminent realization of that which is beyond change, but we cannot come to realization, the days change to slowly and pass to quickly. We are what we are when we wake up. We will never again be what we were just seconds ago. So we let go of the rope and hold onto the vague hope of Providence, finding that the only change was in the forgetting.
The only difference between Hell and Purgatory was hope. The same brave punishments were fashioned for sinners of the same ilk, but one was to endlessness, the other towards change. Ascending the celestial ladder, passing by the baser planets, we apprehend the smile of the beloved in the stellar flower. But it’s all just a poem, reflecting nothing of reality other than the imagination of a man. This too we see in the skyscrapers and artesian breads. You cannot go home again, it’s been overrun with those that did not change while you were away. And there is the drawing and there the map of the world. Through the windows of the house next door, you look into the shadowed room and see a reflection of your hearts contemplation. Monsters? Lovemaking? Nothing? We are what we were then. We are what we are now. We are what we will be. But we change with the atomic dissipation as everything else does. Whence comes consciousness and whither does it go? We are bound here, and yet freer than the angelic. When I swung the golf club, I became something else, because, on occasion, I chanced to swing well. The beer and the pizza remind us of right this very second. Come now, sweet girl, and sit beside me and read. All men die alone, but we can live in company, if only we discover how to hear the farmer say, “that’ll do, Pig, that’ll do.”

A Cynic's Guide To Love

And so the computer is not up and running again. I’ve dug out the computer that John gave me last time I broke my own and set it here on my desk (no longer sitting rain-endangered beneath the window). This is a good computer for typing, as its RAM does not allow for much more. No pictures, is what I’m saying, and that will be fine.
The past weekend was spent in the little valley that I grew up in, participating in the wedding and related festivities celebrating the marriage (finally) of Jonny and Jen. An excellent time - lots of drinking and merry-making. I slept a long time last night.
Coming back to Buffalo, Stephen, spurred on by the recent nuptials and his practical mind, took me to task once again for not having had a girlfriend in 11 years. But I was prepared. I do not want to be anyone’s boyfriend; it is a useless and expensive thing to be. Way too many strings for such slender compensation. That is why I haven’t had a girlfriend in 11 years. And that answer will do for now. But Stephen, being a very Stephenish fellow, pressed on past the facts and insisted in engaging in a “But What If…” (“Elseworld” if you’re more of a DC fan). But what if you did find someone that would make you take on the bitter bit of a romantic relationship? What would that look like? After much haranguing, this is what we concluded – if Spike were to enter into a romance it would require 3 things (in the positives, the negatives are a very long list and are, for the most part, summed up by stating the opposite of the positives): 1.Comfortableness, 2.Similar Aesthetics, 3.Sustainable Lust.
What then is meant by “comfortableness”? Comfortableness is defined herein as “the ability to live for a long time (as long as ye both shall live, theoretically) in close proximity without pissing each other off frequently.” You could call this the “roommate standard.” Because in actuality, this is what you will be most of the time. You will be sharing space, toiletries, cleaning, and bills. After that honeymoon blush fades (rather quickly, usually), you’re left living with someone. All. The. Frigging. Time. For. The. Rest. Of. Your. Frigging. Life. How comfortable will you be with that? How good of a roommate is this person going to be for you? This leads into 2 – “similar aesthetics.”
You could call this the “best friends standard.” It’s an old horse, “marry your best friend.” And if it were literal, you’d have a lot of straight men married to straight men and a lot of straight women married to gay men. This is why friends is in its plural form. Most people have a lot of associates that they call “friends.” In this category there are usually many sub-categories: drinking friends, talking friends, work friends, bad friends, and there is usually a special category – “best friends.” Most people talk about their “best friend,” but if they were honest they would acknowledge that they’ve had a long line of “best friends” - Best Friend Around the Neighborhood, Best Friend in Elementary School, Best Friend in Middle School, Best Friend in High School, Best Friend of the Cousins, Best Friend in Church, Best Friend in College… if one takes a moment to look at their own list of Best Friends, they will find that there is usually a commonality – a shared aesthetic. I don’t mean it in the limited definition of art appreciation. It’s more of “how do you actually spend your time?” thing. The reason that we change “best friends” is because as the circumstances of our life change, the way that we actually spend our time changes.
On a side note, this is why young love is the stupidest love. As you get older, you are less apt to change dramatically – you get boring, but this boringness is what makes you more easy to live with. When you are younger, your life is very exciting and you change constantly and are mostly an asshole that only a mother could love with any kind of endurance. When you are young, that person that you are will cease to be about every two months, as will that person that you fall in love with. Useally, these schedules are off-set so, if your lucky, you’ll get about two week of understanding each other before you become alienated again. End Sidenote Now.
When you have become more boring, you find that you tend to spend your time following a predictable schedule, and what I mean by “similar aesthetic” is similarly boring schedule: we both want to live in the country, we both get sleepy before Letterman, we both like to have a cocktail when we get home, we both like to watch Lost and CSI, we both get horny on Tuesday mornings, we have both discovered the malicious nature of attempting to live a purpose driven life. No one is going to have the same aesthetic, but having a less similar one will have you cutting the love-seat in half with a chainsaw a lot more quickly that a more similar one.
The last requirement is “sustainable lust.” It’s really the least important, because you’ll spend a lot less time being your significant’s hump buddy than you will being their roommate and non-humping buddy, but if you have not lust, what the hell’s the point in enduring the annoyance of a relationship at all? The other name for “sustainable lust” is the “MILF Standard.” It’s very simple to state: when this person is 55, will I still want to shtoop them? It’s nearly impossible to answer this question, but you should really give it some thought. Look at their genetics – are her parents shtoopable or not? Look at their proclivities – are her friends shtoopable? Look at their past – did she spend more time being shtoopable or unshtoopable? Once again, past and present are no real indication of future performance, time and chance happen to them all, but if you’re gonna bet your rent money, you should at least try handicapping the ponies.
By the end of the car ride back to Buffalo, this is what I had concluded. At the moment, I’m sticking to it, content with my small, uncomplicated, comfortably onanic life.