A Valentine's Day Story
So this Valentine's Day, but maybe not exactly, but definitely somewhere in its environs I was talking to this girl.. about what else? Love.
Now when I was a teeenager I'd listen to Chet Baker, get all moody, and think.. that man with the horn knows- he knows how easily I fall in love. That old addict with the knocked out teeth and the golden horn.
Of course being a teenager I was a fucking idiot.
I don't fall in love easily in fact, not at all. My closet has some lovely skeletons - gorgeous freckled hippies that want to feel everything all day, Asian goth models obsessed with Japanese rope bondage, a guitarist with calloused hands a shaved heat and pale blue eyes, a reclusive painter fond of moody walks, a chain-smoking bassist, a warm smiling French girl with wide eyes that looked like she just walked off of Gainsbourg's Melody Nelson album cover and other assorted strangers, lovers, misfits and beautiful losers. But I haven't been in love with any of them. Last year I felt on my way, but like a space alien rockstar once wrote I was always crashing in the same car.
This girl falls in love a little more often than me, and we talked about that. Not love with each other mind you, far from it, but love as an experience. For me it's not a right away thing, I have to shift through all the gears, and manually. I've told I love you to someone twice - once was a lie and once was an accident (and a lie - fueled by a wave pool of post-coital chemicals running through me).
But I have been in love once. And it was a long time ago. And for a long time.
There was this girl, call her M. M.M. actually. I was a boy and for many years I lived in love with her. There's something addictive about the feeling - the Gun Club said that "she's like heroin to me." And she was.
To give you context this was in elementary school.. a long time ago indeed. We were two of the smart kids in school - in Odyssey of the Mind together with the not that smart kid Mark and the two kids of the local heart surgeons Paul and Rachel. Who were quite smart. But M. and I would sit around in 3rd grade and talk. The conversations we had were more interesting than most of the conversations I have now - she was heavily into reading about the Holocaust, we'd discuss Anne Frank's diary, which we'd both read, and the horrors of WW2.
My interests were similar - I was heavily into the American civil rights movement. For easter in 3rd grade my Mom got me a copy of the Autobiography of Malcolm X, and I was devouring anything the Scholastic Books orders could send me about him, Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks, civil rights rallies. I used to have dreams about the Million Man March back then.
Aside from a mutual delight in swearing and sarcasm (I used to be the master of this elementary school game where the object was to gross out or disgust the other person visibly) we'd talk about our secondary interests.. she preferred the kindness of Florence Nightingale and I the tactical brilliance of Napoleon Bonaparte. Oh Napoleon! Why did you invade Russia? I'd lament.
But in those years I was infected by the chemicals of being in love and having fantastic conversations. We never dated - but we did dance at school dances. I realize now how rare these conversations can be.
The Perfect Day
I don't know if you have many - but I very few. A day that's the perfect day. And not just a day that everything feels right.. but a day that's knock your socks off goddamn magic. A day which the whole thing is experienced in what atheletes might call "the Zone", meditators might call "satori" and clever Russian psychologists might term "the Flow state."
So my perfect day happened completely by surprise. I was vacationing in the summertime. There's a town in the interior BC called Kamloops - a big city compared to where I grew up. And if you were a kid in Kamloops in the summertime it meant joy for one specific reason - Kamloops had goddamn waterslides.
So my family and I go to the waterslides (keep in mind this town is about a 6 hour drive from where I live) and who is there but M and her family, who I hadn't seen in about a year. So the whole day we baked in the heat and joked and ran around and slid and splashed and so on. It was Malick's "New World" it was a kind of childhood happiness that still feels pure.
Denouement - M moved away, I was to find out later once I'd moved to Victoria that she'd gotten pregnant at the age of 17 and current whereabouts remain unknown.
But still remnants of those feelings remain in a bit - our young feelings are surprisingly strong. If I look carefully I can still see traces of things going back there. I painted my room metallic gold last year - for no logical reason just strong emotional instinct. Then I saw a movie preview a few months ago for a film called Bridge to Terabithia.
A book that I'd read with M and always kind of us as characters in. And what do I remember most about the book - the parent's living room in the novel - painted metallic gold. Also my recent desire to go on a transcontinental summer waterpark trip can probably be rooted in similar memories of bygone days.
So as much as I love trashy sex, long drug fueled nights of dancing and grinding, as much as I've broke people up, slept with people with boyfriends (and girlfriends), broke taboos, and committed enough sins that I'll still go to hell with a papal pardon and crave voodoo, violence, and passion, I still have a soft soft for love.
So that's my Valentine's day story.
A quoi sert vivre libre
Quand on vit
Sans amour?
So this Valentine's Day, but maybe not exactly, but definitely somewhere in its environs I was talking to this girl.. about what else? Love.
Now when I was a teeenager I'd listen to Chet Baker, get all moody, and think.. that man with the horn knows- he knows how easily I fall in love. That old addict with the knocked out teeth and the golden horn.
Of course being a teenager I was a fucking idiot.
I don't fall in love easily in fact, not at all. My closet has some lovely skeletons - gorgeous freckled hippies that want to feel everything all day, Asian goth models obsessed with Japanese rope bondage, a guitarist with calloused hands a shaved heat and pale blue eyes, a reclusive painter fond of moody walks, a chain-smoking bassist, a warm smiling French girl with wide eyes that looked like she just walked off of Gainsbourg's Melody Nelson album cover and other assorted strangers, lovers, misfits and beautiful losers. But I haven't been in love with any of them. Last year I felt on my way, but like a space alien rockstar once wrote I was always crashing in the same car.
This girl falls in love a little more often than me, and we talked about that. Not love with each other mind you, far from it, but love as an experience. For me it's not a right away thing, I have to shift through all the gears, and manually. I've told I love you to someone twice - once was a lie and once was an accident (and a lie - fueled by a wave pool of post-coital chemicals running through me).
But I have been in love once. And it was a long time ago. And for a long time.
There was this girl, call her M. M.M. actually. I was a boy and for many years I lived in love with her. There's something addictive about the feeling - the Gun Club said that "she's like heroin to me." And she was.
To give you context this was in elementary school.. a long time ago indeed. We were two of the smart kids in school - in Odyssey of the Mind together with the not that smart kid Mark and the two kids of the local heart surgeons Paul and Rachel. Who were quite smart. But M. and I would sit around in 3rd grade and talk. The conversations we had were more interesting than most of the conversations I have now - she was heavily into reading about the Holocaust, we'd discuss Anne Frank's diary, which we'd both read, and the horrors of WW2.
My interests were similar - I was heavily into the American civil rights movement. For easter in 3rd grade my Mom got me a copy of the Autobiography of Malcolm X, and I was devouring anything the Scholastic Books orders could send me about him, Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks, civil rights rallies. I used to have dreams about the Million Man March back then.
Aside from a mutual delight in swearing and sarcasm (I used to be the master of this elementary school game where the object was to gross out or disgust the other person visibly) we'd talk about our secondary interests.. she preferred the kindness of Florence Nightingale and I the tactical brilliance of Napoleon Bonaparte. Oh Napoleon! Why did you invade Russia? I'd lament.
But in those years I was infected by the chemicals of being in love and having fantastic conversations. We never dated - but we did dance at school dances. I realize now how rare these conversations can be.
The Perfect Day
I don't know if you have many - but I very few. A day that's the perfect day. And not just a day that everything feels right.. but a day that's knock your socks off goddamn magic. A day which the whole thing is experienced in what atheletes might call "the Zone", meditators might call "satori" and clever Russian psychologists might term "the Flow state."
So my perfect day happened completely by surprise. I was vacationing in the summertime. There's a town in the interior BC called Kamloops - a big city compared to where I grew up. And if you were a kid in Kamloops in the summertime it meant joy for one specific reason - Kamloops had goddamn waterslides.
So my family and I go to the waterslides (keep in mind this town is about a 6 hour drive from where I live) and who is there but M and her family, who I hadn't seen in about a year. So the whole day we baked in the heat and joked and ran around and slid and splashed and so on. It was Malick's "New World" it was a kind of childhood happiness that still feels pure.
Denouement - M moved away, I was to find out later once I'd moved to Victoria that she'd gotten pregnant at the age of 17 and current whereabouts remain unknown.
But still remnants of those feelings remain in a bit - our young feelings are surprisingly strong. If I look carefully I can still see traces of things going back there. I painted my room metallic gold last year - for no logical reason just strong emotional instinct. Then I saw a movie preview a few months ago for a film called Bridge to Terabithia.
A book that I'd read with M and always kind of us as characters in. And what do I remember most about the book - the parent's living room in the novel - painted metallic gold. Also my recent desire to go on a transcontinental summer waterpark trip can probably be rooted in similar memories of bygone days.
So as much as I love trashy sex, long drug fueled nights of dancing and grinding, as much as I've broke people up, slept with people with boyfriends (and girlfriends), broke taboos, and committed enough sins that I'll still go to hell with a papal pardon and crave voodoo, violence, and passion, I still have a soft soft for love.
So that's my Valentine's day story.
A quoi sert vivre libre
Quand on vit
Sans amour?
VIEW 7 of 7 COMMENTS
you know, i've come to dislike the word "passion" It's such a serious word for such a simple, innocent thing. it's root even means suffering. ridiculous. i'll take joy over passion anyday.
i sent out your mix cds the other day. the whole moving-across-the-country thing kind of got in the way of sending it out sooner.