mqx

If there's one thing I write less about online than my relationships, it's follow-ups to events I write about online. That said, context is one entry back.

When I was younger there were a lot of things that made me cranky; like most guys, I guess. As I've gotten older, many of the old passions have faded or been accepted and the list of what really gets under my skin gets shorter. Unfortunately, most of the list revolves around ways I deal with relationship issues, friends, girlfriends, that kind of thing, but the overall picture is usually pretty good.

Did I mention how much I hate waiting?

When I was young, nine or ten, seven or eight, my mom announced she was taking me and my younger sister to Disneyland. We lived in Washington State and the last time I had been to Disneyland was when I was in my mother's womb, right before I was born in Santa Cruz. Going to Disneyland was a BIG DEAL back then. This was the early 70s, before super-hype and package deals on television and Pirates moves and all that other crap that came post Star Wars.

We were poor. Not the cute kind of sir may I have another poor or living in a shelter poor, but that kind of lower class working poor that means you have somewhere warm to sleep and a TV, but, out of necessity your mom keeps a garden, your dad keeps rabbits (the kind you don't grow attached to) and occasionally you eat pancakes for dinner because all that's left in the cupboard before Friday is Bisquick and an old crusty bottle of Log Cabin.

We were riding a jet plane to California to go to Disneyland. And it was a month or so away.

After the first couple nights of breathless anticipation, I did at nine, seven, or eight, something that would affect my life in a profound and permanent way; I stopped being excited. The anticipation was so great I made a willing and conscious decision to stuff the excitement back into me, pretend nothing unusual was going on, and deal with it the day of the trip (at the earliest.)

Now, fortunately, this odd little habit, while it did continue until, well, now, didn't do too much damage to my psyche; but what damage it did was sharp, acute, and cannot be ignored. I opened up on the plane and had a great and wonderful time, fully basking in the glory of the Pirates ride, hotel hedge animals, and the awesome Haunted Mansion.

Let me be clear, about the words I'm using, the semantics, of what I mean here. Anticipation, (thanks to that night, that shining beacon of reason) for me, is a great and glorious thing; it is attached to a positive force or event, something I want and look forward to, that I have a specific time-frame of reference. Anticipating is a great movie, dinner, or roller-coaster ride that you know you're taking, eating, watching, and the worst that can reasonably happen is it not living up to your expectations. You can choose when to become excited, and, to a degree, how excited you get.

I still measure my anticipation, still make sure I'm closer to the event before I let it escape... but I still get excited about things and still love anticipating.

Waiting is everything else. Waiting is the two weeks before, when you don't the means to speed up time and something could go wrong. Waiting is also being in a situation where the pace or control or even ultimate resolution, is out of your hands.

If I was in the trenches, World War I style, waiting to jump up into Turkish gattling gun batteries or German mustard gas clouds, I would not be anticipating the charge; the run to death. I would be waiting for it.

Waiting, is the most and awfulist destructive force in my universe; in a world where anticipation is G*d, waiting is the beast with a thousand faces, the fallen angel named Lucifer, a gigantic waste of fucking time and the aforementioned G*d's gift of precious life.

Did I mention that Robert E. Lee (who I may be distantly related to) had a general, named Longstreet; a great bearded man. Longstreet created trench warfare, during the Civil War, if I remember correctly, and it was still considered modern 40 odd years later when the Great War happened. People disconnect the two wars, maybe just because of the mark of the turn of the century; but, in reality, the wars were pretty closely linked in a day where we didn't have 200 channels and the internet to occupy our (short) attention spans.

Anticipation is a gift, a spectacular present. Few things live up to the anticipation, but occasionally, something surpassed it. And while failed expectations can leave me a little bitter or sad, I take heart in knowing that the anticipation was part of the fun, leading up to whatever it was I was anticipating.

Waiting is to anticipation, as depression is to love's first kiss.

Waiting is what we do in banks, and DMV lines, in traffic, on roads. Waiting is what's attached to test results, operations, autopsy findings. Waiting perches on your shoulder, hind claws sunk in, while it slowly picks at that scab on your spine until your vision blurs and your fingers feel fat and tingly.

I stand by the road, waiting.

Waiting clouds judgment, revels in, breeds, feeds, and grows destructiveness. Waiting forces hands, that are rationally trying to anticipate something, anything, to get to sleep at night, to try and wake up with a positive spin, as if nothing is happening; it forces hands to choke the life out of causes, to reach a quick... any... conclusion, or resolution, no matter how thoughtless or damaging in "the overall picture". It's a matter of self-preservation.

Waiting is what you do in bed, alone at night, for someone to come home or when you're nine and you can't fly a plane or really even tell time very well and every hour feels like two weeks and two weeks is so unimaginable that you think it hasn't been invented yet. Waiting creates hands on her body a thousand miles away, hot breath in her ear powered from unfaithful hearts.

Anticipation is what you do on the plane, moments before the wheels lift off and you rise into the sky for the first time in your life, three hours away from the happiest place on earth.

Waiting is walking into a cold basement hoping that you can grab a jar of pickles or peaches before whoever it is standing in the cobwebs and shadows, pulls free with a rasping chuckle.

Trying to destroy waiting is like taking anger by the lapels and kicking it square in the nuts. Anger likes that, because anger wears a cup and kicking anger in the balls just makes it more angry. Once waiting perches, once it starts scratching, all you can do is try not to think about the warm blood running down the curve of your tightened spine and hope it finishes before you go blind. The only thing that kills waiting is resolution and waiting's sole, soul sucking ass-fuck is to push resolution back down the stairs and often and as long as possible.

No part of waiting is constructive. Waiting is selfish, waiting is power run amuck. Waiting is what happens when careful thought meets with self-absorption. The most positive thing you can say about waiting is it is a result of either incompetence or revenge. When Tom Sizemore stands ground in Blackhawk Down as bullets bounce around him and says "Nothing takes five minutes", waiting says "fuck you, I determine what takes five minutes... actually, fuck you, I determine how long five minutes is."

He wasn't anticipating being shot. He was waiting for it.

While waiting can produce positive news, a good grade, forward movement, it comes only as a relief or in reflection of the darkest alternative not met. Waiting produces the kind of happiness that's really just mislabeled ease at something not being as painful as you thought. Waiting rooms are places where people go to learn if someone has died, either by accident, murder, or the very risky proposition of childbirth.

Take heart, I really hate being late, too, though I have been guilty of it.

I'll let you figure out how patience works into all this. But when the problems of two people are waiting on one of them, patience can go fuck itself. You know what else can go fuck itself? The argument of personal choice. And, don't get me wrong, I'm a firm believer in personal choice. That's one of the paramount goals of being a grown-up. I chose bad behavior that was based on bad behavior. I own that, with big open eyes. I chose to walk the lower path, hand in hand, instead of climbing to a higher place and pulling her up into warm, loving arms, anticipating love's first kiss.

But, you know what? Fuck personal choice. Only two people can resolve the problems between two people. One person thinking they can resolve the problem themselves is as fucked as the other person making the choice to quit waiting and walk away. Cowards all, and that's not a lower path I'm as comfortable on.

Waiting is primal, waiting is a wolf howl at the moon, the belief in a made-up G*d or a mouse with big ears and a cartoon laugh. It's punching a sleeping dog. It's one person telling another that I can make life or death decisions in moments every day of the week, but for you, I'm going to take my time; for you, I'm going to extract a little flesh, a little blood. For you, I'm going to pretend the extra time is a measure of importance... but don't worry, you still won't have to worry about participation.

Waiting wears me down, day after day, even though I try to be distracted by sunshine and life. Eventually, waiting makes me want to write follow-ups at 1 o'clock in the morning. It makes me hope someone reads it, and I hate it when people write things hoping someone will see it. It makes me want to purge, not more physical vomit because there's none of that left, but mental anguish for no good cause, no good result. It makes me hope I'll feel right in the morning, but deep down I know I won't. I don't anticipate the morning.

Now you know my dilemma, the one I've had since nine, or eight or seven. I wasn't mad at Disneyland for taking so long to get there, I wasn't mad at my mother for telling me so far in advance.

But the road to resolution was clear, there, then. I wasn't waiting on it as much as I was anticipating where it lead.