sometimesaway

Ketchup/Lust For Life





There wasn't much he didn't already understand about life. Julian could tell you so much about what so much had meant to him. He understood so much of the life he'd lived, he could tell you nothing of anything about any life he might yet still lead. At thirty-four years old, he was already just a bit too old for anything but what had to come next.

At thirty-four, Julian kept telling himself that he'd lived not yet half of his life. The whole of the life I have lived, I may live again he told himself. He'd be walking somewhere...say, the nearby mart run by the small quick Asian friends he had. He was doing that. He was now walking down the sidewalk and towards the grocery mart. There, he would find friends that knew him, that greeted him, that asked after his dog Jady and inquired over his health. He'd be, he is, walking down the empty but permanently pregnant streets of his adopted city, and he would, and will, and is, begin thinking on the time his life had already transversed, and the possibilities held within the rest of the time he had to live.



He was lucky enough to live in a nation that valued the length (if not the quality) of life that was lived, and so even when he reached double his current age of thirty-four years, he would still be living for twenty to thirty years after that! This was, he knew, not exactly right. Nothing could exactly be the same again...he understood. He already understood most of the things a person can understand about life. Julian understood that without puberty to go through again, much would be different about the next thirty-four years. He understood that nothing was ever the same again after it's happening.

But to think of it! To think of it! All the crushing time since his conception. All the glowing reviews and half-lived moments that could still all be purchased again by the silent pressing of a mental reset button. If only he could find the will to press it! Just imagine life lived by 34. Not life lived by eighty, or forty, or six. Life lived by thirty-four. The compact, consistent sound of it. Thirty...Four. Like a mountain climber finding the right handhold's to grapple onto just seconds before the plunge into an abyss. Life up to thirty and four. All that has already happened to me....could fit again and then some into all the time I have left to be here and walk these streets and think these thoughts.

The gangly gracelessness of adolescents, the furious confusion of his teen years, the forced confidence of his early twenty's, the aimless, goalless freeze of his late twenty's and early thirty's. All of that could happen once again, but this time with the perspective and consul of aged wisdom. Thirty-four. Thirty-four was nothing. A ghost age. A mirage. A memory an old man has of when he was once very, very young and very, very new. Julian kept telling himself that. He understood it. He understood immensely. The more he repeated it to himself, the more he knew. Julian already knew most of what could be known about life. At thirty-four years old, he'd not lived even half his life. The whole of his life, as he'd already lived it, could fit again into the time he still had left to live, plus maybe as much as forty years! So much time. A river of it. A mountain of time left for him to scale. A steady, insistent, hammering consequence-laden journey of time, with all it's poisons and purities, could still cascade down over his head and shoulders and senses!

Just at the peak of his thinking, at the energy and pulsing beat of his self-confidence in the almost eternal nature of his own experience in life, Julian remembered what he had already understood the first time he posited this affirmation to himself. He remembered that nothing would quite be the same, even if he'd live that time all over again. It was not raw time that had defined him, but the things happening within that time, just as the sun passing and passing does not define the mountain, but the rivers of water that channel down it.

Julian crossed the empty street. This moved him just slightly closer to his goal, but also arranged him to he could view the falling sun. He'd always loved sunsets. He knew that about himself, because it was something he'd always told himself. Some things, he'd forgotten he loved, because he had forgotten to remind himself from time to time. But sunsets, he still loved. He would tell anyone who listened. Most other things he told people he loved, he only loved for that day, or that hour, or that year. He didn't trust these things to be loved for very long. He didn't believe in their endlessness, their consistent reminder of themselves. He believed that he loved sunsets, because at least once a week he trudged out into a cold or hot or windy or steady evening, and watched one. While watching, he would tell himself, sometimes out loud, that he loved sunsets. With most other things though, his love of the thing was very much like a small child in a pet store, falling in love with puppy after puppy after kitty after kitty, until he learns intuitively that they will be feeding the mice to the rattlesnake, so that he sets his new toys down and cries on his mother's leg for the mice. He loves the mice and cries at their death because at that moment, he tells himself he loves them. But just as soon as the puppy is purchased, and a name is given, the mice fade away into not even the nothingness of guilt. In fact, just this thing had happened to Julian, when he was six years old.

He'd never be six again. He'd never be twelve again. Never. Not in all the time that could happen would Julian be twelve again. He'd never sit in his bed and listen to his broken father hack up his daily smoke into the sink while crying in a way that was meant to be hidden, private, and silent. Julian, now all the way across the street, jumped up onto the curb and began to think about his father. The man he referred to in his youth as his, biological father, in an effort to distinguish him, both emotionally and literally, from his step-father, a man he loved and respected a considerable amount more. As he aged into his late twenty's, Julian became disgusted with the clumsy title biological father, feeling that it carried with it too much to explain, and began to refer to both men as simply, father. As a very young child, Julian remembered, he had not even separated the two men into separate halves. Both blurred into one another like the frost that runs into ice at the end of the fall. By twelve though, the original and clumsy titles of biological and step were punctuated preemptively before the bedrock father. He remembered one particular night more clearly than most.

He wasn't sure how far into his twelfth year he was, precisely, or what the date was, exactly. He knew that it was that systematic time of every other weekend referred to in all the legal papers, because he was at his biological father's house. His sister and he had made awkward childish conversation with a household pet for hours. The cat had been cold and self-important, oblivious and unconcerned. It was named Styles. Styles was named after a television program, as were all the fish. Julian reflected here, on this street sidewalk, that he himself had been named after a television program that his mother had loved. His father drank Busch beer with his twin brother as they watched a football game. Every once in awhile he, Julian, would try hard to think of something to say about the game, but all he could think of was the things they had said already moments before. This was before shame had printed itself clearly into his mind, so that is stayed firmly with his body, so he would say those things anyway. He was never sure if they heard him.

He would say those things, and they wouldn't seem to mind. He didn't know if they remembered having said them anyway. He didn't know his place there, in front of that television, with the spectacle of sport bouncing around in front of him. He didn't know the language of that tribe.

He moved into the bedroom to play a game with himself. He slid a cover-mat off the bed and put half of it on the floor, and half he kept on the bed. It made a tiny but excellent slide. He bounced onto the bed, and in his head he'd climb Everest, dodging giant snow-covered monsters with teeth like hanging icicles but pointing in all directions. He climbed to the peak of all things and noticed the hounds of angry spirits rushing clumsy with rage out of caves to attack him. He jumped into the snow and slid the thousands of feet below, to plop down with no mystery onto the warm soft shag carpet. He often did this, this game and others like it. Most of the children his age had begun to drift away from it and its like, yet Julian could still (even still, at thirty-four??) pass any amount of time in the pleasure of his own creation's company.

His dad's name was Albert, and Al moved around in the darkness of the hallway. Julian couldn't see anything in the hallway except for the pulsing cigarette end. Shrugging his shoulders in imitation to a hero he once watched in the bulb of television, he continued his play. In the hallway, bright red lit glowing for one beat and then dipped and dimmed as his father moved to cradle his hand around it, as if protecting a child. Night fell as his father stood in that hallway.

Julian eventually fell away from his game, and collected himself for his evening chore of bathroom insanity before night fell. His sister was already sleeping in the room next door, snoring softly in beats that match with glowing cigarette ends. She hates the stink of the cigarette, Julian understood even then, at so silly an age. She will forever associate the smoke with her father and all the half-truths never spoken, the incomprehensions of place and order, the guilt over loving her step-father so much more cleanly and simply. In contrast to her simple avoidance of the thing to disturbed her, Julian began smoking as soon as he was able. He'd flip and wrap the smoke around his tongue, and even though it would never taste to him how it smelled on his father, he would always hate knowing that his presence and reek would match the uncomfortable anarchy of his father's entry into Julian's life-encyclopedia.

Jerking suddenly into movement his father gathering himself into Julian's weekend bedroom. He always pulled Julian into the bathroom before sleep, to make sure he went before his dreaming. Julian never could go. His father loomed up over him and behind him to be sure, and poor young Julian would close his stinging eyes to think of rivers and streams and life systems. He'd feel no pressure in his bladder, but only the weight of his father's eyes on the toilet. He didn't have to go, but he wanted to so badly, if for only that moment to satisfy what it was that life needed out of him. That night, a pitiful stream of piss comes there and trinkles out with no satisfaction. His father will have to except this for his sacrifice. Julian then begged his father, with his typically youthful dramatic appeal, to PLEASE let him go to bed. His father grunted...then smiled. He smiled and held Julian and pulled him up by his back into the father's hands. Like that...just like that, with a please, Julian leaves his sullen memory for a place of comfort and love and meaning. His father, holding him, not at all upset that he (young young young Julian) could not pee before his bedtime.

Here, then, Albert, this man in his early thirty's, say, thirty-four, held young young Julian in his hands. He smiled and hugged his son. His breath and face and body and clothes poured the damp cigarette smell. He kissed his son on the cheek and his facial hair tickled Julian. He picked his boy up and told him a joke while smiling and smelling of deathly smoke. The joke was...

What do you drink if you're loosing a race?
And Julian just giggled and laughed and smiled and didn't know. He stuck his face out far in front of him, breathing his stinking father inside into himself. His father said,

Ketchup

And Julian laughed and laughed and laughed, but of course he didn't really understand the joke until an hour after he laughed. He was much like a boy who cries for the mice in a pet store.

Julian laughed at the joke and laughed again as his father threw him into bed a few moments later. If you feel like you have to go, make sure you get up and go his father said to him. Sometimes, Julian would wake up and go to the bathroom in the middle of the night. Sometimes, he didn't wake up at all, and he'd let go of his bladder sometime in the middle of one fantasy or another, and be awakening in the morning to the now well-learning stink of things and the sticky failure all around his world. It'd gotten so bad that his father had purchased a slick thick cover for Julian's weekend mattress, a cover that doubled as a snowy mountain. Julian had never wet the bed at his mother and step-father's home.

On this particular night, Julian could hear his father shuffling around in the living room before he fell asleep. He heard the spark of the lighter against the edge of the flint. He heard the inhaling, the brush of things against other things.

Sometimes, Julian's father rambles out into the hallway at the peak of the night, like this night. He did it on this night Julian is remembering. On this night, his father did stumble out into the hallway and into the bathroom. His father, he never turns on the light when he goes into the bathroom so late.

He thinks of his father there. Julian. Julian at thirty-four thinks of his own father at thirty-four, sitting in the bathroom and not being able to fully close the door as he hovers over the sink. The brush of things on things. He thinks about how much he came to look like his biological father and how much he will come to not look like him.

He thinks about how well he will develop a sympathy for the man's weakness and humanity. He thinks about his sister's marriage so many years later that forced him out of Julian's life. He thinks about how he's chosen to never speak to this father again. A letter. Julian thinks about the letter that will someday come to remind Julian of the man's life, while informing him of his death. A choice . There's always a choice. Julian just understood so much. He understood most of what could be understood in life. Julian wonders if he really smells like his father used to smell.

In his mind...in his clear crystal memory for this single night that stands out so much farther from the pack of the rest of his memory, Julian sees his father there in the middle of the night. He sees him in the bathroom, hacking and hacking and hacking up lungfulls of smoke-chocked fibers and phlegm. Hack and hack and choke and isn't that crying? Isn't he crying there?

His father's in the bathroom, and Julian's feet criss and cross the ground towards the corner market. Julian hears the old-man at thirty-four, hacking up the destruction to his lungs. Hacking and spitting his three-packs a day into the sink. He hacks up the false bravado and petty niceties that separate him so clearly from the step-father's calm life that seemed lived in a television commercial of perfect safety and love.

In his thoughts, Julian wakes up into the night to see his father hacking and spitting in the bathroom. Julian shuffled and shifted and squirmed and his sister snored and he thought and thought and then froze with the certainty that he could understand all that could be understood about life. Julian's father will never know it, but Julian was there with him in that bathroom. Julian hovered up over his father's shoulder, and he was seeing him. He was looking down at him into that sink. Julian dissaproved of almost all that his father was, but he still loved him. He couldn't talk about it, but he hopes his father could feel his love through all the years that seperated him from this walk to the corner market store. His father hacked and spit but he could never get it all up, no matter how hard he tried to flush it all away. It just grew and stunk and grew and bloomed. He couldn't spit it out. It was so hard. So hard to bridge the gap between the bedroom to the bathroom. So hard that Julian released himself there, too afraid and shaken to get up and ask his father if he could use the toilet. It was the first and last time Julian ever wet the bed while awake...and also the last time he ever wet it at all.




Julian walked into the corner market and nodded to the small short Asian woman who stood behind the counter, already launching into her prepared questionnaire to Julian, on the health of his pet, the quality of his life, the feeling of his gut. Julian just nodded away, disturbed by the way the memory of his father had taken away from the peace of his day so far. Where was he at? Where had he been in his thoughts? A mountain stood now between him and where he had wanted to go. There was so much he understood that he had to remind himself of. He had to be like a man standing on the top of a moving car, screaming out to the sky that he loved sunsets.

He purchased some food, some toilet paper, some cigarettes, and a magazine he wouldn't read but felt compelled to purchase because of the image of a young woman in almost no clothing on the cover. He walked out of the store and almost ran straight into a pair of teenage boys straying around the entrance.

Hey, mister. Hey. You buy us some beer or something? Asks the bolder of the two. And Julian just keeps nodding and nodding and begins to walk away as quickly as he can. The two of them, both those boys. Just teens. Just about sixteen.

He'd never be sixteen again. Even sixteen years after this year of thirty-four, Julian would not be sixteen. Even this day now, on this street corner, on the way back to his place from the market to pick up this food and this cigarettes, Julian could not start a clock that would count up and up until it reached Sixteen years. By that time, he would not be sixteen years onto anything. He'd never again be just sixteen years of age. He'd never again be dating Audrey, the woman-child he introduced him to the dramatic flaring of his inclinations. To sex. To love. To hardened meanings and endless conclusions followed by licentious re-attachments. Audrey.

He'd be fifty. Fifty yeas into everything. Fifty years into waking down streets to buy cigarettes. Fifty years into the meaning behind everything. Fifty years of pet dogs named after previous pet dogs. Would he have children by then? Would he finally lower the stark walls that he kept up between himself and the available women he met? Would he begin to again meet women at all? What job would he hold? What life would he lead? Would it be much like this one? This one that seemed to offer no additional insights, no further nonspecific revelations. This one where he seemed to know, at thirty-four years of age, just about everything anybody could know about life?

Thirty-four. Thirty-four being just about as similar to twenty-four as a ten year gap can be up until that point where every decade seems like a shaded lighthouse in it's purposeless pouring of glacial happenings. He'd never be twenty-four again. Never. Not once. Not for one more second.

Never again would he feel the bright beam of identification and yearning for every single solitary character he encountered. Never again would he want to be and do whatever it was that anyone interesting or intoxicating was doing or being. Never again to barely be able to tear his eyes from the washed and pressed jeans of the young and the aged women all around him. Not that. Not again. He'd never be any age again but what he was going to be next, and not that forever. Never that forever.

Julian knew that there was not objective sense of himself that he could explain to another. He thought then of lovers. Lovers, he'd had. Lovers in his teens, twenty's, and thirty's. Lovers by the multitudes. The thirty or so women and the three or four men he'd loved in one way or another. Some of those multitudes he could and perhaps should have passed on by like so much flickering candle flames. For some reason, he always felt compelled to huddle protectively over the least promising of disorder, until he could fan it into the necrotic twitching of his past.

There's no tragedy to him there. None he can detect. None he can be sure of. He's loved enough there. He touches each love in his heart in turn after turn and reflects on them with instant progress through the life of it. He currently held an immense and private crush on a women he worked with. This woman Amy reminded him (without ever knowing or perhaps even caring) that he had loved many many times. Passionate, deep, personal love...like tucking universes under his arms to just run and run with all that light as far as he may take it. She reminded him of Laura, with that golden arch of back and sweet sweet taste, those nervous shakes of her head to the side. And Jamie, that danced in the parking lot until she blazed with hot liquid metal into the undersides of Julian's borrowed sense of self and shaky eyelids. And Audrey of course. Of course Audrey. Amy reminded him of Audrey's dipping thumps into thought and cheering silently for the star-trek wisdoms plucked back up. Julian had attended that past year an employee Christmas party that saw Amy stumbling off with another male employee, a man with at least a foot of height on Julian and much more else in charm and temperment. It did not touch Julian at all. His passion and crush were his. Amy there at the party, winking without thought, telling us she'd never been drunk while calling for her third, fourth, fifth, in even established experienced voice.

Julian could taste the want of those who he'd loved, could see their eyes dismissing doubts which he felt he could never do back for them.

Julian could remember the hundreds and hundreds and thousands of women and men walking past him in university hallways, urban streets, controlled or crazed environments. He could remember them with flipped gestures, Asian eyes, anxiety-filled laughters as if asking while laughing if laughing was allowed. He had loved them all. He had love just all of them. He had felt the quiet desire to love, the solemn life-given right to love and love and not to stop for fear of what it might take away.

On some nights, when the weight of being began to fall, just before it sucked out the air in his lungs, the touch of his kiss, and the heat of his sigh, one of his past loves would comes out of and to him, in mind or in face. They either whispered secrets like elves, dancing on his ticklish areas, or they charge like thunderous hordes of conquering knights from a strange and vibrant kingdom he was in danger of forgetting was named Hope.

Women. Women and some men. Julian had lover's. That is to say, he once had lovers. The height of it had been his early twenty's, and those sweat-drenched nights of dancing, where it was impossible to stay drunk as the alcohol poured off the bodies and onto those he had danced and jumped around.

Julian remembered the joke of women. Just the joke of them, as they play and feel and are. The touch of them back then could send sounds of vibrancy through all that Julian was, but the joke was that he couldn't touch them, and that is all that made it wonderful. The beautiful Afro-queen in her tierra shyly looking his way only consumed him with more confusion, easy enough to shut out when "Lust for Life" is playing loudly and he is indeed dancing like a hypnotized chicken. The Asian woman with the confidence of Cleopatra, the drunk one who danced with all the boys but only had eyes for Julian (so his twenty-something mind would tell him, because he was the only one she didn't look at). Julian walked his street and he thought of the play of time and light and the distance between two points being only as long as a casually dropped eyebrow.