Every so often--and it's usually late at night in a non-routine moment--I am given an insight into everything I have given up and everything I would like to recapture.
Confession: for all my agitant ways, I am LOUSY at change. I criticize people who can't change, and characterize myself as "adaptable", and I am--to a point. But if I am capable of changing in a certain situation, it generally means that I had no emotional investment in its continuing existence. And there are so very few things in which I truly am emotionally invested--I can count them on one hand: LJ, this house, the memory of the time I knew JP (and all related things both antecedent to and concurrent with the "relationship" part of the relationship--everything from August of 1991 through October of 1995)--That's it, mostly. Anything else that changes doesn't really unhinge me anymore....but let any one of those things change to which I DO have an emotional attachment, and god help us all.
Sometimes I can endure this change by just...not...thinking....about...it. I would have to class JP's death in this area, and the same with the compromises I've made in our shared vision. As long as I don't think about the fact that I am not a writer, not an artist, not a musician, not a professional provocateur, agitator, or shitstirrer; as long as I don't think about the fact that I have tethered myself by circumstance and choices to a job in which my creativity withers, a job in which I am not appreciated and which does not offer me even the salve of a disgustingly-huge salary to ease my injured ego; as long as I don't think about the fact that I have in many, MANY ways settled for much less than I want--not even to say "deserve"--as long as I don't think about those things, the sum total of which is the dreaded and dreadful word SELLOUT-- it is much easier to endure them. But that involves a great deal of not-thinking-about the converses of these things--the summer of 1995; the feeling of being equal to, and as valuable as, any man; the dream we had where JP was a revoltingly-famous musician and I was the poet to be reckoned with....
Pause.
I feel here, since I'm rambling anyway, that it's important to state something: When we dreamed of being celebrities, it was a very different version of "celebrity" that we embraced. The current culture sickens me; I do not give a flying monkey's red-rimmed ass about J Lo, Ben Affleck, Jessica Simpson, Paris Hilton, any of their ilk. We wanted to be old-school celebrities--rock stars in the old, decadent sense--not the new, decadently indolent sense. We wanted to be celebrities for what we could do, not who we were.
Anyway.
As long as I don't think about who I'm not, it's perfectly easy to accept who I am. But sometimes--in these late-night, break-from-routine epiphanies--sometimes, I'm forced to face it.
Tonight was one of those nights. It's hot as hell, and I'm sitting here in my tank-top and pajama pants with a cold wet cloth on my neck and fans blowing on me. Frasier was a rerun, so I changed channels and came across JBTV.
Now, JBTV has been a fixture of my emotional and creative life since 1993. I can remember nights in JP's room at his mom's apartment, with the 20th-floor view of the city out the window and the thin blue light from the TV the only illumination. I remember the night my mom threw me out--after the Mazzy Star concert, before I actually went home--and JP and I lay on the mattress down on the floor of his room, after screwing for -hours-, watching JBTV---I remember "Screenwriter's Blues" from Soul Coughing, for one thing...a few months later, in the apartment at 1460: the second or third night I ever did heroin, lying in bed watching "Junior Citizen" by Poster Children. I remember nights that summer, and then once we lost the apartment and moved back to his mom's--the weeks before he died, I remember JBTV too. And then after, moments with CR, where he would be in one room and I would be in another and I would sneak JBTV so as not to set him on another of his tirades. I remember the night I found out that Layne Staley was dead, sitting in the bedroom, watching "The Diamond Sea" by Sonic Youth.
All of these were breaks in my routine. All of these memories are from moments long-removed from the circle of get-up-got-to-work-come-home-eat-shower-and-sleep, the rhythm that has ruled all of my most stultifying days. I have never been happy at any time while adhering to that structure--but because I have made choices that require me to have a steady income, I am afraid to leave the structure that makes me unhappy. Rather than be miserable all the time, I've just chosen not to think about how miserable it makes me to have to get up at 6, commute for 90 minutes, work for 8 hours, commute for 90 minutes, and only then arrive home--the reason I'm doing this all in the first place.
And now this: I am in the middle of a week off--the last week off I am likely to have until at least Christmas and probably longer. I am doing the best I can to get things done, but it's just been waaaay too damn hot, and so I'm being forced, essentially, to relax. And once again, during this break in routine--JBTV.
It wasn't so much what they showed--though they DID show "I Am One" by Smashing Pumpkins--but just what it all represents to me. In 5 days I'll have to go to work again, and summer season will start, and they will expect all kinds of things of me which are a waste of my abilities, handing off projects which would be a better use of my talent. I'll leave the house at 6:30 in the morning, and get home at 6:30 at night. And the summer will go on, and fade, and then the fall and winter, and soon another year will be behind me. My mother turned 75 years old today; I'm nearly as old now as she was when she had me. Huge chunks of my life have escaped me, and unless I stop them, unless I stanch this bleeding away of time, before I know it I'll be 75 years old myself...but I won't have even the simplest things my mother has. Not that I want those things, most of them--but it's scary anyhow, to know that I'll most likely be alone when I get old. I don't expect any man to stand by me forever; since JP, I've been braced for every disaster, and since CR, I've understood the treachery of love. LJ may stick around and he may not; my money is on "not", but that doesn't mean I'm not going to enjoy it while it lasts. But eventually there will come that inevitable moment where, when one man leaves, there won't be another to take his place.
It seems I'm already at the stage in my life where men have to look past things--last night I had a long talk with Terrence, to tell him that I've made up my mind that nothing is going to happen with him. (After l'affaire Marcus, I've made a conscious decision to stay faithful. Not because I'm afraid LJ would do some physical harm to me--but because I actually care about LJ, and I think in his way he cares about me.) Anyway, I had this long talk with Terrence, and at one point he was telling me about his current-verging-on-ex girlfriend, how shallow she is, and how he ended up with her. "See," he said, "I made the usual mistake. I had a choice between her beauty and your brains, and I went for the looks. But see, you have the most important thing to me in a woman--you're smart. I mean, physical attributes are nice and all--but in your case I'm willing to look past that, because you're so intelligent. Maybe not more than me--but close."
So Terrence, provided I'll screw him, is willing to overlook my obviously-inferior physical appearance; LJ, though he doesn't often say it, looks past all the things I do that get on his nerves. I'd rather take LJ's view of things--after all, we ALL do things that get on our partner's nerves--but here's the thing about Terrence: It doesn't matter if the woman knows she's not the most beautiful woman in the world. It doesn't even matter if the woman knows the MAN doesn't think she's the most beautiful woman in the world. I don't care WHO the woman is--we would all like to BELIEVE our man thinks we're the most beautiful woman in the world. To be told that the man is "willing to look past" her appearance...well, let's just say that didn't do much for my self-esteem.
To JP I was beautiful; to CR I was contemptible; to LJ, I guess I'm just here. I have to keep reminding myself: I am his third major girlfriend, and the only one he's stayed with for this long. That counts for something.
All I know is, I have to change my life. I just can't do this monotonous routine anymore, can't spend 12 hours on work and 8 on sleep, and leave myself only 4 hours on a good day for being who I really am. I'm very close to losing my real self completely, and if that happens I will have no reason whatsoever to keep going in this life. I'm not prepared to just give up, so something has to change, and soon.
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