I still remember the exact moment when I realized that women were taking over the world. It was one of those summers, it was one of those LIVES, when so much happens around you without you noticing it — so many ghosts of the dead lie in droves under footsteps, women work with fair, delicate hands, glancing up at you to decide who you are. We rode in camaraderie to the downtown dinosaur museum… our staff was largely kids from parochial schools, and though I was from a public, I identified with them, and there was no gossip. Kids from parochial schools have a penchant for acting normal, and not looking around looking misanthropic, or scratching their necks as if they’re fiending for horse.
Life was like a card game. And sometimes it was your turn to play your hand, and sometimes it was time to sit back and behold that of the other — provided they decided to play with you.
But sometimes, winning was the hardest part — a climbing up to a pinnacle that bore a lot of responsibility. Especially if you didn’t have a car, and you were walking around around town, you’d get a lot of glares. People would literally get in your way — you’d walk one way, they’d walk the same way. And then you’d get home and count your modest earnings, your modest allowance. Life didn’t seem any more possible than it had that morning. But you’d learned something.
Any wishbone breaks. I remember, out west, the seasons just kept traversing around the sun, it was like the planet was on slingshot mode. It was always sunny, and I made more money, and I expected the winters to be tough, in both ways, in both ways in which they assuredly are back here in the Midwest — temperately, but also socially — the whole rat-race paradigm of fighting and conquest not even taking a break at all through the single-digit, cloudy chill of winter.
I lived out west for years, and years, made a lot of money, and hardly aged at all, though creeped some people out. Still, I thought I was living. But any wishbone breaks, and there’s no disease as fatal as simply being old. Once I’d talked to this girl while working at Pacific Rim at IU Bloomington, we’d talked about her home, Vermont, talked about restaurants, everything, and a customer complained that we were talking. My Morning Jacket blew their load big time, and I never really reached that custard summit I wanted to, and now all of a sudden I was talking to this rodent-looking girl at this other job, nice enough looking, but she hated me, and wouldn’t talk to me. She was young, and I was older; these were our defining characteristics. I’d get into Chicago, get RELEASED, there’d even be a girl checking me out when I came out from taking a dump at this bar, where the bathroom was like in the middle of everything, too, (although what we call here in Indiana “checking out” could actually just be a sort of manifest meditation that’s been wrongfully, culturally suppressed back here in the redneck Hoosier state), and I’d always climb back home and come sort of inside myself, chilling on my chairs, because I couldn’t afford a couch, flipping around on the Michigan – Wisconsin basketball game, enrapt before the malevolent god that was poisoned to destroy me.
I went down south and then back up north, and through tornadoes and legendary winters, I met her — someone who REMINDED me of that nasty girl at my job, but was in the mode of filling in, reshaping my visions of my fellow beings, with sundry miscellany. There was a spontaneous moment, and after my mind had seen her body from behind, and just a glimpse of her face, she decided that I belonged in the world, that I had a rightful place in which I was presently lounging, on the bar seat. Through sympathy, she invited me into her eyes, and her eyes darted to the left and right as she spoke, in earnest, though we mostly just talked about her own beauty. I’d never seen anything like that — those eyes darting to the left and right, as she looked out to the western horizon, through the wall of the tavern, but given how she transcended the rat-race doctrines we make with accepting hospitality into those eyes, is her reality actually something for the knowing?