Sunshine, Lollipops, and Rainbows.
Here’s an uncomfortable one:
I’ve always kept rather cobwebby box in the back of my brain labeled “possible short stories,” and generally find one of the weightier files to be a structural/thematic experiment in which all the action is seen through Symbolism-O-Scopes. Meaning, all allusive meanings or implied puns become concrete and neon-flashing - a pregnant woman actually just has a sack of green apples strapped to her stomach, a courtroom lawyer suddenly finds his pants have burst into flames, a cavalier brandishes a sword crafted to look anatomically phallic, etc, etc. Generally these things are just fun to muse upon - to imagine them in regular non-literary encounters, or wonder if they’re just slightly more erudite versions of 90% of Mel Brooks’ humor. I sometimes think up new ones as a pastime, which is usually innocent enough - and yet, there are also days when they twist strangely, as though existence itself was playing along, but with a less-comforting sense of humor. It’s these manufactured moments that unnerve me, these circumstances so cleverly woven to catch me in exactly the spot the weaver desired, and my utter blindness as I walk into them.
Late Friday night I ran into an example of this. It was around midnight, and I was sitting in the Market Street Station waiting for the next bus to Boulder, which was scheduled to come a little after one. I had been allured by the light and electric heating systems of the waiting area, an attractive contrast to the rain-damp cold snap taking place outside, and decided to sit out the hour there instead of exploring late-night 16th street as my sense of adventure would normally have me do. Luckily I was well stocked with all the necessary modern conveniences: bloodstream filtering expensive coffeehouse caffeine, an iPod full of Radiohead, and my notebook to scribble in as far as the pages and pens would allow.
I didn’t know the man who sat down next to me. (See? Already you can tell where this is going. I was to be plugged in and oblivious for the next half hour.) He allowed me the respectful personal-bubble-perimeter of about a yard and took out a book; I hardly knew he was there until I heard him address me over the ambiance-noise in my headphones.
“Do you write anything good?” he asked.
I instinctively cover the pages with my hand. “Nope,” I reply, “all garbage.”
Without so much a pause: “Would you let me read any of it?”
Taken aback - who the hell asks something like that? - I finally look him in the face. My first impression is, even without the help of Symbolism-O-Scopes, a striking resemblance to The Duke from Moulin Rouge. I refused his request, citing some invocation of a right to privacy.
“Why not? You’ll probably never see me again.”
“There’s no guarantee of that.” We debated this point for a minute or so, until I finally made a very noticeable show of wishing to return to my scribbles, and again detached. Five minutes later, though, he wanted to know what music I was listening to. I, somewhat annoyed at first, unplugged a single earbud to tell him, and it was at that moment that I noticed the book he was reading was actually something legitimate - Faulkner, to be specific. Suddenly we were discussing books. This is the point that still unsettles me: how, despite all the other impressions I was soon to get of him, he and I shared similar literature tastes - we’d both read and loved The Brothers Karamazov, Lolita, The Satanic Verses, so on, and even if we had slightly different takes on them, well, that was just something further to discuss. I also discovered that to some extent we had similar senses of humor - the kind of wry sarcasm that lends itself to barbequed-hamster jokes and the occasional overly-theatrical impression of overly-theatrical people. This is not to say that the red WARNING lights in my head were not flashing - indeed, they were quite energetic in making their point heard. When the bus finally pulled up, I decided to act upon the flight instinct, and used all my well-honed crowded-amusement-park maneuvering skills to entangle myself deep in the anonymous safety of the crowd of fellow CU strangers pushing to board. Head down, I wormed my way through the tight-clumped masses to the back of the bus, found an empty row of seats, and confident that no one could possibly possess the prowess to follow me, sat down.
Only to feel, the very next moment, the slight upward bounce of the seats, indicative of the fact that he had somehow gotten through - directly behind me, too, judging by the frighteningly short time lapse between us (damn the rules of cat-and-mouse, if the mouse turns its head to check behind, it gives the game away...) and had now claimed the seat next to me. Now, being a Go/Chess/Diplomacy/etc. addict, I understand well territory-strategy games, and I knew right away that I had unwittingly just handed him a very favorable position. I was boxed in on all four sides - tall seats to the front and back, the window to the right, and now him to the left. FUCK-FUCK-FUCK read the brain-lights. “Do you mind?” he asks me, several moments after settling himself in, the engine rumbling to life beneath our feet.
And with that, welcome to the longest and most nerve-shattering bus ride of my life.
The darkness and cloistered nature of the seats brought out bolder streaks in him. First the polite three-foot personal space boundary began shrinking. He would lean in closer when telling me something, close enough that I was able to finally identify the faint musty tinge of his breath as wine, and I would try to lean away in turn and end up bashing the back of my head on the window. I tried every subtle trick I could think of - obvious pulling out my iPod to fiddle expectantly with the headphones, staring out the window for long periods of time, replying to queries in curt monosyllables, and the all-around arrangement of body language to communicate the stop talking to me!! message. This proved, however, to be one of the extremely rare times when I come into contact with someone who understands how to manipulate the social-interaction contract almost as well as I do; he merely had to act as though he hadn’t noticed the death-rays I was bombarding him with, and remain talkative to simultaneously cover my stern silences and continually demand my attention. I knew, and he probably did too, that the only way I could force him away under such circumstances would be to cause a scene. And so, he gestures excessively with his hands while monologuing, “Have you ever watched Twin Peaks? No? Oh, you have to, it’s the most dramatic show that’s ever been filmed, I’m serious, I’ve got all six seasons,” and when the gestures stop, the hand drops and lands ‘accidentally’ against my thigh. “Tell you what. I’ll give you my number, and we’ll get together sometime and watch them…”
“That’s not likely,” I tell him coldly.
The hand creeps away.
All trials eventually come to an end. After an hour the bus began its string of stops in Boulder, and I was busy trying to figure out a way to get off without the possibility of him following me. It was in these last minutes that he offered me his final thought: “I like to search for momentary perfections - like when I can look at a person and say, you, you will be perfect for this moment…” Ha, clever shift of grammatical objects, no? - I told him I could never be so discontinuous, and speedily exited the bus at a randomly selected stop. And, never mind the irony in the fact that I normally make fun of girls who are paranoid enough to do these kinds of things, I covered the half-mile walk to my dorm in probably two minutes.
Those two mildly-panicked minutes, however, were quite sufficient for me to start the process of piecing together the odd unexplained loose ends of the past two hours, and begin to wrap my thoughts around the complexity of the whole, and why it stressed me out so much more than an average semi-drunken advance would. I’ve dealt with creeps before; but why did he have to be a verbose, literate creep? Why did he have to know how to effectively manipulate the unspoken social laws? Why did he have to have wine on his breath, not beer? Why, in essence, did he have to possess so many characteristics I generally portray and value in myself? For some inexplicable reason, it seemed to become clear with the realization that despite the length of the encounter, this man never once asked for my name. I was always the immediate, prematurely informal, second-person tense to him. This man was some partial embodiment of Rian. My perpetual demon.
Ah, enlightenment.
I’d like to call this all a bent-mirror kind of perception trick, some poor stunt my subconscious would play on me for the sheer love of torture, but I’m not sure my head could be that clever. And if it was entropy - that out of all the possible existing moments that contain characteristics of that fallen piece of me, those two hours just had a higher concentration of them than Fate’s dice normally deign to roll - maybe that would be a comfort. I probably won’t be able to convince myself of that, though, especially with this stranger’s final words still darting around my thoughts: perfect for this moment. What a thing to say; what a thing, because to some extent it might be right. I get the soul-stuffing scared out of me, I write this, and the moments cease to be discontinuous despite the ending accusation I spat across that bus floor. And, if nothing else, to some extent, this applied to and will probably change ever-so-subtly the current chapter I’m writing.
Maybe not a Best-Of-All-Possible-Worlds, but certainly one full of more design and intrigue than I could ever hope to grasp.
I’ve always kept rather cobwebby box in the back of my brain labeled “possible short stories,” and generally find one of the weightier files to be a structural/thematic experiment in which all the action is seen through Symbolism-O-Scopes. Meaning, all allusive meanings or implied puns become concrete and neon-flashing - a pregnant woman actually just has a sack of green apples strapped to her stomach, a courtroom lawyer suddenly finds his pants have burst into flames, a cavalier brandishes a sword crafted to look anatomically phallic, etc, etc. Generally these things are just fun to muse upon - to imagine them in regular non-literary encounters, or wonder if they’re just slightly more erudite versions of 90% of Mel Brooks’ humor. I sometimes think up new ones as a pastime, which is usually innocent enough - and yet, there are also days when they twist strangely, as though existence itself was playing along, but with a less-comforting sense of humor. It’s these manufactured moments that unnerve me, these circumstances so cleverly woven to catch me in exactly the spot the weaver desired, and my utter blindness as I walk into them.
Late Friday night I ran into an example of this. It was around midnight, and I was sitting in the Market Street Station waiting for the next bus to Boulder, which was scheduled to come a little after one. I had been allured by the light and electric heating systems of the waiting area, an attractive contrast to the rain-damp cold snap taking place outside, and decided to sit out the hour there instead of exploring late-night 16th street as my sense of adventure would normally have me do. Luckily I was well stocked with all the necessary modern conveniences: bloodstream filtering expensive coffeehouse caffeine, an iPod full of Radiohead, and my notebook to scribble in as far as the pages and pens would allow.
I didn’t know the man who sat down next to me. (See? Already you can tell where this is going. I was to be plugged in and oblivious for the next half hour.) He allowed me the respectful personal-bubble-perimeter of about a yard and took out a book; I hardly knew he was there until I heard him address me over the ambiance-noise in my headphones.
“Do you write anything good?” he asked.
I instinctively cover the pages with my hand. “Nope,” I reply, “all garbage.”
Without so much a pause: “Would you let me read any of it?”
Taken aback - who the hell asks something like that? - I finally look him in the face. My first impression is, even without the help of Symbolism-O-Scopes, a striking resemblance to The Duke from Moulin Rouge. I refused his request, citing some invocation of a right to privacy.
“Why not? You’ll probably never see me again.”
“There’s no guarantee of that.” We debated this point for a minute or so, until I finally made a very noticeable show of wishing to return to my scribbles, and again detached. Five minutes later, though, he wanted to know what music I was listening to. I, somewhat annoyed at first, unplugged a single earbud to tell him, and it was at that moment that I noticed the book he was reading was actually something legitimate - Faulkner, to be specific. Suddenly we were discussing books. This is the point that still unsettles me: how, despite all the other impressions I was soon to get of him, he and I shared similar literature tastes - we’d both read and loved The Brothers Karamazov, Lolita, The Satanic Verses, so on, and even if we had slightly different takes on them, well, that was just something further to discuss. I also discovered that to some extent we had similar senses of humor - the kind of wry sarcasm that lends itself to barbequed-hamster jokes and the occasional overly-theatrical impression of overly-theatrical people. This is not to say that the red WARNING lights in my head were not flashing - indeed, they were quite energetic in making their point heard. When the bus finally pulled up, I decided to act upon the flight instinct, and used all my well-honed crowded-amusement-park maneuvering skills to entangle myself deep in the anonymous safety of the crowd of fellow CU strangers pushing to board. Head down, I wormed my way through the tight-clumped masses to the back of the bus, found an empty row of seats, and confident that no one could possibly possess the prowess to follow me, sat down.
Only to feel, the very next moment, the slight upward bounce of the seats, indicative of the fact that he had somehow gotten through - directly behind me, too, judging by the frighteningly short time lapse between us (damn the rules of cat-and-mouse, if the mouse turns its head to check behind, it gives the game away...) and had now claimed the seat next to me. Now, being a Go/Chess/Diplomacy/etc. addict, I understand well territory-strategy games, and I knew right away that I had unwittingly just handed him a very favorable position. I was boxed in on all four sides - tall seats to the front and back, the window to the right, and now him to the left. FUCK-FUCK-FUCK read the brain-lights. “Do you mind?” he asks me, several moments after settling himself in, the engine rumbling to life beneath our feet.
And with that, welcome to the longest and most nerve-shattering bus ride of my life.
The darkness and cloistered nature of the seats brought out bolder streaks in him. First the polite three-foot personal space boundary began shrinking. He would lean in closer when telling me something, close enough that I was able to finally identify the faint musty tinge of his breath as wine, and I would try to lean away in turn and end up bashing the back of my head on the window. I tried every subtle trick I could think of - obvious pulling out my iPod to fiddle expectantly with the headphones, staring out the window for long periods of time, replying to queries in curt monosyllables, and the all-around arrangement of body language to communicate the stop talking to me!! message. This proved, however, to be one of the extremely rare times when I come into contact with someone who understands how to manipulate the social-interaction contract almost as well as I do; he merely had to act as though he hadn’t noticed the death-rays I was bombarding him with, and remain talkative to simultaneously cover my stern silences and continually demand my attention. I knew, and he probably did too, that the only way I could force him away under such circumstances would be to cause a scene. And so, he gestures excessively with his hands while monologuing, “Have you ever watched Twin Peaks? No? Oh, you have to, it’s the most dramatic show that’s ever been filmed, I’m serious, I’ve got all six seasons,” and when the gestures stop, the hand drops and lands ‘accidentally’ against my thigh. “Tell you what. I’ll give you my number, and we’ll get together sometime and watch them…”
“That’s not likely,” I tell him coldly.
The hand creeps away.
All trials eventually come to an end. After an hour the bus began its string of stops in Boulder, and I was busy trying to figure out a way to get off without the possibility of him following me. It was in these last minutes that he offered me his final thought: “I like to search for momentary perfections - like when I can look at a person and say, you, you will be perfect for this moment…” Ha, clever shift of grammatical objects, no? - I told him I could never be so discontinuous, and speedily exited the bus at a randomly selected stop. And, never mind the irony in the fact that I normally make fun of girls who are paranoid enough to do these kinds of things, I covered the half-mile walk to my dorm in probably two minutes.
Those two mildly-panicked minutes, however, were quite sufficient for me to start the process of piecing together the odd unexplained loose ends of the past two hours, and begin to wrap my thoughts around the complexity of the whole, and why it stressed me out so much more than an average semi-drunken advance would. I’ve dealt with creeps before; but why did he have to be a verbose, literate creep? Why did he have to know how to effectively manipulate the unspoken social laws? Why did he have to have wine on his breath, not beer? Why, in essence, did he have to possess so many characteristics I generally portray and value in myself? For some inexplicable reason, it seemed to become clear with the realization that despite the length of the encounter, this man never once asked for my name. I was always the immediate, prematurely informal, second-person tense to him. This man was some partial embodiment of Rian. My perpetual demon.
Ah, enlightenment.
I’d like to call this all a bent-mirror kind of perception trick, some poor stunt my subconscious would play on me for the sheer love of torture, but I’m not sure my head could be that clever. And if it was entropy - that out of all the possible existing moments that contain characteristics of that fallen piece of me, those two hours just had a higher concentration of them than Fate’s dice normally deign to roll - maybe that would be a comfort. I probably won’t be able to convince myself of that, though, especially with this stranger’s final words still darting around my thoughts: perfect for this moment. What a thing to say; what a thing, because to some extent it might be right. I get the soul-stuffing scared out of me, I write this, and the moments cease to be discontinuous despite the ending accusation I spat across that bus floor. And, if nothing else, to some extent, this applied to and will probably change ever-so-subtly the current chapter I’m writing.
Maybe not a Best-Of-All-Possible-Worlds, but certainly one full of more design and intrigue than I could ever hope to grasp.