6/15/2008

Heliopause

I.
from the WordNet 2.0 dictionary, 2003:
"Heliopause
Noun
1. the boundary marking the edge of the sun's influence; the boundary (roughly 100 AU from the sun) between the interplanetary medium and the interstellar medium; where the solar wind and the wind from other stars meet.
(hypernym) boundary, bound, bounds."


II.
It's Sunday afternoon and we're all at this party, at this luncheon at blondie-who-works- for-Porsche's and the two of us have just returned from the grocery with Coke, bread and charcoal for the barbecue.
She's wearing blue jeans and a flower-pattern tank top with strips ending up in a small knot around the back of her head. I have my sunglasses on even though it's cloudy, mainly because I can't take my eyes off her cleavage.

She opens the trunk of her car which is not a Porsche, sadly, and we wrap the charcoal in paper bags, in shiny plastic bags with the Sttutgart Porsche logo on them.
I throw a couple of half-smart one-liners at her, mostly referencing to that being the ultimate proletarian wet-dream under Socialism, stuff like that.
It takes her nearly half a minute to beam a modest smile back at me. I flinch then hope the bottle of Absolut I've left on the sink by the grill has been left untouched by the other attendees.

Back at her place all the girls' husbands or boyfriends are manning the cooking while the girls themselves give me hell, half-jokingly, for being such a sloth and not doing actual work per se, just sitting around chatting, drinking:
They tell me I'm an overindulged, pampered snob but I just smirk under the sunglasses and say I'm not a snob but a bon-vivant, and way too cool for menial work on a Sunday, of all days, for chrissakes.

...daylight moves on then slips into twilight: the act is kept on, everything taken in stride.



III.
I'm standing outside as evening falls, leaning against a concrete pillar, making small talk to this green-eyed brunette who's sort of a stand-in for Angelina Jolie but more of a local variation sans the glam, and she just happens to be a vegetarian. Conversation soon drifts away from what the hell I’m thinking of the MBA course towards debating the pros & cons of not eating any meat.

Bizarro-Angelina has been going on and on for what seems like hours with the argument that eating meat is bad because of Commie-stuff like the suffering the cattle go through.
I tell her she's missing the point entirely, mostly because the animals' sacrifice is exactly what makes it so damn cool in the first place, then compare it to Jesus Christ dying at the cross for her sins, and thus that by refraining from eating meat it’s like she’s forsaking her faith in Christianity.

She looks at me half-appalled and half-fascinated by the analogy.
I look at her with mild interest once I jump to the (inaccurate) conclusion I've never gone down on a veggie cunt before and I'd sure like to try, at least for completion's sake if not for anything else, but then I realize I totally forgot about this other girl I used to go out with, like, a few months ago, who was indeed a veggie and just begged me to take her to that fancy place with the overpriced quinoa seed vegetarian burgers all the time. Which I did and even paid the bill, but only after we were done with all the respective going-downs.

I think of you and how, when we first met, you so sucked at this kind of socializing but as time went by I saw you go on to become the Magellan of circumnavigating the mundane. Yet this is me 'N' years later and still utterly unable to connect without using a façade of some kind.

Mildly exasperated at Bizarro-Angelina, I roll my eyes.


...evening creeps into utter darkness, fun & games decay to sheer boredom, to sheer contempt: Nighttime comes alone and my interests skim a little closer to the edge of the kingdom of destruction, to the principality of pain.



IV.
from "Atmosphere", by Joy Division, 1980:

"People like you
find it easy,
Naked to see,
Walking on air…"