Address book RIP!!!

I.
Last weekend this girl I was after turned me down for maybe the second, third time. I flipped shut the mobile then bowed down my head for a minute or so.

When I was 19 years old, getting turned down by a girl would knock me off my feet for what, a couple of months? Now all it takes me it´s like 30 seconds to recover, and another 30 seconds to think of a way out:

I flipped the phone open and went for the address book: It took me two hours to start burning my elbows and knees and other parts of my anatomy against the carpet back at my place, which is conveniently located near a subway station (if you´re ever to understand the Uncle Charlie logistics of it). I mean two hours, think about it willya! That freaking address book sure means business!!


II.
This weekend that very same girl turned me down for the fourth, fifth time and what would Uncle Charlie do? I went for the address book not an eyeblink later, once over, once again, but this time only to find out I´d spent my last shot last weekend.

Then I despaired.

My address book has been rendered useless, which means come every Saturday I´m back to basics, swinging from up high with no safety net, no one to call to keep me company when either the nights get cold or the bed gets hot, or both.

Oh well, it was fun while it lasted.


III.
Of course there´s always plan C... or rather, plan D, because I ended up calling the guys and we went to this real cool restaurant and drank two bottles of champagne and this Japanese lady in her mid-40s was sitting by the table next to hours and she totally looked me over. “Dude, that woman just totally looked you over,” I was told. But she was kind of too fat, and to be quite honest with you I´m utterly unable to flirt while eating because I eat like a pig, it´s a fact, too fast and wolfing everything like a refugee from Darfur.

The guys gave me a ride to halfway to my place, then I sort of chose to go on foot to clear my head, etc, and stopped by the gas station and bought myself an ice-cream cone: It was close to midnight and the air was starting to get cold enough to sleep with a blanket. I zipped up my jacket and took another bite off the ice-cream, and headed home alone, with a spent address book.

Gods & monsters

“Here´s a hundred bucks, kid,” I slip the blond surfer boy sitting at the desk next to mine at the back of the classroom, two fifties, on Thursday evening. “Supposing you´re man enough to do it, I mean”.
He looks at the bills, then to the back of head of the guy sitting right in front of him: Wager is, a hundred bucks are his, supposing he kisses the other guy´s nape during class.
“You want me to kiss his goddamn neck?,” he says. “That´s like, totally gross!”
“Of course it´s totally gross, you imbecile,” I tell him with a smirk. “But unemployed kids aiming at a post-grad still have tuition to pay for, so let´s get on with it shall we?”
He looks at me, smiles. Looks at the guy next to him, smiles too. Pats the dude in front of him on the shoulder with a sorry man, but it´s money-- stands up a little timidly, tilts his head sideways and whams, kisses the guy´s nape. Everyone laughs everyone´s asses off, girls are grossed out, freaked out, I leave the classroom and almost trip down on the watercooler because the whole place becomes a riot, and I just want to go to the bathroom and laugh out as loud as I can.

When I get home later that night, Bride of Frankenstein is on TV, the original 1935 version, which is this kickass movie with a killer prologue.
I stab my fork at my microwave-heated dinner, whatever it is, as the wicked Dr. Pretorius tempts Dr. Frankenstein into doing nefarious things onscreen, then toasts to some “new world of gods and monsters!”.

“Kickass, Doc!,” I blurt out to the television, and return the toast with my fork.

Tora! Tora! Tora!

Little history lesson for you guys out there: So it´s December, 1941 and the Japs have just swooped low over Pearl Harbor and bomb-strafed the place to bits. What do guys like Superman and the Green Lantern do? Well, they pretty much get together with the likes of Wonder Woman, the Spectre, etc, the whole crazy bunch of them, and cross over the Pacific. “Hey fellers, now let´s go and lay Tokyo to waste” must have been the closest thing on their minds. Or something like that.
But they weren´t really counting on this Spear of Destiny thing, see, which Hitler´d just acquired back in Europe and pretty much covered all Axis-controlled territory with a magical force field that would put any there-present metahuman under his control.
So Superman, GL et al, all had to pretty much come back, and be content with only protecting the homefront “for the duration.” Whatever that meant.

Okay. Now back to me: I can´t seem to go out with any girl of Asian-descent, period. I don´t know whatever Nazi-spawned magicks Hitler must have cooked up like sixty years ago but it´s still going on strong: I got turned down not by one but I swear to god, TWO of those girls, and totally unrelated girls to boot, this past week alone.

I mean, have you ever gone out with an Asian girl?
I took one to dinner, a few weeks ago, and that was that. Period. "No miso shiru for you!!!" -------- (hey that joke was actually good!)

It´s incredible, I´ve never seen anything like that: Rebuked (twice) with such grace, such an ease, it almost made me believe of a forcefield up and running there around Midway. Tell you something, girlfriend, that Bushido thing´s a killer!



TEXTUAL NOTE:
At this current point in time, any reference by the author of this very blog to a historical person by the name of “Doolittle” would most likely be understood (by the author himself, no less!) as the guy who like, talks to animals and stuff...

...As opposed to say, the guy from 30 Rock who´s bomb-strafed the Jap mainland with Ben Affleck a few years ago, or something like that. I just want to meet cool, cute girls, regardless of race, credo, skin color or social condition, for chrissakes, not think up crappy posts on dead Sunday evenings...

Nihilism, then a little symbolism (Guest-starring: Black Adam!)

I.
“Yeah sure go ahead,” I tell her in response without really looking her in the eyes. “You go and shower first.”
I´m laying back on the couch wearing shorts, no shirt or shoes, leafing over a comic book without too much interest or attention: Captain Atom is rallying the supermen of America against alien invaders hellbent on destroying the planet, that kind of kiddie crap, just another day at the office.
The aliens swarm in and destroy Australia or something. I take my time and wait.

It´s much later when I get back to the bedroom after taking a quick shower, and she´s lying semi-naked, fast asleep on my bed in the dark. I turn on the air-conditioner, fix the spare mattress on the carpet by the bed and stand there for a minute or two not really knowing what to do, or feel, next.
I close my eyes, pinch the bridge of my nose between thumb and index finger, and it´s like the whole world comes weighing down on my shoulders: I bow down, stare at my own toes as if seeking to extract some hidden knowledge from them or a reason to carry on, and find nothing instead.

"You have the right to work, but only for work´s own sake,” I whisper to no one but myself, recalling a verse from some holy Hindu scripture or another: The Bhagavad Gita or something like that, however it´s damned spelled. “You have no rights to the results of your own work.”
I get to repeat those lines some ten or fifteen times over like a mantra despite having no credo, belief or religion whatsoever. I´m not entirely sure why I get to do it just then, like that, but it helps me focus anyhow.

I pick up the bedspread by the floor just by the bed and gently slip it over the girl who starts shivering because of the cold.
I get to do that because it seemed the right thing to do—I´d just assumed that´s what regular people would do, see, and pretty much followed suit.


II.
I was called a goldfish the other day, see—I was like riding in this car with a couple of friends over the weekend, we were going over to the hospital to see M.´s newborn son, and they told me I had the exact same emotions and ability to relate to people as some goldfish does:

They got a kick out of watching me trying to hold the baby at the hospital. I pretended to understand the whole thing just a little and smile even though little of it actually made any sense to me. I was kind of happy for the couple though, because they´re like, really nice people and stuff.

“You can´t really go on living on this nihilistic void like that, man,” I was told. I found it a little funny that it sounded sort of redundant but turned my mind to this Def Leppard song playing on the car stereo, and never really gave any of it a second thought.


III.
I had a dream that night.
I dreamed of this girl from the office, totally unrelated to this other girl I´ve just been with—I´m sort of into her and that kind of stuff even though nothing´s really happened yet. I´ve been kind of toying with the idea of asking her out.
I don´t know.

So, in my dream she was with this Arabic-looking guy by her side: It was a comic book character, Theo Adam, who´s the human host for the spirit of this dude from Ancient Egypt or thereabouts called Teth Adam. When Teth, or Theo, cries Shazam, he´s like hit by this magic thunderbolt and becomes the world´s mightiest mortal, Black Adam. He´s this Captain Marvel foe from 1945 even though he´s been getting plenty of screentime still.

So there she was, green eyes behind thick glasses and the Mona Lisa smile that kills me at every Good Morning on weekdays, Mon-to-Fri. He had his arms around her and she, hers around him. I asked if they were going out, he said Yes, they´d met over at some superhero wedding or something, which didn´t really make much sense to me, not that I really cared.
I got sort of pissed because I´ve kind of called dibs on the girl at the office so it was pretty rude from his part to move in on her like that. But what can you do, guy´s probably stronger than Superman himself—What´s a boy to do, then?

But then it clicked: F*cking Theo Adam. Not Teth, not Black. But Theo Adam: The placeholder. That´s my mind playing tricks on me, I assumed. Meaning of dreams and all that jazz.
“You´re a vessel here, a placeholder,” I told Theo. “This is a dream and you´re standing in for something.”

“You´re good, I´ll give you that,” he said and held the girl closer. “But you´re not that good.”

“Hey dude,” I smirked. “Like, that´s the Wisdom of Solomon talking!”

“No. That´s Captain Marvel´s and you should know that by heart,” he replied. “My wisdom comes from the Egyptian pantheon. It´s the Wisdom of Zehuti.”

“Or of Thoth,” said the girl with an uncharacteristic lisping ´S´, snakelike, as she pointed to a full moon over our heads. “If names and words matter so much to you.”
I was unsure whether she´d meant thought or the deity itself, but in hindsight it was probably really just a pun.

I scratched my head and looked to the lunar disk above: “Thoth. The moon. That´s some... female iconography you guys got going in here, eh?”

They said nothing and pulled each other´s body tighter against themselves , then brought their lips together as actors about to kiss at the movies. They lisped an ´S´ as they told each other either Thoth or Thought, or both at once, and I realized their bodies started looking like two snakes intertwining around each other, just like in a caduceus: Thoth and Hermes.

I woke up just before understanding the whole thing, shook my head and crawled up from my mattress on the ground, and went for a glass of water. When I got back to the bedroom, I noticed the girl no longer had the bedspread over her body.

I did nothing and left it on the carpet this time around though, and went back to sleep anyhow.