Walpurgisnacht ´09
I.
________ once asked what I meant and at first I thought she was dodging the issue because she knew that it would, ultimately, boil down to why wouldn´t she go to bed with me. What I´ve since learned, standing here in the future through an X-ray hindsight able to pierce the strongest candyglaze is irrelevant now: Yeah well, maybe we did not go to bed, in the end, because I really wanted it less than I thought I did. But a future proves itself irrelevant every time it gets tangled up in digressions.
________´s reply, at the end of the day, metaphorically speaking since we were ones of the late-night variety back in that year, year and a half following the end of High School, was that it sure beat the hell out of staying home alone watching TV. “Also,” she´d added maybe a half minute afterwards, “If you don´t get to know people, how do you ever expect to know who´s the right one for you?”.
Distance, as in time as opposed to actual, factual space, has proven me ________ to be the queen of coming-of-age aphorisms: Her wisdom has since become my astrolabe, and the way she wore her hair still gives me this tiny little secret half-smile when watching a Rita Hayworth movie on late-night TV reruns.
II.
But I´m not thinking of Rita Hayworth right now and I´m not thinking of ________ either, not really. I´m thinking of Superman, and how Superman handles rejection.
Now mind you, this is the guy with serious Oedipian issue borne out of, from an infant´s perspective, being abandoned by her mother, who chose to stay & perish with her husband instead of jumping ship (jumping planet?) with him, little baby Kal-El.
So how did Superbaby handled his first rejection? He sublimed from the Freudian to the Jungian and found himself a schizoid spanning the opposite ends of the archetype spectrum draped against both sides of the newspaper headlines—and Lois? Ah Lois, Lois.
Ah those fictional characters and their Lois Lanes-es, Iris West-es, Linda Park-es, Silver St. Cloud-es. Ah ________ knowing from the get-go the real-world alternative to that and the promiscuity that inevitably ensued, and the inexcusable need for address books and the urge for hitting nightclubs all by yourself any given Saturday evening when TV got any more boring than usual.
III.
I have this recurring private joke all my own when it comes to finding that one true person: I´d ask about her birthday and she´d would reply, “April, 30th”.
I have this recurring private joke all my own with a punchline that´s got my meeting a girl who was born on Walpurgis night—which on itself is a whole other recurring joke to myself. Bottom line is, there´s a world where Clark Kent met Lois Lane on his first day at the office, then later on as if finding your own true love weren´t enough, he travelled back in time to Krypton before Krypton ended up as Kryptonite rain on Earth, and met poor, doomed Lyla Lerrol, and this world maybe is not our own.
But maybe it is.
Do you remember this one time we went out for a burger and a Coke, I think it was the first time we´d ever gone out together, like a date but before even kissing and stuff—I don´t recall why, not anymore, but I sort of told you Talullah, the name, just like that, right off the bat and what did you do? Jesus Christ, you sang me the lyrics to the Bugsy Malone song in a mock-Jodie Foster way that just killed me and almost made me choke on my onion rings and tex-mex.
The April, 30th joke came much later than that, many years later in fact, and was only in thinking of it that I actually remembered dreamed-up, picture-perfect ways of meeting your own comicbook-ey right person, regardless how rare, gets some much cooler once real.
IV.
On the night of April, 30th, the legend goes, all that ectoplasmic crap from a bad Discovery Channel haunted house mockumentary comes to Earth: Like ghosts and demons and witches, and well, we´ve seen Chernobog on Walt Disney´s Fantasia and we´ve read Goethe´s Faust—there it is, Walpurgis Night—also allegedly the last night on which Odin the allfather hung from a gallows-tree in his pursuit for power and knowledge.
It is Odin´s spirit then, that I´m addressing this Walpurgis Night just like playwright Edward Albee did in the climax to Who´s Afraid of Virginia Woolf (and the fact I don´t actually need Wikipedia for this passage is living proof that once in a blue moon, I can get cool and slick and trendy in a brainy kind-of way), and sort of letting it all out.
V.
I was down with the flu last Thursday, maybe with a fever, maybe not. Fact is, I went to bed and I had this really crazy dream: I was at this classroom which was an amalgam of all the classrooms I´ve ever been in, and there were lots of people coming in and out, people I´ve taken classes with, been enrolled with, etc—girls, boys, children, adults—and it was all so very funny because I quickly sided with the worst of them (comic books notwithstanding, I´ve always been much more a back-of-the-class bully than the wimpy opposite).
So there I was in my oneiric classroom tagging along the bullies and making fun of everybody, laughing my ass off, and during all the time I just couldn´t take my eyes off the door: At each new-old face that popped in my heart skipped a beat and I squinted my eyes just a little tighter—But you, you, to my eternal exasperation, never really came in.
VI.
I´ve since gotten over ________ and I´ve since gotten over you and I´ve since gotten over this number of girls that, in hindsight, is a little mind-boggling considering I´m the guy who takes girls out to dinner, to this cozy little restaurant that only gay people go to, and there´s this white, opaque glass plate over a little pool of water as a decoration, like an abstract statue dividing environments, the tables from the bar, and the first thing I tell those girls I´m out with is, Hey there´s the Fortress of Solitude—and I get to take about half of them to bed afterwards.
Yet regardless of whom I´ve gotten over, sometimes they (you, plural?) all feel like demons trapped inside a mountain, waiting for the right day, for the right night or time when the membrane separating their netherworld from the real-world gets thin enough—then it´s like this big acne on the face of the earth with Chernobog riding high atop a hell of broken hearts, then the pressure builds and scars just burst.
________ once asked what I meant and at first I thought she was dodging the issue because she knew that it would, ultimately, boil down to why wouldn´t she go to bed with me. What I´ve since learned, standing here in the future through an X-ray hindsight able to pierce the strongest candyglaze is irrelevant now: Yeah well, maybe we did not go to bed, in the end, because I really wanted it less than I thought I did. But a future proves itself irrelevant every time it gets tangled up in digressions.
________´s reply, at the end of the day, metaphorically speaking since we were ones of the late-night variety back in that year, year and a half following the end of High School, was that it sure beat the hell out of staying home alone watching TV. “Also,” she´d added maybe a half minute afterwards, “If you don´t get to know people, how do you ever expect to know who´s the right one for you?”.
Distance, as in time as opposed to actual, factual space, has proven me ________ to be the queen of coming-of-age aphorisms: Her wisdom has since become my astrolabe, and the way she wore her hair still gives me this tiny little secret half-smile when watching a Rita Hayworth movie on late-night TV reruns.
II.
But I´m not thinking of Rita Hayworth right now and I´m not thinking of ________ either, not really. I´m thinking of Superman, and how Superman handles rejection.
Now mind you, this is the guy with serious Oedipian issue borne out of, from an infant´s perspective, being abandoned by her mother, who chose to stay & perish with her husband instead of jumping ship (jumping planet?) with him, little baby Kal-El.
So how did Superbaby handled his first rejection? He sublimed from the Freudian to the Jungian and found himself a schizoid spanning the opposite ends of the archetype spectrum draped against both sides of the newspaper headlines—and Lois? Ah Lois, Lois.
Ah those fictional characters and their Lois Lanes-es, Iris West-es, Linda Park-es, Silver St. Cloud-es. Ah ________ knowing from the get-go the real-world alternative to that and the promiscuity that inevitably ensued, and the inexcusable need for address books and the urge for hitting nightclubs all by yourself any given Saturday evening when TV got any more boring than usual.
III.
I have this recurring private joke all my own when it comes to finding that one true person: I´d ask about her birthday and she´d would reply, “April, 30th”.
I have this recurring private joke all my own with a punchline that´s got my meeting a girl who was born on Walpurgis night—which on itself is a whole other recurring joke to myself. Bottom line is, there´s a world where Clark Kent met Lois Lane on his first day at the office, then later on as if finding your own true love weren´t enough, he travelled back in time to Krypton before Krypton ended up as Kryptonite rain on Earth, and met poor, doomed Lyla Lerrol, and this world maybe is not our own.
But maybe it is.
Do you remember this one time we went out for a burger and a Coke, I think it was the first time we´d ever gone out together, like a date but before even kissing and stuff—I don´t recall why, not anymore, but I sort of told you Talullah, the name, just like that, right off the bat and what did you do? Jesus Christ, you sang me the lyrics to the Bugsy Malone song in a mock-Jodie Foster way that just killed me and almost made me choke on my onion rings and tex-mex.
The April, 30th joke came much later than that, many years later in fact, and was only in thinking of it that I actually remembered dreamed-up, picture-perfect ways of meeting your own comicbook-ey right person, regardless how rare, gets some much cooler once real.
IV.
On the night of April, 30th, the legend goes, all that ectoplasmic crap from a bad Discovery Channel haunted house mockumentary comes to Earth: Like ghosts and demons and witches, and well, we´ve seen Chernobog on Walt Disney´s Fantasia and we´ve read Goethe´s Faust—there it is, Walpurgis Night—also allegedly the last night on which Odin the allfather hung from a gallows-tree in his pursuit for power and knowledge.
It is Odin´s spirit then, that I´m addressing this Walpurgis Night just like playwright Edward Albee did in the climax to Who´s Afraid of Virginia Woolf (and the fact I don´t actually need Wikipedia for this passage is living proof that once in a blue moon, I can get cool and slick and trendy in a brainy kind-of way), and sort of letting it all out.
V.
I was down with the flu last Thursday, maybe with a fever, maybe not. Fact is, I went to bed and I had this really crazy dream: I was at this classroom which was an amalgam of all the classrooms I´ve ever been in, and there were lots of people coming in and out, people I´ve taken classes with, been enrolled with, etc—girls, boys, children, adults—and it was all so very funny because I quickly sided with the worst of them (comic books notwithstanding, I´ve always been much more a back-of-the-class bully than the wimpy opposite).
So there I was in my oneiric classroom tagging along the bullies and making fun of everybody, laughing my ass off, and during all the time I just couldn´t take my eyes off the door: At each new-old face that popped in my heart skipped a beat and I squinted my eyes just a little tighter—But you, you, to my eternal exasperation, never really came in.
VI.
I´ve since gotten over ________ and I´ve since gotten over you and I´ve since gotten over this number of girls that, in hindsight, is a little mind-boggling considering I´m the guy who takes girls out to dinner, to this cozy little restaurant that only gay people go to, and there´s this white, opaque glass plate over a little pool of water as a decoration, like an abstract statue dividing environments, the tables from the bar, and the first thing I tell those girls I´m out with is, Hey there´s the Fortress of Solitude—and I get to take about half of them to bed afterwards.
Yet regardless of whom I´ve gotten over, sometimes they (you, plural?) all feel like demons trapped inside a mountain, waiting for the right day, for the right night or time when the membrane separating their netherworld from the real-world gets thin enough—then it´s like this big acne on the face of the earth with Chernobog riding high atop a hell of broken hearts, then the pressure builds and scars just burst.
posted by 186282mps at 10:38 PM
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