And now: Planning ahead for the near-future

I will refrain from stacking up needless Iron Man 2 memorabilia at my place... I will refrain from stacking up needless Iron Man 2 memorabilia at my place... I will refrain from stacking up needless Iron Man 2 memorabilia at my place... I will refrain from stacking up needless Iron Man 2 memorabilia at my place... I will refrain from stacking up needless Iron Man 2 memorabilia at my place...

Wait. What. Again?!

Regardless of happens in the weekend afterwards, regardless of where I end up at which time of the night and with whom and all that irrelevant jazz: The weeknights before are an entirely shitty chapter upon themselves.

See, this is me: Lying on the couch at what, eleven p.m., iPod on, a sore throat, down with the flu, and also with two bags of ice over my knees. Sure, big news there. As if all that he-man running in the park at night, more often than not in the rain, wouldn´t amount to this. But this is not even like, the top-offender this time around: What really bugs me is this coin I have in my hand, and this thing I keep doing with it, every night, with this deadbeat, bored look on my face, in which I just keep passing it in-between my fingers, dancing over my phalanges.

I´ve figured that, if I repeat it enough times, it oughtta be enough to make it true: That I´m not heartbroken, that I haven´t just fallen for a girl after she´s boarded a plane to live in a different country to go live with someone else, that I´m just lonely tonight and a little frustrated because I´m over 30 years old and that it´s just the painkillers talking, anyway.

There´s all these things I should have told F. before she went, and all these things I should have done instead of acting like a total jackass at the nightclub last week and... Oh crap. Crapcrapcrap.

It´s gonna be like this for a while, right?
It´s always like this for a while, but then it passes, too.


-------
PS: (Somewhere in the back of my head, a choir twenty thousand voices strong chant in unison: I told you so).

(Thieves like us)

I.
We are caught in-between the bursting of the strobe and the flickering of the purple and pink haze of the neon lighting above the dancefloor. There are two guys kissing each other to our right, two girls kissing each other to our left, and this huge, broad-shouldered guy crossdressed as Tinkerbell waving a baton like a cheerleader amidst everyone else: We are all multiplied by a million, dancing as we watch our own reflections repeating themselves after one another on the mirrored walls, afterimage upon afterimage, superimposed to forever and kowtowing to the beat of the DJ.
This nightclub used to be a catholic church, many years ago. This is so cool.

Human League starts playing after an endless parade of modern techno-whatever, really. I pull F. closer to me and whisper (shout?) in her ear that ____ should be popping up any time now. She nods as I pretend not to notice the smell of her hair: She´d just had her visa to Canada revoked due to some technicality or another, but she´s due leaving the country for good come next Monday this time around. I bite my lower lip, close my eyes and make peace with all the gods I´ve never had.

As predicted, and not missing his own beat, ____ appears from out of thin air; crawls back from wherever he´d crawled forth I think ever since we´d arrived a couple of hours earlier, only now a little tipsy, with a glass of champagne in his hand. F. says she bets he´d been on the prowl. I tell her, yeah, on the prowl for liquor.

A few hours later we repeat the exact same routine, with Talking Heads instead.


II.
It´s past six A.M. and I´m sitting on the couch of my living room in my underwear only despite the cold morning outside: The first rays of the morning break across the sky and filter through the half-opened blinds. I´m holding my shirt in my hands, thinking twice against actually showering before going to bed: She is leaving for Canada next Monday and all I have left of her, for good now, is the Emporio Armani She lingering in my clothes, on my skin.

I bite my lower lip and close my eyes, trying to dismiss the somewhat annoying fact that regardless of all the holding hands and the cuddling and embracing on the throwpillows back at the club, she actually turned her face away and pulled me back when I tried to kiss her. She´s got this French boyfriend-slash-fiancé now. I should have known better – if I really cared.

But it´s past six A.M., see, and all´s been said and done.
F.s boarding her plane within a day and leaving the country for good: By the time I open the faucet and the hot water starts pouring down on me and washing her perfume away, she´s definitely gone for good: A scar gained, a medal missed, a drop in the ocean.

In the back of my head, New Order starts playing Thieves Like Us.


III.
Way earlier that day, B. asked me during lunch if I still thought of you: I don´t know, I told him, just a little, sometimes a little more than just that.

It was a pretty honest answer.

He said that´s what´s probably holding me back from taking some next step as far as relationships are concerned. I told him naww, that if he ever got his hands on a time machine, he might as well go back in time and tell the nine-year-old me that I´d grow up to become exactly the kind of person I wanted to be when I was a kid.

It was a pretty honest answer, too.

A week in late March, 2010

MON
On Monday I get all grouchy because it starts pouring in the evening, just as I get on the bus home. I´m supposed to jog on the park on Monday evenings, see. Not doing that makes me grouchy as hell – so I just stay home and work out with the dumbbells instead.

TUE
On Tuesday evening I totally take a French leave from the office even though I´m supposed to do whatever at this Happy Hour they´ve come up with. Only, it just looks like it might not rain for a change so I make my point so as to be at the park as soon as I can, and catch up with not having jogged yesterday.
The next day I discover how powerful an excuse “I can´t miss on my training” really is.

WED
On Wednesday evening some lame meeting runs for longer than anticipated so I barely have the time to get home and take a shower – I meet this girl for drinks at eight, nine o´clock p.m. and we head to this fancy Asian-style bar near my place I´ve become quite partial to in the last few months. She says she loves it and that I just know the coolest places (it´s true, I do, but most of them I totally steal from ___´s.). We pour down the vodka like there´s no tomorrow, and since I´ve been give the next two days off, it means the night ends up at half past three in the morning when all the bars we´re trying to hit next up have closed doors: We talk about Brave New World (me an bout the book, she about the movie), Hawaiian singer Israel Kamakawiwo'ole, and whether it was right for Sinead O´Connor to rip the pope´s picture on Saturday Night Live all those years ago or not, and the time she french-kissed another girl. Last joke of the night is about this girl, a mutual acquaintance whose eyebrows are so thin and sparse she looks like she´s undergoing chemo – then we pretty much hop on a cab, each of us taking separate ways.
For some very bizarre reason, it never even occurs to me to actually hit on her during the entire evening, not even when Sinead O´Connor was brought up and it´s such a given for an old move of mine with the DVD with the living room lights off...

THU
On Thursday I wake up at what? Two in the afternoon or something?
Royally wasted.

FRI
On Friday I laugh out loud for about five entire minutes once I find out some paper I did as accreditation for my post-grad´s achieved a near-perfect 9.8 score and it´s going to be published on the University´s Library: I did it on less than five hours, and the other two-thirds of it that are not blatant copying from other people, are just plain old cheating: I wrote it like a romance and made everything up -- all this creative writing here is paying off, what do you know.
Of course it´s later on, Friday night, and I´ve been sort of stood up by this other girl, whom I´m supposed to be going out with or something, so my dinner plans at this fancy restaurant are pretty much shot to hell, and so is the sex that´s supposed to have ensued: I end up eating some Chinese alone on the couch watching either Heroes or House or both, and drinking the remains of a bottle of Stolichnaya I found at the back of the freezer.
Later on, when I go out on the streets, dead-drunk and looking for some late-night ice-cream, I end up petting this cute girl´s Boxer and saying “Attaboy, Poindexter” and then telling her something lewd (else just a very bad pick-up line, really), who pulls up the dog to her side and walks away saying, “His name is not Poindexter” through gritted teeth.
Cute girl though – but in hindsight the dog was just really after the Lo Mein sauce I´d spilled on my t-shirt during dinner.

SAT
It´s Saturday evening and I´m at M.´s place having a beer on the kitchen as his one-year son is unwrapping all the million presents he got at his birthday party earlier that day, and bringing them up to show us.
It´s one of those quiet, quaint, peaceful moments that make me stop and wonder and rethink a thing or two about life -- even if for just a second.

SUN
On Easter Sunday I´m back at my parents´, much to my chagrin and obviously against my will, but it has its moments: Like when I made everybody sing Happy Birthday at the lunch table, and when they asked me why I said it was to celebrate the birthday of the baby Jesus, who was hatched from a lizard´s egg about two thousand years ago.
It´s of course later that day and I´ve since come back home (the holiday traffic notwithstanding), and meet up with ____ for dinner at this trendy restaurant with the low-lighting and the high glassed walls: There´s this guy at the table to our right and he´s from Denmark or something: he´s talking about off-shore funding with this drp-dead gorgeous girl but his accent makes him sound just like oArnold Schwarzenegger – sorta looks like him too – I look up from my trout and the vodka-and-lime, at _____, and tell him that we just know the coolest places.