Friday, February 26, 2010

(Extra)Ordinary People ... Don't Know Which Way to Turn ...

I am sure I've called my cousin many things before - occasionally by a name, or maybe out of her name - as the rap songs say. She was the relative, among the few who speak to me, who said ... "love the sinner, hate the sin ..."; but Blaire, as I call her now, is complex, and seventy, and some sort of rock for me. She is the last vestige of the matriarch in this very old, poor, black family where Southern and racist and talking-funny run together into some undefinable bull-shit that I think of as home.

I'm watching "Ordinary People," and Mary Tyler Moore's hard-pressed, cold mother figure makes me sad ... and reminds me of Blaire. Blaire was never thin, never the cool waif maintaining a hard-won social cool - acceptance and place. She was curvy, with long nails a big hair - a sort of Dolly Parton character but with a lot less money, and oh yeah ... not quite the same nail color. I always like Blaire's nails - when I was a kid. They were trashy but glamorous, and I am thinking that now as I admire patrician charm, i.e. the set of the aforementioned "Ordinary People."

It is a good weekend for reading, for all those endeavors best left indoors - and I wonder if that has anything to do with the fact that I've been dumped again - this time by a guy in whom I had a serious interest but of whom I could expect very little. We met only once. Or maybe it's that I find out my LSAT score - a great, determinative thing - on Monday, this coming Monday. Maybe it's the tone of love in the air again - how everyone's getting some and why I'm not ...

I don't think about it much, except when I want it and don't get it. But there was a certain fun in Mount Gay, by the way - I thought of this this morning, when I woke from a dream about the Crazy Russian, Dr. Bartender, the guy I was THEN seeing, et al.. Fuck - my love-life is a mess of complications, doubts and ...

I read something on a blog - a blog that looks at random texts and point out how crappy shit can be taken out of context. "Her vagina smelled like bad choices ..." and I can't help thinking that my sex / love life reeks of them - bad choices. And dope smoke. Bad choices and dope smoke. My life is not measured out in coffee spoons.

Blaire sent a care package - three cases of food, the sorts of which one picks up at church give-aways and soup kitchens. Old people food - as we call it, in casual circles. Corn flakes, 1% milk, brownies, and canned ham.

It is not so late on a Friday evening, and I'm thinkin' maybe I attach too much meaning to Friday nights. It's date night ... or a night to read a good book and watch the Oscar history run-down on Turner Classic Movies. The black man to whom I'm talking (is it really so very different to use that common phrase ... 'talking to ...'?) invited me out; it felt like a consolation. He's going out at 1AM, with a friend ... and invited me as an after-thought ... and I am so tired of being after-thought.

I take comfort in being thought at all, but that's a whole other line of thinking.

I am watching "Ordinary People," a film of which I've never seen the end. And I am feeling bored and alone tonight. Those are my primary triggers, by the way ... in active addiction - boredom and isolation, although tonight I don't feel either pushing me toward a crack pipe.

I miss Mount Gay right now - just because he was a man who wanted to be with me - not that I buy that he did, or that I miss him. I just miss having a man around, and he was nice. In his way.

That reminds me of Blaire, too - the statement that "he was nice - in his way." I don't recall much of Blaire's history, other than that there were two men, two babies' daddies, and that she was only married to one of them. I think it is very Southern (as we say) and all that that she regarded the man with whom she was involved as a nice man who came along. That is not the way of all second marriages / couplings - but something tells me that that was the way of hers.

And I find myself in that place - thinking that Mount Gay was 'at least' interesting, at least there, at least 6'6" and 170 lbs., a skinny white boy with a big dick and who professed to love me.

I think of my cousin in many ways, and as I go for that second helping of coconut cake in the fridge, I think of her as my rock, my friend, and someone who's been there before. She doesn't even know - I'm sure - that her love life has at least a lick of that same crap with which this tired queen is presently living.

Who knew?

Mark



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