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Dance Card Is Empty Again
Mar. 19th, 2011 12:20 pmClosing in on 70 degrees yesterday. The robins are back. I saw the first crocuses. (Croci?) Most of the snow has melted though there are a few, crusty black-edged banks left, looking for all the world like huge wedges of dirty styrofoam packaging, discarded when we unwrapped spring.
With the melting of the snow comes that most unpleasant of all yardwork tasks: cleaning dog shit. Yep, at the height of winter I reneged on my pet owning responsibilities. No fucking way I was going to walk dogs in a blizzard or when the thermometer dropped much under 15 degrees. So the front yard is littered with numerous piles of poop in various stages of ossification. If I don’t clean it up some alien archeologist is going to stumble across it millions of light years from now and deduce – wrongly – that canids were the dominant species in upstate New York.
I’ve been in a bit of a funk for the last few days. Brought it on myself by scab-picking. I want someone to pick me up and put me down again somewhere where I’m happy, somewhere where I’m home.
Problem – and in existential terms, this really is the root of all my problems – is that I don’t have a home. In fact, I’ve never had a home.
RTT got taken out to dinner last week by the mother of a friend of one of his classmates. “She knew Grandma Nancy!” he said entranced. “And she knows Uncle Lew! That’s just so cool that people know my relatives.”
In the days before I made an executive decision to stop having ambiguous conversations with the Feckless X, he’d said something along the same lines: “I can go to Ludlowville and see the graves of my ancestors dating back 200 years.”
“So that means you’ll never leave upstate New York again,” I said.
“I don’t know,” he said.
It’s the attraction that Jayne LeGro holds, I suppose – he knew her when he was 18 years old, her brother – the dead brother that died of AIDs – was one of his closest boyhood friends. You make all of your assumptions about the nature of the world long before you’re 18, and then you move to places where those assumptions aren’t true. How comforting then to come back to the place where you were once 18 and discover, But they are true!
He’d come to Seattle from upstate New York when we first met and now, having spent more time than I wanted to here, I can see he’s very much the creation of this place, its terroir runs in his veins – he’s a small town boy who also happens to be very, very smart but his intelligence is like a radio he doesn’t use very often that he keeps on a shelf in the closet.
“I’ll never meet anyone with whom I’m as intellectually compatible as I am with you,” he said another time.
To me that’s the tightest bond there is.
But not to someone who grew up somewhere.
###
Philosophy professor and I decided we weren’t attracted to each other. Plus he seems to have poisoned his Chihuahua by feeding it grapes and now is in deep mourning. Did you know grapes are poisonous to dogs? Chocolate, macadamia nuts and onions too.
Gotta line up some more partners on the dance card. But boy, the pickings seem slim.
With the melting of the snow comes that most unpleasant of all yardwork tasks: cleaning dog shit. Yep, at the height of winter I reneged on my pet owning responsibilities. No fucking way I was going to walk dogs in a blizzard or when the thermometer dropped much under 15 degrees. So the front yard is littered with numerous piles of poop in various stages of ossification. If I don’t clean it up some alien archeologist is going to stumble across it millions of light years from now and deduce – wrongly – that canids were the dominant species in upstate New York.
I’ve been in a bit of a funk for the last few days. Brought it on myself by scab-picking. I want someone to pick me up and put me down again somewhere where I’m happy, somewhere where I’m home.
Problem – and in existential terms, this really is the root of all my problems – is that I don’t have a home. In fact, I’ve never had a home.
RTT got taken out to dinner last week by the mother of a friend of one of his classmates. “She knew Grandma Nancy!” he said entranced. “And she knows Uncle Lew! That’s just so cool that people know my relatives.”
In the days before I made an executive decision to stop having ambiguous conversations with the Feckless X, he’d said something along the same lines: “I can go to Ludlowville and see the graves of my ancestors dating back 200 years.”
“So that means you’ll never leave upstate New York again,” I said.
“I don’t know,” he said.
It’s the attraction that Jayne LeGro holds, I suppose – he knew her when he was 18 years old, her brother – the dead brother that died of AIDs – was one of his closest boyhood friends. You make all of your assumptions about the nature of the world long before you’re 18, and then you move to places where those assumptions aren’t true. How comforting then to come back to the place where you were once 18 and discover, But they are true!
He’d come to Seattle from upstate New York when we first met and now, having spent more time than I wanted to here, I can see he’s very much the creation of this place, its terroir runs in his veins – he’s a small town boy who also happens to be very, very smart but his intelligence is like a radio he doesn’t use very often that he keeps on a shelf in the closet.
“I’ll never meet anyone with whom I’m as intellectually compatible as I am with you,” he said another time.
To me that’s the tightest bond there is.
But not to someone who grew up somewhere.
Philosophy professor and I decided we weren’t attracted to each other. Plus he seems to have poisoned his Chihuahua by feeding it grapes and now is in deep mourning. Did you know grapes are poisonous to dogs? Chocolate, macadamia nuts and onions too.
Gotta line up some more partners on the dance card. But boy, the pickings seem slim.
