Scott’s gaze to me is exceedingly curious, as if he is expecting me at any moment to be pummelled. I wonder what Melanie’s words were preceeding the snapping of this photograph. I look very much as if it was not expected. That is, there is no poise or silliness in my demenor, a facet of my personality that manifests itself when some human being who is psychologically associated with me begins to aim the camera (and I am noticing their actions, of course).
The drink I quaff (not in the photograph, but surely within the immediate vacinity of the time at which it was taken) is (I assume) Dr. Pepper, as is Melanie’s. Scott’s is not to be seen. The props of the scene belong to Kerby Lane North and I’d like to think this was my reunion night with Scott.
The exact date escapes me, but I am sure I can dredge it up in my expansive archive of emails – mayhap I shall tomorrow evening.
The next day, our trio applied at MCI for telemarketing positions. Scott and I were hired and melanie spurned (it was good for her). My mind refuses to recall any other details of the evening, sadly, but Kerby Lane itself has a rich and varied history with me beginning in the summer (June?) of 1990 when I was introduced to the Kerby Lane Kerby Lane one by Neil and a few other humans I do not remember. I have not seen Neil in eight years. The only detail of my first Kerby Lane experience I can recall is Neil (or was it his brother?) letting me and everyone else taste his food as he raved madly about how magnificent it was. I believe the pick of the evening was enchiladas - mayhap California Enchiladas, one of my preferred foodstuffs.
So quicklyy I divert from the original subject in my shallow, daft, bland, superficial recount of a mostly forgotten evening. So I stop.
I now notice the age in my face. The smooth visage of youth is becoming creased by time’s unbridled clip. Experience, like the sand of a desert storm, weathers and erodes my skin. Every moment of my life has somehow left a stain on me. It is as if my sort putty-like youth has slowly hardened into the complex and moulded cast of a man, the slow but sure hands of time, my shaper.
Who is 0603323917???
Time is relentless. It will never stop, not even after my molecules are again in thedust of a nebula. The lines show clearly, standing out poignantly on Kevin Tritt‘s forehead.
I wonder now if he has ever fixed the ducttaped window or if the rustle of Alaska’s autumn leaves still seeps through those imperfectly sealed cracks and into the kitchen where kevin stands. I think I purchased the teapot sitting on the stove ready to warm in its innards a tasty beverage for the inhabitants of that house on Lois Drive in Spenard.
I remember the night Theo, Brian and I sat on the counter the stove graces speaking of subsersive ways to destroy the pulp mill near Ketchikan. Bohužel, these things never came to any real fruition. Or is the whole fecundity of the event in the amusement of those involved at the moment? It drifts, like all others, into a haze, a blurring dust storm, just stinging sand which erodes the skin, withers the senses, eventually kills. And, of course, these moments are most likely not the ones others would pen into leatherbound books, but only for me.
A strange sensation has flooded into my consciousness, is slowly receding again. This is a reason to have children, after all. Magdalena! I take it back! I want beautiful children with you! They and possibly they alone would sit in wonder as they perused these pages. My concerned reader, perhaps you are not in solitude, after all. Everyone has made pretty radically horrific mistakes in life, surely, but I doubt many as bad as my choice to have a vasectomy. Now the complications involved in getting it reversed are immense, indeed.
I am trying to imagine Magdalena’s thoughts if she ever read this – especially concerning the reversal of my feelings involving so many things – most notibly children. Do you, my avid reader, think it would satisfy me? Or would it wear my mind into a malaise of stagnation like so many other things? I DO know that cutting this rope of peregrine that binds me is an appealing thought at the moment, the problem being that I also cut away, foolishly, the relationship that made me the most satisfied. Her. Magdalena. Damn you, Bob.
Isn’t this journal a facility I employ to further understand myself? Indeed. So I should heed my own advice instead of fogetting the many plaintive moments I spend talking to myself in a searing frenzy of loss and isolation. The familiarity that I crave spawns in the filling well of my mind, a spring of creativity and productiveness. Sadly, this recalls the song Back Door by Kansas wherein Steve Walsh describes succinctly the desire to share a number of beautiful things in life, events, thoughts, words, future – and then, in contrast, closes each verse with the line But are you leaving? Leaving by my back door? This terrifying sense of loss stabs another sabre of pain through my chest. The Back Door signifies to me escape, surreptitious disappearance. This you Steve talks about is dissing his dream of a beautiful life just about as much as humanly (or godly) possible. And guess what, my spellbound reader? I feel the exact same way about the situation with Magdalena. Sigh – repeated history. The lesson? Never fall in love? Have a hemispherectomy? Blah.
