A TRUE STORY. [© 2013; presented as is.]

A True Story

I was hanging out with a friend of mine who was (and probably still is) homeless and who smoked (and probably still does) a lot of weed.

At first, I had romanticised him, calling him, somewhat pretentiously, an ‘aristocratic bum’, to which he had to take a moment to think and discern that it was a complement.

‘Thanks, bro.’

I then told him about the computer game I had been designing the first time I saw him that semester.

‘Bro, no offence, but I think you waste a lot of time with things that you could be using more constructively.’

My companion ultimately disappointed me, however, which is a turn of events that I always admit with embarassment. I tried reading my most confessional poetry to him, towards which he replied, at one point, ‘Bro, I appreciate your taste in poetry, but I just want to smoke weed and watch South Park.’

At around 1 o’clock in the morning, we got into an argument because I wanted another swig from his water bottle, which I needed only for a few seconds so that I could fill it up at the water faucett he had shown me, a few yards from where he was lying.

He, however, was upset that I wouldn’t go out to 7-eleven to get him a lighter, and insisted that he could not ‘nurture my dependency’.

Somehow, I ultimately talked him into letting me have the damn container. I think that I pointed out that he was doing the kind of thing that the Ruling Elite would do. That clicked something into place in his brain.

At around 2 o’clock in the morning, he requested that I sneak onto the Palomar College campus so as to retrieve some wire cutters that he had left there whilst fully living up to the title of the crime ‘Illegal Camping’.

He had a whole plan laid out for this. He showed it to me on a bird’s-eye-view satellite map on his phone.

He had a good deal of zeal in orchestrating this heist, as you can imagine.

Well, around the time that I made it to my designated point of entry, located conveniently under a street light, a police car passed me by, and I was like, ‘screw this.’

I walked off, past my companion’s hiding place, and waited for the 4:40 train on San Marcos plaza. Of the few people whom I saw there, no one said anything to me.

At around 3 o’clock A.M., I made the mistake of falling asleep at one of the tables outside the Pat and Oscar’s.

Twenty minutes later, I woke up, and I was Freezing.

I told myself, ‘screw you and your weed, ---- (the name of my acquaintence)’ and proceeded to withdraw from my back pack a pen and note book.

I began to write a poem addressed to my crush.

Practically the moment that I set the pen to the paper, two things happened: Time disappeared Entirely as an entity, and I felt a Gush of warm blood from my heart permeate my entire being.

I got into that train thrilled.

The next time I saw my companion, he held little against me for flaking out on him, although he preferred that I do not mention it.

I asked him if he would like to hear a poem.

‘No, thanks, bro,’ he said quickly and definitely.

I then began to tell him about what happened to me that night. He tried to hush me up and cut me off, as though he had an appointment he just remembered.

I persisted. I told him about the poem that I wrote, and how it affected me. He paused, staring analytically and ponderously into space, and then said, ‘that’s pretty trippy, dude.’

The Troll

I had known the Troll for some time.

When we first met, he was charming and childlike in his enthusiasm, as misunderstood as I had been but appearing markedly less perturbed by the fact. He recounted, with enthusiasm, his safe haven, Satan’s Alley, and in his descriptions of the entrance between two stone walls I could see the deep darknesses of the valley I would have yet to become familiar with.

Syd, back then, had his particular group, and in my mind he was a Mahayana Cultist.

Yet it was troll’s company, almost a sore thumb in Syd’s grounded group, that prompted me again to consider paving the world in leather rather than wearing sandals. It was, in particular, Troll’s charmingly innocent unawareness of the almost Christian piety behind his passion that made his enthusiasm that much more moving, at a time when I could not relate at all, except intellectually, to the extreme non-involvement of his peers, which, again, seemed almost to not affect him.

‘Do you support causes’’ I asked Syd, and, of course, his reply was of the almost jeering kind that he himself, and many of his friends, took always to be ‘charming’, as though the fact I wasn’t barking up his tree meant instantly that I was barking up the wrong tree.

I had finished the drawing of my crush’s face as I was eating with Troll and another friend. It was my first attempt, back when I was not in the established habit of illustrative art, so it was understood when she ultimately overlooked it with an artist’s disinterest.

Yet it was vivid, swarming with detail. The seasoned gentleman sitting by the window at Sorrento’s gave me the kind of appraisal for it with, in retrospect, a widening of the eyes that at that moment had seemed ecstatic and assuring but that, in hindsight, proves to have been, assurance and approval notwithstanding, the tempered, sagely look of a man who was Alive in the Sixties but who, in that moment, witnessed something surprising come of our generation.

I was geared up and revved like an automobile.

An ecstasy that was partly brought from home and partly that of the Palomar Student Body coursed through my veins like gasoline and solar power, respectively.

I stormed into Randy’s, spotted the cute, young Mexican woman behind the counter, and, approaching her with an upsurge of gusto, asked, ‘How do you say, “Can I have your number?” in Spanish?’

She seemed pleasantly taken aback. I explained that I needed to ask a girl out.

She encouraged me, finding my quest admirable.

Passing the parking lot, I saw Troll, walking far ahead of me, ambling joyously, almost gelatinously, not looking behind him, immersed in the joy of his companion.

I knew, for his sake and hers, that I couldn’t do it.

Bonobo and Chimp


I had relayed Maya’s story, quite statistically, about the eight men in one week in Minnesota.
Looking up from the piano, I met his glassy eyes and immediately felt almost as though I had been caught unawares by a predatory primate.
‘When was the last time you had sex?’ Frank asked with an ex-drug addict’s curiosity.
He was a psychology major, drug past aside. He had a charming way of treating the sexual game as though it obeyed the kind of rules that Alcoholic Anonymous followed, except that he was not preaching abstinence but something a pole apart.
Over the next hour, he managed to have me convinced that all of my emotional longings, so tender to me that I could not withhold them from my new friend with the kind of paranoid defensiveness which seems so epidemic of my generation, was a merely ‘obvious’ and readily visible (as though such a thing could even adequately be made a topic of conversation, as he seemed to disprove) Symptom of not Abstinence – a mark of moral fortitude and, as far as I could attest from having had experience with Happiness, Love, and Sanity – but Sexual ‘Deprivation’, and that, quite apart from this condition being attractive, it was likely to be a deterrent.
Well, this was an astronomical fantasy on par with magical thinking to me. After all, if his argument that promiscuity was advantageous to the survival and health of the human species held any water by even Darwinian standards, then, if the survival of the species was his main concern and, hence, the chief interest of all of his respected female friends*, then wouldn’t a pattern of sexual behaviour that was likely to diminish Population Growth be the most attractive feature?
Clearly, his point seemed a challenge to the classic heroic idea that one must, as a test of true grit so as to enter into Manhood, surpass the temptress and walk the long and painful road towards the goddess, collapsing, heroic(, probably thirsty,) and ‘deprived’ at her feet.
But this would be quite a feat, on par with war and death in the family.
* ‘I know a girl who’ll go to a party and literally pick the nerdiest guy and have sex with him,’ he related to me with genial and vulnerable glee.

‘Do you have any children?’

‘There’s a strong likelihood,’ he replied with a comical poker face.

‘Does that bother you?’ I asked with not nearly as much the veneer of a preacher so much as the inquisitiveness of a good reporter.

‘Very much so,’* he continued, expression unchanging.

Had he been a temptor? The whole fantasy* that he presented seemed too much akin to the comic books that he had once loved, for whom he hid a burning lifelong passion from the world.

He had been with thirty-seven different women after one of his first and most memorable ‘stepped on his heart’. This he told me with almost dramatic irony.

It had been mostly unprotected.

‘I only got Climidia once*,’ he said.

Now he was due to be married. His fiancée called him on the phone. She sounded somewhat groggy and defensive, but they exchanged ‘I Love You’s’ without obstruction or self-consciousness.

I’ll never forget him. He was dressed like a pirate one day, a motorcyclist the next, and, at one point, we got on a brief tangent about semantics, wherein I corrected him on the etymology of a particular word, and, leather-jacketed and mustachio’d, he almost sniggered with congenial delight at the observation.

Maya

Maya had been one of few girls on the Rancho Bernardo High School Robotics team, but, with all due respect to the moral and personal virtues of the one or two others, she was perhaps the only one that an average boy would have noticed.

I had known Maya during the one year that she was at our high school. She, back then, was notorious for building up a strong opposition to her for her political and religious views. The few people who kept her afloat were the disillusioned romantics, comprising an antisocial minority, and the men who wanted to have sex with her, comprising a majority.

One night, she handed me a Q'uran. It had been a deep blue night settling into a frighteningly uncertain future, in the November of my Senior Year. The young sophomore girl, with a sheet of auburn hair wrapped about an olive visage, allowed herself to be harassed gently by Vivik, a wildly theatrical but nonetheless Noble and Intelligent human being with a reverence for caffeine and a probing gaze that could threaten all statistical miseducation despite a maniacal grin that seemed to jeer at Reason Itself.

She had intimated few things to me without ever really feeling close to me. One night, standing in an alleyway between a row of trailers and a wall of classrooms, she told me that she had used to live on the internet for the longest time.

I commented on some headlights we saw from the street, postulating something to the effect of them being space aliens. She faked an awkward, stifled giggle.

The Monster

When I was in kindergarten, I only got in time-out a few times. Facing a red, brick wall during recess was an unluxurious kind of embarassment, so I avoided it.

Come first grade, we moved from the splinter-box to the sandbox. There was a jungle gym in the playground. We would play a kind of game wherein people climbed the outskirts of this metallic mountain and, with daring, grabbed the pole running from the dome at the top, jumped off the top rail, slid down, and, landing awkwardly on the sand, scurried, too fast for the monster to catch, to climb out from between the rails.

I was always the monster. I chose to dwell at the bottom of the volcano, looking up at them, chasing them as they ran too fast for me. Only a few times was I clever enough to try to climb up the rails from the inside.

One day, however, maybe in Spring, I was not the monster. I walked along the rim of the sandbox, in luxurious embarassment, looking down at them. I smiled, shyly, and told them that I did not feel like it today. Girls and boys crowded about me soon, pleading. But not today.

Ketchup’s Theory

Ketchup had a theory. He described it as he drove me through the depths of the one-story seaside city, as it tapered into the beach and ultimately dissolved into an ocean that on a day a shade mistier would have swallowed the horizon as well.

'You know, man, I took three and a half days away from home...'

'Wait, so you left the house for three and a half days?'

'Right.'

'Yeah, that's about how long it takes.'

'Right? And I got back and everything was better, and I thought maybe that how's the Universe is. Maybe at some point it got too much, and it was like, you know, you guys, just go and do your own thing and we'll see you in a couple... oh, a couple trillion years...'

'It needed some space.'

'Exactly'.

Peter Lasagna

Peter Lasagna had the makings of a good cultist. His house was located atop an obscure mountain in the midst of a range that seemed to border and lend relief to a wide expanse of fields set aside particularly for vague farmers that never emerged. Only ten minutes of driving past the woods lining the outskirts of these ranches would bring one into the relative shelter of the city of Vista, which was one place that one never wanted to be in after a certain hour. If all California cities had a density in the air that gave the very atmosphere the character of a hangover, Vista’s was an angry drunk, and there was a nervous texture that seemed to sprout from its cement floor, fueled by cocaine.

Peter Lasagna was a smart kid.

He had even made it to the University of California at Santa Cruz.

In his second year, I think, he got expelled. I heard the story recounted from Alan the guitarist.

Purportedly, Peter had left his dorm building that day with a camera in his hand, actively having begun filming, already, everything in sight.

I know not what had become of the footage.

One of the topics, however, that had particularly pleased Peter was, apparently, a particular woman whom he had met that day on the campus. She had been sitting innocently on a bench.

According to Peter, (according to Alan) he had not done anything overtly inappropriate to upset her and to thus warrant the sex offense charge that she would go on to file against him in the aftermath of the events. Suffice to say, however, as Alan recounted groggily in a placid, darkened kitchen nearing midnight, Peter’s footage would, if it was still existent, a fact that Alan almost laughingly expressed uncertainty towards, show a greater interest in the girl’s bottom than in her personality.

If that encounter alone had sealed the doom of Peter’s academic career at UCSC, however, he had made ample use of his remaining hours of freedom, if not sanctity, on campus.

Encountering another woman of apparently equal attractiveness but surpassing familiarity, Peter invited her back to accompany him in his dormitory. His room mate, by his fortuitous absence, did not interfere with the sexual encounter that ensued.

As Peter explored her, he found himself, to his infinite alarm, unaffected by the experience. Distant and stunted, he withdrew.

This had been the moment that the lady entered into a catatonic state, as Alan speculated. In great disrepair and thoroughly unprepared, Peter hid her under the bed in his dormitory, for her protection.

As night deepened, young men tapered off into sleep, attention surrendering consciousness. Either the lack of attention or the loneliness, as Alan told me whilst I took a confident sip of Tecate, upset Peter, and it added to his discontentment at having returned to the dorm room, some indefinite time later, to find it deserted.

He sought to remedy this, first, by throwing open the window by virtue of which his chamber looked out over the courtyard and onto the skyline. His room mate, he must have surmised, had yet to pay a visit to the room.

It was at that approximate time of extreme morning that students at the University of California at Santa Cruz reported having been awoken by the screaming of a mad young man threatening to throw himself out of the –th story window.

It had taken several people to fetch him from his precarious station.

They had succeeded in pinning Peter Lasagna to the floor of his dorm temporarily before he riggled, aggressively, to a kind of freedom that led him straight down the stairs, where he met police officers looking for him.

His room mate had, upon returning to the dorm room, found the girl, with terrifyingly withdrawn eyes, lying hidden under his roommate’s bed.

Horrified, he called the police.

Two men were arrested and expelled that night from the University of California at Santa Cruz: Peter Lasagna and his room mate. The latter had supplied, earlier that day, the mushrooms.

Sampson

Sampson was set apart from other hipsters by magnitude alone. His eyes were protuberant and locked in the incessant, methodical gaze characteristic of the persona, and yet he lent it an almost alarming degree of intensity that suggested that the probe went deeper, both ways, than the confines of casual conversation.

I must have supposed, as I still do, that it was commonplace for hipsters, maybe even by definition, to mistake their mask for truth.

I don’t recall how, but somehow I found him sitting across a table in the Community College cafeteria that had probably been deserted when I arrived.

Inexplicably, I now found myself a witness of the kind of flirtation typical of a college boy and girl intent on rubbing egos before any thing could ensue.

Apparently, nothing is so effective a tool to boost one’s ego as an ego-transcending experience. He began to brag about all of the psychedelics that he had done, and there was a familiarity between the boy and girl that transcended their anonymity.

The girl’s eyes had a sad but assured look in them, and she smiled a rabbit smile with a timidity rivaled only by her self-assurance.

When she departed, I asked him about drugs.

‘Go straight to DMT,’ he said without blinking.

Rocky Horror and the Quest

Last night, or, more specifically, this morning, I went to a midnight showing of the Rocky Horror Picture Show with my dear friends of several years, whose names I will spare in this instance. This was a tradition that the older of the two friends was quite fond of for the sheer hilarity of it: A large group of enthusiasts of this old cult film, almost unanimously theatre students, crowding about to watch the film for maybe the fiftieth time and to watch some of their best prance about the stage of the playhouse in lingerie, mimicking the film as it played on the screen behind them.

The theatre was in Encinitas, which is right beside the Pacific Ocean. The city was Alive, markedly more so than the pacified, hungover suburbs of Rancho Bernardo. Stepping onto the street felt like experiencing something for the first time for the first time in ten years, as though just waking up after ten years of being asleep. The ocean seemed to wash onto the streets and into the minds of all the young patrons pacing it unapologetically. A light that seemed to have no past lent a flicker with no foreseeable future to every lamp and every set of tables behind every window, and each shop was like a child in its own right, a sibling of its neighbors but its own tenant, and an orphan with no regrets.

Yet there was a strange hangover from Rancho Bernardo, that old retirement community that cropped up like a fungus in the midst of the sixties counterculture, in all the young actors, boyfriends and girlfriends, and degenerate twenty-year-old children that stood like a scattered guard outside the playhouse. I got the impression that each costume that I saw, the group of them together an ornate cornucopia, paled in the eyes of those who wore them. Something in the face of every patron seemed to glaze over the very Fact of each face present with a kind of almost hostile self-righteousness, as though to admit the fact that they were Alive, be they happy or sad, more so than anyone I had seen in Rancho Bernardo, was embarrassing.

I looked upon each face, head, and body with reverence. At moments, I attempted to catch a glimpse of recognition from these novel strangers, or even familiar ones I had met during my brief and interrupted stint at Palomar College, but to no avail.

I looked over to the older of my friends, and he told me, grinning with grim resolution, that a letter “V” would be inscribed on my face with a washable marker. The “V”, I presumed correctly, stood for Virgin. It was a joke. I was among a crowd of people who would be thus marked for never having gone to see this production at this playhouse before. A young man with the sarcastic demeanour of a slighted joker came about and leant the best friend of every Virgin his red marker. My friend wrote two “V’s”, one on each cheek, and the words “Cum Dumpster” on my forehead, for good measure.

There would be a brief ceremony to honor the Virgins. Once in the safety of the theatre, the crowd of us were prompted to stand in a line that almost encircled the rows of chairs in the middle of the theatre. A faction of the troupe would then run about in a line, as we stood facing away from them, and slap us from behind to riotous applause and, with luck, chuckles of good sport from the slapped.

My sister will be going to high school next year. At the dawn of the summer, after watching cartoons, we strode to the pharmacy to buy some of the pizza that we could prepare in a microwave. The moment that we set foot outside and a car whizzed by us, I was possessed of an inexplicable anxiety. I asked her, fumbling not to say anything about the World, if she was afraid of being innocent. She told me that she was not. She then said, with only a moment’s hesitation to think, that she was afraid of being naive.

As we ambled back up the hill, having bought what we wanted, she pointed something out to me. She told me about a girl at her school who would pretend to watch the show “Adventure Time”, an animated program reputed for its oddity, which I loved for its fable-like quality. This was done with the girl’s intent to appear “weird”. Maria said that she herself and her friends were weird, but that people who were not Actually weird pretended to be because strangeness had become popular.

About a month prior, I had gone to an audition, with a group of friends, for a television program. I had never hung out with these friends before. I only met two of them the night before. They were my friend’s boyfriend and brother. The next morning, we set out for Los Angeles. She admitted, as we sat in a Denny’s diner, killing time before our audition, that she felt the strange, paranoid and overbearing aggression, like an epidemic in the city, that I did.

The audition was for a show called “The Quest”. It was produced by the young college graduates who had created “The Amazing Race”. One was a short girl with a clipboard and an angry glare who looked pregnant. The other was a young man who looked like he was still calling the shots in a community college film crew.

The premise of the game show was that it was a competition for “nerds” (i.e. intellectual, socially awkward enthusiasts) that pitted them against one another, or in teams, in a simulation of a Tolkienesque Hero’s Journey.

My group of friends, comprised of a Wiccan, a Christian, an Atheist, and an amateur Zen man, were the biggest nerds in the crowd. Predominantly, our adversaries were Los Angeles locals hoping to begin their acting career. Everyone in the room was instructed, by the short girl with the clipboard, to present a brief life story to the other contestants. People went up in groups, although a few went up alone. At one point, their bios seemed to settle into a kind of stew. One girl presumed that almost everyone else there was from Los Angeles. She was wrong, but she spoke with conviction nonetheless. Another man, who seemed to have known better, said that he was a local and that he worked two jobs, but qualified that everyone in Los Angeles worked at least three jobs.

We did not make the audition. We were the most socially awkward people there. My friend had been caught off guard, and the rest of us had to console her a bit afterwards. She had not been prepared to present in front of a large group of people pretending to be nerds.

The Singing Class

I had returned to Palomar College for one last semester before deciding towards the end of the December to drop out. What had set this semester apart was a sense of glory: I felt that there was nothing I could not do. That had proven to be wrong.

One day, presumably after having taken my first singing class, I wandered into one of the practice rooms bordering the courtyard of the Palomar Art department. Inside was a classmate from my singing class. He was playing a piano piece with bold, fleshy chords. He greeted me with a smile that seemed just as vibrant and intimidatingly jovial. Somehow, he had prompted me to admit that I loved the piano as well. He jumped up from his seat and had me sit down and play for him. He then invited me to join a jazz ensemble organized by the same teacher from our singing class.

I got in. The instructor, whom I knew from two prior attempts to pass her class, had a look of perpetual flattery in her eyes that always were exposed as deceivers by her wrinkles. Yet, as she gave me what little praise for my voice that she felt was my due but that amounted to more than I could ever remember having, I began to feel myself sinking into a strange funk that had always appeared to haunt Palomar College like a ghost that had never left, not out of spite but out of habit.

I joined the class. It was a jazz ensemble. I joined under the condition that I would be a bass. There were a plethora of aspiring singers in the class. Each had something buttery to say about himself or herself when Serenity, the instructor, had us stand in a circle at the foot of the Organ hall and introduce ourselves as though we were in the second grade. Each woman and man, young and old, tall and short, emerged from the Funk as though to pay homage to some heathen God. I felt alone among those with little to say about myself, and they recognized the heretic the moment I accepted the charge of opening my mouth.

There was one experienced soprano there. She had almost harsh Italian features that were fixed perpetually in the choleric temperament, though she would wear her persona at every performance without apology nor pretense, drawing clear attention to the fact that her talent was a career. Her voice was enviably thin and sufficiently resonant. Serenity looked upon it with a customary delight.

The young woman, who was fairly squat as well, also had an infant. It was made clear early on that her child would visit every one of our classes.

I sat next to a seasoned, sexually healthy man whose hair was just beginning to gray, against his wishes but to his resolution. He looked at me always with a kind of manic invitation to be as charismatic and certain of himself as he was. He and I would share sheet music.

Every time we sang, Serenity would have to remind me to sing up one octave. Intent upon Taoist principles, I immediately noted the artificiality of her request, as though I had been invited to play a guitar but, upon arriving on stage, thoroughly rehearsed, was told to withdraw into a practice chamber across the courtyard and to record myself. I would then have to wait for one of the technicians in the electronic music laboratory across the alleyway to recreate my composition in an electronic form. Only then would it be played to the class, as I sat on the stage.

I dropped the class. Serenity had made it clear that she would not be compromised with. If any doubt is cast on my reasons, it was the infant.

The day before my last visit to the jazz ensemble, I rode up to college on the Sprinter train, a train that runs along a more or less direct course from Escondido to Oceanside. I was intent upon filming an amateur documentary regarding the drug culture. I met a man on the train with a sunken, pudgy look in his face and eyes like raisins barely hidden behind slits in dough.

He had difficulty following my train of thought. Instead, our interview involved him reciting behaviourist dogma pertaining to his condition. I felt, for the first time in months, an overwhelmingly Sinking sensation, as I set foot again on the Palomar college campus, one that I had seen through mist and sunshine for three years.

Serenity kept telling me to make the extra effort to sing tenor rather than bass. I kept looking over at the infant, feeling immense recrimination. Something in the high strung style of our rendition was so Elevated, so torn from its roots, so contrary to jazz, that it could not have upset only me. I got the incontrovertible impression that the baby was disturbed by the noise, that the tones we embodied were not the ones that were maternal to a baby’s ears, and that the child would remember, subconsciously, my high-pitched singing throughout his or her entire life, but never knowing what it had been, he or she should resolve himself or herself to depression.

The Present in Terms of the Present

                                                                                                  Something strange happened to me the night that I felt I became enlightened. I first took a photograph of myself. I was perturbed at first by the visage, but then I realized that I was without delusion. It was the first time in something like three years that I saw with such clarity.

I immediately began preoccupied with Andrew. How would he handle the emotionally straining confinements of his Romantic delusion?

It was perhaps that preoccupation that made me feel impeled to visit Denny’s. Andrew and I had gone there many nights.

I showed up at Denny’s. There was a waitress at the counter. She offered me a seat. I took one.

I began to peruse the surroundings. I looked at the people. I smiled. I looked at the waitresses. One of them was looking straight at me. She was staring, suspiciously.

I ordered a Pacific Chiller. I began to feel morose. I waited for my chiller, with my hands wrapped about my elbows, looking down at my knees. When the waitress returned, she seemed very unnerved, as though she were exhausting every effort to be genial. Glad with myself, I smiled at her.

A song came on.

“Excuse me?”

She came up. She had a glare in her eyes.

“Do you know, by any chance, who this song is by?”

She replied immediately, as though it were absurd that I was asking. She didn’t know.

“I was thinking it might be by Rob Thomas.”

“Yeah, it sounds like him.”

There was no flicker of amusement at this fact.

I was beginning to feel very nervous.

Having finished my chiller, I walked up to the counter.

I began to think of what I had written in my journal earlier: That I thought that I had handled my altercation with Maria, earlier that day, “Heroically but recovered from more slowly.”

I had been incredibly confident in that that was true. It was untellably Empowering to know that I had been right.

Perhaps I hadn’t. Perhaps I had been a bully. Yet I began to wonder about whether I should change “May have” to “might have”. I Might have handled it more heroically.

I began to act as though that mattered. Immediately, a strange sense of exhiliration, like the pains of early childhood, seemed to draw a bridge between me and the waitress. She seemed absurdly Content, all of a sudden, with my behaviour. I looked at the head waitress again. She was still staring.

Spencer Wayman works at Round Table pizza. I walked in and asked for him. He came up to the register. I asked him, in a mockery of a mad old man, if “may” was interchangeable with “might”. He affirmed this immediately, qualifying that “the English language is strange. Pretty much every rule you can think of can be broken.”

I asked him about the waitresses. He told me more or less what John the Hitchhiker had told me: That people were afraid of you if you were introverted.

I told him, still feeling like a crazy person playing the fool, that I would like a beer, since there seemed “nothing else left to do”, logically. He obliged. It was on the house. I hope he doesn’t lose his job.

I sat at Round Table for about an hour, but it became difficult to. Everyone that came in looked at me with, strangely, the same expression. I felt my experience encroached upon by a logical imitation of the Moment. It wouldn’t have been bad, except I was of half a mind that one of the people would call the cops on me and take me to Aurora Behavioural health. They don’t need jurisdiction for that. Only suspicion. At least to hassle you.

A song came on on the stereo. It was a country song I had never heard. I was beginning to obsess over “might” or “may”. If I believed that the word was “might”, then everyone welcomed me like a mother her infant. If it was “may”: That woman’s stare. Everyone would stare like that. Everyone was happy, content, yet I fell short of the standard They had met.

That was absurd, of course. Yet I still could not Understand WHY that woman – why both – had been glaring at me as though I had or was about to do something wrong.

I cast my mind back to the restaurant. She had spoken with a Mexican man who may have been her husband. Then she returned to her sentry. She did not do anything. She just stared at me unblinkingly. I raised my hand, weakly, to wave. She kept staring. Was she staring into space as I was?

Several young people came up beside my table. I met eyes with one of them, trying my hardest to go beyond the persona level. I was unsuccessful.

I remembered going to Round Table pizza after the last soccer game of the season, many years ago. I sat at this table, or one like it, with my parents.

Later, after the end of my senior year of high school, my father began to coach teams. He had delivered a very awkwardly phrased but eager speech as many girls and their parents received trophies. The Russian accent was forgiven.

The song on the stereo now was a country song. A young woman, a little older than I, was admonishing a young girl to “hold on to innocence” in one of the lines. I was about to go mad. “May”? “Might”? “MAY?” “MIGHT??”

I told Spencer that I would return in an hour. We were dubious regarding the arrangement. He told me that he would stay here until eleven at night to clean. I did not tell him anything conclusive. I just waited outside, realizing promptly upon exiting that I would wait for him. It was around eight o-clock.

Being enlightened is nothing special. It means that you are free from the delusions that would separate you from other people. You no longer think “socially”, because that defense mechanism is no longer necessary, Neither is logic. You are just in accord with your human instincts. You wake up, seeing things as they are. It is nothing special. The Japanese have a word for it: “mu shin.” Nothing special.

It does not set you apart. You become like a lamp in the alley, but that lamp cannot be described. You don’t even want to. Everything in the Universe is content and particular and obviously clear to you. “Glorious” is too inflated a word for it.

I watched the patrons of the bar next door – A gastropub – amble out. My peace was beginning to dissipate. Why could I not allow myself to stop obsessing? The detail was clearly inconsequential. “May” or “might”? “May or “might”? “MAY” or Might?

One particularly generously proportioned Hispanic woman came up the aisle. She was with her husband. She smiled back at me before I smiled.

I left my tray of Denny’s leftovers and a note on the bench outside Round Table. It was Ten or so. I had peered in multiple times, but I could not find Spencer anywhere. Some girl emerged from the kitchen. She was pudgy. I looked at her innocently. She did not indicate that she had seen me, although she had.

I had to use a restroom. Round Table was closed. I made a pilgrimage to Denny’s.

The pen and paper, I might add, I had borrowed from one of the waiters at the Gastropub. He had come outside when the pub was closing.

I returned to the Denny’s. The restroom was soon sonorous with ecstatic electronic music. I wanted it to lift me up like it had so many times, to a new height of novelty. But I kept burdening my own ascent with an anxiety that seemed intensified by the very energy of the song. “MAY”? “MIGHT?” HOW COULD SUCH A TRIVIAL DETAIL OCCUPY MY MIND FOR TWO HOURS?

I got out of there like hell.

Round Table Pizza was closed. All the lights were out. My tray was still on the bench. I had only been away for fifteen minutes.

I went back to Denny’s. People were there. They were smiling. They were jovial. Why? There was no tenderness in their jovialness, like finding a video that someone had filmed on a road trip. There was no maternal glimmer in their eyes lending realness to the petals of flowers. There was no Novelty, like hearing Modest Mouse music that a friend had burnt to a plastic CD, for the first time.

My father came in within minutes, grinning. He had known, somehow, that I was there. I waved to the Mexican head waitress. She grimly replied with a goodbye that seemed to say that it was her solemn duty to be this miserable and that I had earned her equally drab approval.

I got home. The lights were out in the computer room, save for one desk lamp that had been there through many a nerve-racked night of typing research papers for high school honors classes.

My father came in and I broke down. I began to scream. I was screaming hysterically, from my diaphragm. Screaming at the top of my lungs. My cry was the sopranino anguish of a man tortured. Maria, thankfully, was at a sleepover.

Mother rushed down, eyes wide in fright, but without any incrimination.

I was manic. “LOOK!” I grabbed the yellow writing pad. “LOOK! I COULD WRITE THIS SENTENCE AND SAY ‘MY OWN’ OR I COULD SAY ‘MINE OWN’ AND IT WOULDN”T MAKE A DIFFERENCE! BUT PEOPLE THINK THERE IS A DIFFERENCE BETWEEN NORMALITY AND ABNORMALITY! THERE”S JUST AS MUCH A DIFFERENCE BETWEEN ‘MINE OWN’ AND ‘MY OWN’! IT’S FUCKING INSANE! PEOPLE ARE SO…’ I began to sob, hiccupping… “fucking..” I was standing on the rotating chair, “…insane.”

My father embraced me like a peer. “You’re smart, you’re smart, “ he consoled as my mother patted my head.

Dana.

The last time that I had seen D.M.Z. was, I think, the twenty-second of August of this year. The second-to-last time that I saw her was near the end of the summer in two-thousand and nine.

I have turned this fact over and over like a stone in my mind for several hours. It is simply difficult for me to accept that four years had elapsed. Finally, after making the calculations enough times, I snapped. I yielded to the insanity of obsessing over this minute detail.

It was at that moment that I had what the Zen Buddhists call a satori. In a fleeting moment of recognition that nonetheless cleared away all substantial confusion (though by no means sparing me the responsibility, afterwards, of defending this fact with an ardour to surpass its own momentariness), I understand why my inner, predominantly unconscious Buddha mind had set this impossible problem for my ego.

Essentially, what I had done, without knowing it, was that I asked Dana, within my head: “I last saw you towards the end of the summer of 2013. I had last seen you, prior to that, towards the end of summer 2009. Four years have not passed.”

Were I more quick-witted and confident at the time, I would have understood the answer to the riddle immediately. This is the answer: Time is an illusion. It is also relative. What may have been four years in theory was not four years at all.

My only hope is that it had not been four years for her. Judging by the fact that she has been even more evasive than when I first met her, being a thankfully private person, for an extravert, it may have been more like eight years.

The calculations were not fruitless, however. By virtue of several months spent working as a cashier, I had learned, against perhaps the better wishes of my well-being, to find a sort of sterile solace in logic puzzles. I had also learned, definitely against my well-being, to identify the proper execution of a simple math problem with some pleasure brought to women of some kind of maturity, even if only a physical one. (This is not, of course, in reference to Dana, who had not only a physical maturity but, refreshingly, a psychological maturity as well.) I worked at a fabric store.

I recalled, innumerable times, the previous four years, trying to the best of my ability to find a space of four years within my mind as I ran about from one entitled customer to another.

The first year had been spent, following the break-up with my first girlfriend, following the works of the notorious and wholly dangerous cult leader Osho. I recall the last opportunity I had had to hang out with Dana. This had been during the spring break of two-thousand and ten. One of last days, I think, that I had seen her, she advised that I “go for it” when I had admitted to her that I had spent eight hours talking to a girl by the name of Ally.

Dana was always stunningly respectful. I might as well have been strung out on laughing gas when I ignored her to chat with Ally over IM. Yet she had a saintly hesitance to invade my privacy.

Come spring of two-thousand and ten, Ally and I had been dating for nearly five months. Her father, the less favoured of the two parents, in her eyes, had made an ominous prediction whilst we sat at a Thai restaurant that both of her divorced parents would take us and her sisters to, at intervals and in uncalculated alternation.

Neil said that, come the three-month mark, our relationship would begin to “go sour”. This was at the three-month mark that he delivered the premonition.

He was right.

There was another thing that he did, by virtue of which I almost suspect that the prophecy he had made was a self-fulfilling one, though I have little conviction in entertaining this theory. As he drove me home one night, lecturing me with a formal respectfulness on the importance of honesty and telling my parents that I was in a relationship rather than hiding the fact, he also handed me a book.

It was by Eckhart Tolle. It was called “A New Earth”. Neil’s prelude was something akin to: “You know, how the Taoists would think that to be enlightened you had to live in the mountains and only eat one bowl of rice a day. Well, that’s not very realistic. But this guy is showing us how we can live that way now and still have a job and a family.”

I must have asked him if he had any qualms with Tolle’s method of teaching. What I had in mind was, of course, the orthodoxy, and what I had in heart was a rightful fear of dependency upon another’s wisdom.

“He’s a spiritual person, so he’s a bit dry,” he said marginally. He gave me the book, leaving that avenue of the conversation on that note, more or less.

When Dana called to hang out over Spring Break, I exhausted almost every emotional strain to be earnest on the phone. I really wanted to meet with her.

My room was a mess, in a largely unprecedented way. On a whim, I had decided to raid my desk, which had been perpetually stuffed with papers throughout the greater part of the course of my grade school career.

Papers were strewn across the floor. Items of dubious actual value but undeniable sentimental value were lying in the most awkward corners, amidst plastic pencil cases. It was a warzone and an unwitting allegory for the adolescent mind. My parents were unnerved.

I had decided to do this the night that I began reading “A New Earth”. The same night that Neil had given it to me.

“Dmitry, can we not hang out?” She would always say things in a manner that was at once almost childlike but that always drew its character from a source of personal understanding and authority. She said this after we had been on the phone for only about a minute or so. She could tell that, trying to hold everything within my life together, I was in no state to go out and enjoy myself with friends.

Had she seen me the following summer, she would have seen me in a much worse state. Cults can do that to you.

The Burning House

Kresten's great-grandmother died today. She had had dementia. He said that it came as a relief when she died because he had suffered long enough watching the part of her that he knew die each day. She's had dementia for several years. She used to be the model Catholic: A kind soul. Kresten wrote a song comparing her to Mr Rogers, saying "Mr Rogers died of cancer." In her later years, her personality would change to its stark opposite: Hostile and sarcastic. It was because she could not remember anything from the majority of her life. She had even begun to use a different name.

When I got up to leave to go to his house today, I had our band in mind. I had had it in mind all day. I had decided to confront him about the band. I picked up the phone. There was a message from him, informing me as to what had happened and how it had brought about a change of heart in him. He wanted to jam.

Before leaving the house, I checked that everything was turned off: The stove and the microwave. I would be leaving Pumpkin, my Pekingese and a family friend of many years, alone. I locked all of the doors. I took the key and locked the front door behind me. I then returned and checked the stove a third time. I wiggled all three of the knobs. I observed the one that was missing, where a bar sticking out filled its place. The two lights that would have signified either heat or gas were out. I held them in memory as I trudged with my best effort at heroic decorum to Kresten’s condominium. I had a keyboard under my arm.

The house was locked. The stove was off, as was the microwave. The gate was locked, and yet still I was terribly afraid that the house would burn down.

Earlier that morning, Maria had shared the first dream that she had intimated to me in a long time. It may very well have been the first I can remember that she described in detail. Actually, it was a series of dreams with one leitmotif: Houses burning down. One dream involved her setting fire to a forest so as to destroy a cabin. Another, prior to that, featured our own home juxtaposed with Hawaii, serving as though it were a hotel room. She could see Hawaii from her window, but emerging into the backyard found her back home. She saw a mushroom cloud that was gray go up in the air and rushed back to find the neighbourhood on fire. A girl from a weblog on the internet was going door-to-door, apparently, telling people about the fire. In Actual Life, the girl had told them about a fire in her own neighbourhood. I’ll spare the remaining details to preserve Maria’s privacy.

Kresten and I jammed for some time before he asked me to leave. His mood was incorrigible, and he was intent on being as Alone as possible, although he maintained a Stoic demeanour. I had seen Kresten cry two times prior within my life, and the fortitude with which he maintained a blank frown was disappointing. I was intent upon staying, however. Finally, Kresten tapered into a kind of passive acceptance of my presence in his mother’s apartment, though he made it clear that playing guitar was out of the question for him at this point. He withdrew into the kitchen as I tried to recover, by memory, a guitar riff that he had written several weeks prior. It had been his failure to remember this riff, amidst other things, that prompted him to stop playing for the time being.

When I found him in the kitchen a few minutes later, he was a happier man. He had just texted Bianca, his girlfriend, so his spirits began to retain a bit more of his characteristic edge. I asked if I should “amscre”, (“scram” in pig-Latin), and he gave me an inconclusive response.

We began to watch an episode of “Breaking Bad”. We began it at a point well into the episode. Soon afterwards, Bianca arrived. I asked again if I should leave, exhausting little effort on my part to appear polite but unapologetic, as had become habit for me. Kresten told me, absently, that “it would probably be fine”, though the “fine” had a marked absence of connotation.

When Bianca arrived, she was not thrilled to see me after not having seen me in over a year. She remained silent and self-conscious throughout an episode of “Breaking Bad”, which we watched from the beginning. She sat in a loveseat directly across from the wooden chair that I occupied leisurely, a small but rectangular table between us, and Kresten behind with the couch all too himself. No one spoke with the exception of the television and an occasional attempt at congenial humour on my part.

I could not tell what was happening in the room, except that I could feel a tension in my muscles at moments. Whether the tension was in response to the events portrayed on television or my friends’ emotional responses, I never learned. It just seemed to escalate, as well as a certain “broken” feeling in my left lobe which I now have the wisdom to identify with Kresten’s “bad days”, exclusivlely.

At one point, Kresten got up, and the tension I felt was markedly one of a fury that had not originated within my own being. He paced the apartment diligently for one continuous but shortlived moment that ended with him withdrawing to the ground-floor patio behind me with a cigarette and a drink. He shut the glass door behind him. By this point, we had already gone from watching “Breaking Bad” to the Korean film “Old Boy”. Somehow, I had intuited that we would be watching this favourite of Kresten’s again. It was over an hour into Bianca’s visit.

About fifteen minutes into “Old Boy”, marked by a scene wherein the protagonist is masturbating whilst watching a television set within an apartment wherein he is imprisoned, Bianca said, “Goodnight, Dmitry.” With a marked lack of eros and emotion, she left the room like a gas flame on the stovetop going out with the turn of a knob.

Disoriented as I was, I took that as my cue to inquire as to what (the hell, though I did not say it) was going on. I opened the window behind me and found Kresten in an admittedly refreshing temper, leaning over the edge of the close metal rail with his elbows upon it and his head resting against his wrists. The trees, in homely proximity to us, their grassy expanse beginning just where the slight strip of cement that Kresten and I occupied ended, diving into a hill that would sprawl into a desolate golf course, took on the ecstatic vibrance of Kresten’s mind. He told me, very plainly, that it wasn’t my fault, but that he wished that either Bianca or I would get over ourselves when he was going through emotional turmoil. “I guess I just have shitty friends,” he stated nonchalantly but frankly, not looking at me. I asserted, but with absolute gentleness, that I would have left had she told me. I also told him that part of the reason why I wanted to stay was to support him. I wasn’t sure, though, if that was what he needed. He admitted that he probably did.

Bianca returned, as had been planned, within a few minutes. I watched “Old Boy” alone as I listened, not entirely observative of either, but attentive, to Kresten reproaching Bianca firmly but fairly via cell phone in the patio behind me. When she returned, she was more polite to me. She said that she had bought “Raisinettes, Ferrero Rochers,” and something else at the drug store nearby. She offered me some.

In the interim between the phone call and her arrival, however, there were a good few minutes wherein Kresten rested on the couch. The television was off. He was intent on rewinding the film to begin from the top. He asked me if it was fine. I said that I did not mind at all.

The television must have been off when I saw Kresten cry for the third time in his life. He recounted everything I mentioned in the first paragraph of this chapter from his couch.

I meditated for some time in my seat, looking down at my hands. I decided to finally say, “It makes you wish that people appreciated it more, doesn’t it?”

Kresten was already on his laptop. “What, music?”

“No, Life.”

It was at that moment that I had the Kresten I always knew and loved back for a few minutes. He was in tears, but with every sob an iceberg seemed to rupture. He said that no one appreciated Life, as though the fact were an obvious claim. He said that he could not understand people’s fixation upon money. I assured him that some people probably do appreciate Life. Maybe a good deal of them do, but our culture does not allow it. I don’t know if it was what I said or his own thoughts that allowed his mood to settle again. It had probably been a combination of the two.

Before returning home that night, I walked along every one of the three floors of his condo complex, pacing the narrow corridors illumined by glowing lamps that remind me now of Bianca’s original attitude towards me that evening. I took several of pictures of these lamps on my phone, sending one to Kresten by text message. The message read, “Despite the ephemeral nature of Life, a sense of accomplishment is important.”

When I returned home, the stove was still off. The microwave did not catch my attention by any device. Everyone was safe and secure. Yet I still felt that my house was burning down.

Andrew

Andrew talked to me again tonight. I shared with him an article that I thought to be of marginal importance when I first found it. It seemed to be merely one of many fairly superficial websites that one could find on the internet pertaining to spiritualism and “Spirituality”. The writer attested that there were three different people who comprised a sage: The philosopher, the wise man, and the mystic.

Andrew and I were thinking the same thing at once. Andrew was the philosopher. Kresten was the wise man. I was the mystic. Andrew synthesized concepts into a cohesive whole and spoke with authority on intellectual matters. Kresten had authority over the world of matter. He had life experience. He was an adventurous rogue who took frequent breaks to pause and to breathe in Life and breathe out his regret for its passing. And I was the mystic. I drew my authority from the Tao. I drew my authority from the fact that no moment like this has ever existed before in memory, yet this moment has been around since the dawn of time, if such a thing exists. Together, we made one collective Sage.

I posted the link to Kresten’s Wall on facebook. Andrew commented on it, corroborating my finding, yet with enough detachment to make it appear as though he had in fact stumbled upon it by accident on Kresten’s Wall. The one detail that would have suggested our mutual conspiracy in this was the word “Kresten” at the beginning of Andrew’s comment, suggesting sincerity.

One of the things that I remembered Kresten saying shortly after I first met him he had said when we walked down to Abraxas High School in his sophomore year of high school and my freshman year of college. It was one of Kresten’s many brooding, melancholy defeatist convictions that still are apt to possess him from time to time, and I was as ardent then in my enflamed attempts to dispel it as I would be today. There was no question of the absurdity of his defeatism.

What he had said was to the effect of this: “It is sad to think that some people are better in my life as memories than as friends.”

Calling upon the authority of the gods and of all of my teachers from High School (for the two parties were apparently the same), I impressed upon Kresten the absurdity of that conviction. We walked back up the street to our homes, and I kindled in his mind an exuberance that illumined his adventurousness. He was prepared to venture into romantic relationships, et al, again, with renewed vigour. My girlfriend at the time, not yet my ex, found it inspiring.

I recalled this to Andrew in the midst of puzzling over why Dana had ceased to speak with me. The memories of her had been a painting to rival any physical painting for the totality of the four-year interim between my sightings with her. Yet no memory could be a substitute for the Person, and I saw that fact looking me in the eye when I ran into her at Jalapeno’s. She had not changed from the substantial Dana that I had met at the foot of the Bernardo Heights staircase in my seventh grade year. The ardous trials of living in Afghanistan had been like boulders upon which the moss could grow, and that moss was an extension of the same life force that Dana was: A tree of fortitude exploding periodically in a flame of ardour.

And no memory could be substituted for that. Not even the glorious emerald painting that had given me pause as I recalled it to John the Hitchhiker. Not even the memory of the silence at Graziano’s at night-time which had stopped my breath could amount to the Thou of seeing Dana in person.

Andrew was quick to disagree with me, yet he never once said that I was wrong. Rather, he assured me that Kresten had been right all of those years ago. The function of friendship was to produce memories. Those memories would endure beyond death. Although interacting with another person is nice, the memory is what matters when that person is no longer in one’s life.

And I was reminded in his use of that peculiarity the same strange conviction that Alexandra had had: That people are not “in your life”, simply because one does not talk with them.

I thought of how preposterous that was. It was always strange to me. I was born from a human race with which I am entirely continuous. Every individual I interact with, be it socially or simply by saying hello in the streets, is affected by my actions, and those actions reverberate throughout all of Humanity, if not the Cosmos. Everyone has this authority, for the Cosmos is comprised of these Units. Yet such intellectual convictions were merely at the hind of my mind. What I kept in mind was emotional. What I kept in mind was that every individual I had ever known carried a part of me. That individual’s life did not END when I ceased to speak with that person; it continued. My memories belonged merely to my egoic conception of myself; the interactions with the world in actuality were mostly unconscious. Why would I use facebook? Was it because I wanted to keep people “in my life”? No. It was because they always were in my Life, be it with or without my consent, and if they felt an indebtedness to their common mankind that necessitated their involvement in the wretched website, then I should adopt that indebtedness as well, however uncomfortable it may be.

But even that had not crossed my mind. What had occurred to me was that this same common sense that Andrew had tried to impress upon me, which Kresten had etched into my memory, was exactly what Dana, and Dylan, and Alexandra, and Doctor Englund, and everyone with whom I had ever really Met had seemed driven to debunk. It was perhaps what Vanessa had sought to dispel when she offered me a bit of her chips as the group of Pre-Calculus students from my first summer school class sat about on a couch in the now extinct Hot Java Café. It was that isolation was bullshit, plainly and simply, and that involvement in a common Life was essential not only to happiness but to sanity. It is a fallacy to think that one is not in the Lives of everyone else on the planet. Why else would one be alive? What motive could there be, if I may voice an ideal, for altruism? Why did Dana go to Afghanistan? To teach children whom she had never met. They had been in her Life since before she had met them. She knew this, even if by memory. And so Andrew claimed to have won the argument with that point, though he did not say that he had won, for there was too much pity in mind towards me. And I had been in her Life throughout that entire Life, as were those children, and as are all children in everyone’s Life at all times, til Death do we part.

But all of this was merely loaded into my words like grapeshell that exploded only after I shot this question at Andrew: “Is it not a matter of common sense that every other individual on the planet is In one’s Life?”

“No, Dmitry,” Andrew snapped irritably. “No one thinks that.”