Oh So Serious

"I don't get it, you don't want to hang out with me anymore?" I was walking her home from an evening out with my friends. It was a bomb out of nowhere.

"No, remember when we first met and it was your friends and my friends and we were all just hanging out? I think we should go back to that."

"That doesn't make any sense. You like me. I like you. We have fun hanging out together."

"I know, I just... it's..." She started over. "We've been spending a lot of time together, just the two of us... and I didn't intend for that to happen. I think we should go back to the way things used to be." I didn't remember the way things used to be. I only remembered smiling when I was around her. I only remembered catching her out of the corner of my eye smiling at me.

I couldn't understand. "Why?"

Her reasons didn't make much sense. I didn't think she was being honest with me. Maybe not with herself. It was a long walk and a long, drawn out conversation. I had made the unfortunate mistake of being chivalrous, insisting I would walk her home when she tried to get me to stay with my friends.

She wasn't going to change her mind. I wasn't going to try to change it for her.

Finally we made it to her door. We stopped walking and faced eachother, both staring at the ground so we didn't have to acknowledge the awkwardness floating between us. "If I see you, I promise I'll be congenial and I'll laugh at your jokes and I won't be jealous of the boy on your arm." "I don't have any jokes," she replied. I hugged her close to me and she left her arms limp at her side. "Give me a hug," I asked her. "Hmmm. You smell nice." She murmured and her arms hesitated. "That's making this really difficult for me..." It better be difficult for you. It's pretty damn difficult for me, I thought to myself. I didn't say it though. I kissed her on the forehead and said "goodbye" and walked away.

When she had stopped at my apartment earlier in the evening she had given me a mix tape. An actual cassette tape. When I got home I saw it sitting on the table where she had set it down. I picked it up and looked at the track listing written on the back. At the bottom she had drawn some hearts and xoxos. "This is bullshit!" I exclaimed to my empty apartment. I threw the tape down on the table and went to bed.

I woke up the next morning and remembered what had happened. "Bullshit!" I exclaimed to my ceiling. "This is bullshit!" I puttered around my apartment, feeling pissed off and not wanting to head to work. I picked up the tape and looked at the track listing again. It only annoyed me more. Songs I liked, artists I liked, from different eras, from different genres. I tried to put it out of my mind.

****

I was driving to a nearby state park to go hiking when I played the tape for the first time. One time she had noticed that my car's radio had a tape deck, which was why she had recorded a tape rather than making a CD. Nobody still had a tape deck. I listened to side A on the way out and only got more irritated. Songs like "Your Love," "In Your Eyes," and "The Way You Make Me Feel" she would have chosen only if she liked me as I did her. At least, I thought. Maybe not. Of course so. Then why did she change her mind? I kept seething in my head, wavering one way and then another.

The last track on side A ended as I pulled into the park and stopped my car. The hike was long and hot; exhaustion was what finally stopped my internal diatribe as I returned to the car. Sitting in the driver's seat, I drank the last drops from my water bottle and started the engine. The tape deck made a series of clicks and whirrings, and side B began as I started to drive back home.

There was a shift in tone from A to B, or at least I thought there was. "Don't Let It Get You Down." "Find Out How It Ends." "Forever Young." "Boys Of Summer." Maybe it was the heat, or the exhaustion, or the sunset I was driving into, or the goofy way the sound was warping faster and slower, louder and softer. Whatever it was, I suddenly understood what catharsis meant.

I started to compose an email to her in my head. I listened to your mix tape... Thanks. I'm still a little pissed, but it made me feel better. I think I understand. Or maybe I'm misinterpreting, or maybe you didn't mean anything at all. Either way, I really enjoyed getting to know you. I had a lot of fun spending time together. I'll miss that. See you round.

A Belated Father's Day

And in that moment Sherman made the terrible discovery that men make about their fathers sooner or later. For the first time he realized that the man before him was not an aging father but a boy, a boy much like himself, a boy who grew up and had a child of his own and, as best he could, out of a sense of duty and, perhaps, love, adopted a role called Being a Father so that his child would have something mythical and infinitely important: a Protector, who would keep a lid on all the chaotic and catastrophic possibilities of life.

---From The Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe

I had that moment when I was twenty one years old. It was the first time I faced the realization that, as a friend of mine put it, "my dad was not Superman." It was the first time I had cried for years. It was the first time I truly realized that my parents would one day not be here.

It was the first time I allowed myself to think that I was an adult. That all there was to being a grown up was growing old.

I saw this when my oldest brother had children. He was still my brother. We still talked about comic strips and about physics. We helped each other out and we argued. Having children did not bestow upon him superpowers, changing him from my brother into something new.

I see this in my father now. My whole life I had seen him as always having the answers, as always being infallible. Now I see he has always been just a man. A man who did the best he could. A man who taught my brothers and me what he thought was right and wrong in the world. How to behave. What you should and should not do. How to treat other people. That you should always do the right thing not because it is the easy thing, or because you may be rewarded, but because it is The Right Thing To Do. These are the things that I carry on from him, the things I learned from him whether or not he knew he was teaching me.

Shopping List

I need to buy condoms, I thought to myself one day. I'll pick some up the next time I'm at the store.

A few days later I was on the way to a friend's for a small gathering. I told him I would pick up the beer. As I pulled into the grocery store parking lot I went over my mental shopping list: Beer, condoms.

There's no way in hell that's all I'm standing in line with.

I made another mental note. Pick some up next time I'm at the store AND buying more than just beer.

Apologies

It's been brought to my attention that I have been neglecting my blog lately.

My bad.

I wasn't really aware that anyone besides maybe two people read my ramblings. Apparently this is not the case. I will try to do better in the future.

The T-Shirt

It wasn't the first time I asked out a bartender, but it will almost certainly be the last. I had had a "server crush" on her for a while -- the kind of crush you have for a waitress or bartender, but know it won't pan out because you're just another customer. But in this case she was a friend of a friend's girlfriend and we were all hanging out one night. It was obvious she was flirting with me, and I was just tipsy enough to ask for her phone number. She was tipsy enough to give it to me.

We saw each other for a few weeks, but nothing really clicked between us. I kept calling her because she was cute and I wasn't seeing anyone else. We didn't see each other for a week or so because she went out of town and then I went out of town, and by the time we were both back she was busy with school. "I'm kind of swamped right now, why don't I give you a call when things settle down?" she told me over the phone. A thinly veiled guise if I ever heard one.

At some point I had loaned her a t shirt of mine. It was too small to fit me anymore, shrunk from years of use and years of growing. It had the date 1984 on it, and I can remember it being so large on me I would trip on the hem. It didn't fit me at all but it fit her quite well, and when I tossed it to her to try on she remarked on how soft it was. "I just might have to steal this," she (half) joked. "You better not; I've had that shirt for over twenty years."

I waited a few days to call her back and see if she wanted to have dinner. I left a voice mail. I mentioned how I'd like to swap my shirt for a shirt my friend had promised her and I had gotten from him. Life went on. About a week later I sent her a text message. I hate text messages. "So I get that you're not interested in seeing me anymore and I'm cool with that, but I was serious about wanting to get my shirt back." No response. I stopped going to the bar where she worked, figuring that avoiding awkward situations was for the best.

The story of my t shirt became a running joke for my friends: "so did you get your shirt back yet?" became a common greeting. "If Tyler would just man up and get his shirt back we could go back to that bar." Except for the principle of the theft, I stopped being bothered by the loss of my shirt. After all, it was just a shirt and it didn't even fit me anyway. Having the story became more interesting to me than having the shirt. "I wish you would just get it back already so I would stop having to hear about it!" one of my coworkers exclaimed. She didn't see the humor it it that the rest of us did.

Weeks and weeks had gone by and I had sucessfully avoided her since the theft incident. My boss, because of some good results at work, said he was going to take several of us out for dinner and drinks. Of course we had to go to the bar I never went to anymore. I knew she had been planning on moving away sometime soon, and I was fairly confident that that sometime soon was in the past by that point. Alright, I thought to myself, there's very little chance that she'll be there. I showed up after everyone else and walked up to the table.

"Awesome." I said to my friends who were in on the story. She was there working.