Note: I wrote the following piece in the summer, so don't be confused by any seasonal incongruity, it was written in the summer. So, with that little clarification out of the way, let the commencement beginulate!
I suppose that once you are a bachelor for long enough you have no choice but to accept that since there is no one else around to take on the job, you're the one who is going to have to decorate the place that you live.
This fact of reality took a while to sink in for me, but after age 30 if you're a single man, then you probably have to do it yourself.
By the way, its not that I am single because I don't want to get married. But I have been waiting and holding out for the girl who broke my heart 7 years ago to change her mind and take me back so that me and her could get married. If I had married someone else in the meantime, and the thing I have been staying alive in hopes of actually happened, and the girl I still love decided to start seeing me again, then she and I wouldn't be able to get married until after a messy divorce from whoever I married in the meantime.
But after 7 years, its beginning to seem like she's not coming back to me. And since most of my current female acquaintances are mad at me for one reason or another and are not interested in offering decoration assistance, I have to take control of the living arrangements jobs all by myself. So its up to me to do ... what is the term they use? D-U-I? Do it yourself.
So I have been handling the house decoration on my own. Lucky for me there's Ikea, solving all my household decor problems in one convenient store. So every time I have a furniture dilemma to handle I head on over to Ikea.
A week ago I went to Ikea looking for something for the bathroom. Since I spend pretty much most of my life killing time, alone in my house, any opportunity to get out of the house is a good one. So, I go do my best T-virus infected style sharamblins through the Hollywood sound stage bedrooms, living rooms and kitchens of Ikea and I found what I was searching for. It was a highly clever product that exactly fit the situation, that I presume will break in two, within a fortnight if any pressure is applied whatsoever.
And! While I walking through Ikea I ran into a young woman I have known a long time but haven't seen for a while. She is a charming young woman who I'll call Penny, which I am using here as an alias, its not her actual name. Penny was there shopping with a friend of hers who I hadn't ever met before and I will give the alias of ... Sarah Bore-Krustenston. The two were shopping for something that had something to do with Penny's friend Sarah's kids.
When I figure out that is what they are shopping for I take the time to I wonder if Penny has kids ... I really should pay more attention.
We end up making our purchases at the same time and so we leave the Ikea together. As it happens it is a beautiful sunny afternoon, and Penny asks me if I would like to meet them for a drink later that afternoon on a patio somewhere when they're done shopping. I like Penny so I give her my cel phone number to call me, and then I go to a bookstore and buy a book, "Ghostwritten" by David Mitchell, who also wrote "Cloud Atlas" which is a pretty good book.
Not too long later she calls me, and I meet Penny and her friend on the patio of a restaurant that I've eaten at a dozen times. Even though I have been there a dozen times I never knew the place had a patio. The restaurant isn't too bad. But the place is kind of a magnet for painfully transparent fuckwit guys posing and trying to look rich. Their see-through efforts are sad because you can tell they work at car dealerships, cel phone kiosks and the like. These dudes usually drive cheap BMW's and live with their parents. Or drive their parents BMW's and live with their parents. I feel a mix of bemused and bedisgusted with young guys with spiky hair trying desperately to convey the impression they're a rich big shot. Please, if you were actually rich and 22 years old, you'd be at work.
Anyway, Sarah Bore-Krustenston keeps bringing up conversation subjects that are basically the day to day garbage about her and Penny's mutual friends. So I have nothing to add. I detect recognition on Penny's part that the conversation naturally excludes me, but the way things are going there isn't much that she can do about it. Her friend appears determined to talk about their mutual friends, and about only that subject exclusively.
I try and go along with a couple of Penny's efforts to shimmy me into the conversation, but the subject of the conversation still finds it way back to being about people I don't know. This is because the actions of their friends is the subject of greatest proximity to the two girls together, and also the only subjects of interest locally, as far as Penny's friend Sarah is concerned.
It don't think Penny's friend is even doing it intentionally. The fact is, that what interests her are only these things. Their friends are the things that she knows and cares about, and not really the ideas of some stranger, for instance me, although the whole experience is boring the absolute shit out of me.
It is at these times I recognize that there is little benefit in trying to change the path of boring strangers thoughts, which are going to take the path they want. Just like in my own personal thoughts, the corrosively banal triffling bullshit that fills Sarah's thoughts, are themselves thoughts of zero relevance to me. This conversation, like all conversations I suppose, is going to follow its natural stupid path like a branch floating down the Colorado river. It will head this way and that way, but short of an eagle picking it off the water, that branch is not getting out of the grand canyon. And I am no eagle.
So I wonder, why am I sitting here? A combination of gravity, sociability, and sexual interest in one of the two girls. But which one? That, is a question I can answer. They are talking and I am looking at them and trying to look barely participatory, although I have nothing to add to a conversation about the current events of people who I will probably never meet.
So I look around, and I think the things you think when you're bored, like:
Is it payday this Friday or next Friday? What kind of a dog is that? Why is that lady's baby so grey?
Then I look at the sky, I look at the ground for a moment for absolutely no reason. The girls see me look at the ground, and they choose to ignore it. I think.
Bored. Bird. Talking bird. I look at the waitresses who are all gathered at the bar. Next, I stare off at nothing in the middle distance, then I imagine some of the waitresses naked. 15 more seconds pass, I haven't said anything to the girls in at least 10 minutes. Penny cares, the other girl hasn't even noticed. By this point I am planning my exit, so when there is another opening to involve me in the conversation, I instead avoid it and try and look deeply involved in something else that I am looking at, just to avert any unnecessary attempts to include me in the conversation.
This narrative can only make me sound like the worst person
ever to have a drink with, and it might suggest I have not much respect for
those girls, but that isn't what I mean to suggest because that isn't true.
Penny is actually really cool and funny. And for my part, most
of the time I try and put a normal level of effort into being socially normal, but sometimes I don't.
But in this case there is no use denying it, at that moment I was behaving badly.
This happens, by the way, for reasons and at times that suit no particular purpose.
If I was anyone else at that table with and saw me acting in that way, I would
probably ask me what the problem was.
I guess that day was one of those days. I could have forced myself into the
conversation. I could have maybe changed the subject to something that would
only interest me.
I could have said "did you know that Phobos is hollow?" "did you know that dark matter comprises over 80% of the matter in the universe?" "did you know that jet packs exist, but they are
super heavy and noisy?" But that would be just as unsociable, and slightly insane.
So instead I wonder about the geometric shape of black holes. Are they spheres?
Discs?
Do birds ever try to fly upside down?
I try and make eye contact with the waitress to get the
bill. Then the attention of everyone at the table, me included, is suddenly caught when a dragonfly lands on the table.
It sits for a second and then takes off again clumsily, like it is a little drunk.
This particular development has the effect of bringing me back into the conversation.
And mercifully soon it is time to go. When we are leaving I think I detect a little regret in Penny,
now she thinks that I might think she is boring. Truth is, we're all boring
sometimes.
What did I learn? I can be selfish, boring, and disinterested, just like everyone else. But I guess what matters is timing.