Posted:Fri Oct 23, 2009 1:15 AM CST
Night at the Beach
She came and went, a blip on a screen, a couple beers later, no great loss, just a few thoughts tossed backward as to might've-beens. It rained the day I thought about it again, like it's raining now, not with any poetic seemliness, not with any wish-appointed meaning, Jesus Christ, no — just fucking rain, the shit that dusts everything with the opposite texture.
You shrug off rain, some moody annoyance, you aspire to sunnier things, I get that. You can't be bothered with unDisneyfication. Everything is face-value or nothing. The beach, you say, and you say it like it is a spell, conjuring up heaven, breathy, "the beach," and you swoon. I think if I'd gotten to know her, I would've found that she liked the beach, because the beach is easy and she called herself a romantic and, for all the great things about her, "romanticism," such as it is, tends to enforce even the most remote vestiges of brainwashing. Cinderella, dressed in yella, didn't anyone tellya, Desdemona winds up murdered by Othella. It clings to even the most grounded women I know, like a virus, and not a few of the guys I know, for that matter.
Buddy of mine spoke of a bright, lovely dame we know pejoratively because she slept around. It made me fucking sad. It was like finding out he was born again. At least she lived.
But it's raining, and it is real, and it is bracing and it should remind you of the shit other than the shit you have control over — which is fucking legion, by the way — and that is my own romanticism, because what is real in and of itself should be enough to shut you up about the beach. The beach fucking hates you, it idles you without books to make your time worth idling, and it gives you cancer. Rain makes everything prettier, because it is the city shining in itself. It probably doesn't look as good out there amongst the fucking soybeans — but then that's why we live in cities.