Feb 28, 2013
There are so many things that I want to say, that I have to say, but instead, here comes a boatload of rocket-powered nothin’.
Bob corrected me today when I quoted George Carlin, “In every cynic there is a disappointed idealist.” Bob nodded as I said it, politely unimpressed. “I’ve heard the same thing,” he said, “but I heard it about the disappointed romantic.”
Charles borrowed forty bucks from me tonight. It was right when the folk night intermission began. He came up to me while I was getting drinks for some couple, or something buttfuckingly tedious like that, and Charles, all serious and sincere and underbreath’d, said he needed to talk to me.
I knew what he wanted, like I probably did, but maybe he wanted something else. I mean, it’s fucking Charles, he’s the man. I actually really like the guy, he is absolutely un-unlikeable (like almost always). He’s written a book, he’s dating a hot chick from my high school, he has this unwavering James Dean doo. If he needed to talk, I needed to listen. And so, right there, in the briefest unwashed cunt-hair of the shortest nanosecond ever, I felt important, a little bit, and thus relented.
We couldn’t talk there, though, he said, not at the bar.
We walked out onto the deck. People. A line of people who had been holding themselves in for two hours, guzzling free water and listening to live Celtic music. We walked back inside. Another line had collected aside the bar where I had just been standing alone. We couldn’t walk to the a la carte dining room because a la carte never has an intermission--which meant I had no ‘intermission,’ since I was the only person working in that room. Instead of talking later bro, six-foot-45-inches Charles opened up the closet beneath the stairwell in the coatroom and stepped inside. He looked at me as if I were to join him to speak in those quarters.
“What the fuck is it, Charles?” I said from outside the closet. “Tweet the deets, bro.” (Please rewrite this)
“Yeah man,” he said, stepping back out of the closet. “I actually need a favor, and it’s a big one, but you know I got you. I just need forty for some herbicide. I’ll pay you back tonight.”
I just gave it to him, after him feeding me a bullshit-ass lie. Nobody buys forty dollars worth of pot, especially people that don’t even smoke pot, like Charles. But that’s Charles, with a load of innocuous and intolerably vague white lies that he thinks cloak his darker side. They don’t.
Does it make me cynical to believe that Charles is going to:
A. Buy pot, B. Smoke pot, C. Not ask me for money ever again, D. Return my money tonight, E. Return my money all at once, F. Return my money, G. Return a favor, H. None of the above?
No. Fuck no, it’s just a human reaction to being let down.
What was I let down from, though? Some crazy restaurant secret that I was finally being initiated into hearing? Was he going to tell me about a girl he knocked up or something? That my status as a servile casual fine-dining whore would somehow improve? No. I guess I just wanted him to say, Hey man, I want some coke, can you help me out?
That’s the real initiation into someone’s life, honesty, and that is why there lies no real initiation behind the doors of Baldwin’s Station, because everyone seems to lie to themselves about not lying to every body else. Am I mad about it--No. It’s just raw human nature functioning chaotically inside the ever-shrinking petri dish of restaurant life.
I’m calm now, though. Just reflecting.
I almost less prefer Bob’s twist on Carlin’s quote than the original he had heard. Or maybe it’s the original twist that Carlin untwisted and made his own, just famous. Either way, I like to think that I am not a soiled romantic, but more of an underwhelmed idealist. I want to get more into how I believe I am an idealist, but I think it would come off as forced, self-serving and as shitastic as anyone calling themselves an idealist could sound.
The fact of the matter is this, that I have felt resounding heartbreak both romantically and idealistically. Both have left me warped, but for completely different reasons. Idealistic heartbreak tends to slowly ebb into the dysfunctional realization that your expectations are inevitably losing out to the world, into the void of apathy and money, where you eventually are forced into accepting the unchange, until ideals are relinquished.
This is much different than Romantic heartbreak. Romantic heartbreak can leave you empty, it can leave you feeling alone, destroyed and lost. In most cases with romance, it’s scary to let go of it, but usually the healthy option. A rebirth usually occurs once the grieving ends, self-improvement and introspective solidarity. What many people fail to realize about Romantic heartbreak is that it also leaves you with the strongest of human feelings, though grueling, they are the ones that really rip you apart into feeling alive. ALIVE WITH FEELING! You could not feel so down, if at one point, you were not ingratiated with insatiable sensations of love, of loving and being loved. The whole concept of feeling FEELING should make you feel that much more alive, and those feelings should be bottled up and stored in a museum of raw human existence. We will all love again.
Losing ideals, though, that’s losing your identity. There was never a sense of reciprocation, just hope, and hope was never met. It gives birth to the pessimist, or the more refined cynic. The cynic is the skeletal remains of those ideals.
There is a great line from the show, China, Il, however, where Babycakes looks at the professor, who’s wife had just died in a car accident, but also wrote in her diary that she never loved him. Babycakes had fallen in love with the same lady after finding her diary at the scene of her accident, and reading it. Both the Professor and Babycakes were talking at her tombstone, the Professor devastated. Babycakes says for most people, diaries are just a place for people to lie to themselves a little. She had to love him a little, if she ‘sexed with’ him, that sexing with him is its own expression of her care--her other feelings about the relationship, which are normal, need to be transferred somehow, so they become lost, secret words in a diary. Eloquently, Babycakes talks about the ambivalence of life: “You and I, Professor, were both in love with the same fresh ghost,” he said. “I both love and hate taking baths, and I both love and hate taking craps, and I both love and hate my dad. That’s just the human way.”
In everything, life is a two-way track, between love and hate, honesty and lies, success and failure--you just never know where the train is heading until you get there. It just stops one day and you step off and see where you are.
Ideally speaking, we all should just learn to love each other, until it is impossible for anything else.
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