The Recognition in Your Eyes Gives You Away Monday, Oct 27 2008 

Love and the Lack of It , , , , , nickjkirincic 19:00

Jean shorts, orange tan, shoes without socks, perfume, clever remarks, rum, peach fuzz, sweat, beer breath, newfound tattoos, pleasure, crow’s feet, remorse, guilt, pain. Why am I here? What is this solving? Wouldn’t the fantasy of this occurring go much more smoothly than the actual participation? How could this ever really make me happy? The sexual tension between the two leads should never be resolved.

“So why did you move to Kentucky?” she asks, blowing a kiss at the match after lighting a bent and rumpled cigarette. This conversation seems like it would have been more appropriate two hours ago, back when we were throwing back shots and making biting quips and laughing unnecessarily.

“To run away.”

“From what?”

“Everything that still exists in Kentucky.” Some people confess their sins to a priest, or silently to a God they can’t see. Some take comfort in friends, others family. And some of us come clean to the world via naked acquaintances, giving ourselves unfiltered in patches of half-hour conversation to someone who in a few hours/days/weeks/months won’t exist or matter outside a brief feeling of conquest or guilt.

“Well, you should come back then,” she says after a flicker of process, in that matter beautiful women tend to – clearly logical advice given unassuredly in a girlish statement/question.

“I just might.”

She pitches herself as all Miami girls who have done their homework do – as an easy, breezy, steely-eyed realist waiting to throw her jean skirt back on and go have a laugh at the world. At nineteen it petrified me, at twenty I did the same, at twenty-one I found it hilarious, at twenty-two it baffled me, at twenty-three it scared me, at twenty-four it saddened me and at twenty-five I just want to let it go. It’s not my problem. Ler her be that. That’s the sort of attitude I need to keep up if I want to jump back into this. I just need to decide if I want to jump back into it.

Sleeping with attractive women who I paint a personality for onto a mental canvas, an amalgamation of past loves and hopes who serve as vessels for reliving them…sometimes it beats a bottle and a Dylan record. Sometimes.

“So what are your plans for tonight?”

“Duck old friends, seek out a few drinking buddies…and generally disappoint a lot of people I love.” I’m really good at finding ways to make those sorts of comments draw a laugh. The less you know me, the funnier it is.

I know that a part of me is here to distract. But a part of me is also trying to relive a past that I soon will no longer be able to relive physically. I’d like to think that I’m not just living up to the allegation of clinging too long to what was – I’m simply not doing the same thing, I’m learning, my eyes see it from anew, etc. – but it’s still the same cramped (yet consistently pleasant smelling) bedroom in an old broken down house, the same overly slathered eyeshadow, the same questions, the same confessions, the same emptiness.

I have places to be, as does she. No exchange of numbers, no false declarations of plans. She has make-up to apply, fresh-faced boys to flirt with. I have beer to drink, couches to stumble onto. When we part ways we will both take one quick, thoughtful glance in the other’s direction, and we will do it at the same time, thus unravelling a little more mystery, and creating a bit more. We will not let this get in the way of our respective evenings. It will feel like I’m twenty again, and it will make me feel like I’m seventy-five all at the same time.

 

And I’m Falling Apart From the Looks I Recieve Saturday, Oct 18 2008 

Captain's , , , , , nickjkirincic 08:09

The most important rule to remember is that life is not fair. Back in Cleveland, I used to catch underage drinks with a man in his late twenties named Glen who constantly preached that from his barstool. The son of well-to-do parents, Glen spent the majority of his youth in a quasi-Paris Hilton existence, and when the time came around to enter the real world, he spurned his father’s offers for placement in a 9-to-5 and settled on running a popular sports bar. He spoke as if from on a podium, and his haughty, attention-seeking delivery was easily forgotten by the sharp intelligence that is often missing from his type.

“Life isn’t fair,” he’d remind us, regardless of whether we were discussing politics or sports or relationships. Innocent civilians died? Life isn’t fair. Girlfriend cheated on you? Life isn’t fair. Insurance company raking you over the coals? Life isn’t fair. You were never promised anything. Some would attempt to argue his logic, but would often be silenced by repetition or – depending on how many drinks he’d had – drowned out by a sing-song rendition of Beethoven’s Fifth.

“Life-isn’t-fair! Life is-n’t faaaaaaaair!”

The afternoon sun trickles through the branches as a shell of myself drinks a beer on the Captain’s patio with a sundress-clad acquaintance and her visiting father. Much of the details of the conversation are lost to the blur of alcohol. Perhaps this was why Hemingway was so brief with his prose.

The intoxication lends to the surreality of being home at a place that isn’t home anymore. The second I passed through the red iron gates onto the patio, my already limping brain seemed to recieve a shot of novacaine that numbed it into a static lull. I can’t be here as a visitor. Not under these circumstances.

For reasons I doubt either one of us could effectively discern, Devin and I had a falling out nearly eight months ago- the type that had no direct source but rather a snowball of irritations combined with the opening of past wounds. The causes are lost to time, but the effects still fester. Fearing the loss of our mutual friends, she set out on a declared campaign to ensure that they ‘choose sides’, undergoing fits of glass hurling rage reminiscent of a helpless grounded teenager at my mere appearance and disparaging my name at every mention. Excluded from nearly every congregation of Captain’s employees for their fear of her outbursts, I found myself bouncing around from bar to bar, listening to drinking acquaintances detail her long-winded rants against me the previous night.

Despite extensive speculation, I have no idea as to what triggered this. As far as I can discern she was trying to use the situation to right a wrong of her past. The fact that I am an insulting, narcissistic prick could also have something to do with it. Whatever the reason, the attack was so persistent and vile that a tired twenty-five year old simply couldn’t keep up. Devin always had a tendency to map out what is to happen in her mind and then attempt to jump into the role she has written, which causes those around her – even those she cares for – to wind up as pawns. I think it’s why she always took such lovely photographs.

The whole thing was all too much. For the third time in my life, I just ripped up my ticket to ride and threw it in the air. It was one thing to suffer the whims of a confused and manipulative twenty-one year old, but to watch everyone and everything you consider solace and home take the ship with her – not because they ‘took sides’ but because it was easier to do so…that just took too much out of me. It all reeked of the chaos and meaningless I had always feared the world to be. Either these weren’t meaningful bonds, they were just people who were here, who enjoyed drinking with me, who thought I represented something that made the brief period of time that they were them more enjoyable…or it reinforced that the world is far more likely to flock to the illogical than to the truth. Whichever it was, it exposed what I had gradually begun to hold faith in as a mere house of cards.

It was more than a job to me. More than a college town, more than just a confused young girl, and more than just a social circle. And that’s the problem with loving the mundane – you’re eventually so swept up in the anxiety of a desire for something more, you lose sight of what it is you really loved about it and why that sensation is so important.

The willing betrayal of my friends that was awkwardly forced by Devin was their fault, and the self-destruction that followed was my own fault. And, hell…someone across the goddamn country who had fucked with Devin’s head when she was a teenager probably explains away her fault. We all have someone to blame, but at some point the whole thing exploded into an over-the-top episode of a nasty reality show that I’m not certain would’ve happened without the advent of nasty reality shows. Life imitates art.

 We all adapt to what’s in front of us, and rarely are we aware that the melding is taking place until after the fact. Most simply walked away from the whole thing. Here I sit, nearly a year after some petty fight I can’t remember, watching Valerie pass by into Captain’s, acknowledging me with a smile and a I-wish-I-could-come-say-hi-but-my-hands-are-tied shrug. The person I thought to be one of the kindest, most beautiful person I’ve ever known, who I haven’t seen in months, who makes me smile at random intervals, who always sheepishly says the right things, who had little to do with any of this besides getting caught up in the tornado, who gives me faith in the world and in myself because when we looked into each other’s eyes we could melt, despite that I’m entirely certain that neither one of us has any clouded desire for romance. I never thought I was capable of thinking like that. I thought the world had gotten to me too much. I’m still not even certain I do or that I understand any of it or am worthy of it. It seems like something I should’ve fucked up long ago. But I should’ve been the one to fuck it up, not some choreographed soap opera that drove everyone to wit’s end.

We can’t say hello, despite the fact we’re ten feet away. We are both at great fault for this, but neither one of us started it in motion, nor do either of us seem sure that we can rectify it. I don’t even think she’s making a mistake by bypassing me. I dug my own grave to wind up here, just as we all have, and though we were all swept up in this because of Devin’s initial machinations, or whoever we blame but ourselves, I’d have to say that I’m the only one who really lost everything in the end. All because some punk kid did a number on a scared girl’s fears and self-esteem back in California ages ago, probably around the time I was listening to Glen’s sermons.

It’s my fault, it’s her fault, it’s his fault, it’s their fault, it’s no one’s fault. I don’t think anyone meant any harm. We just weren’t thinking. Life isn’t fair.

 

The Flowers She Sent and the Flowers She Said She Sent Thursday, Oct 16 2008 

This is What I Settled For , , , , nickjkirincic 08:17

I’ve heard that Native Americans used to believe the act of taking someone’s photo actually captured their soul. That could be bullshit for all I know, but if they did I think they probably meant that reflection of one’s own past removes a part of them from their present. I think that holds true regardless of a happy past or present, although considering the short end of the peace pipe they got, I imagine the reflection would be on a past of torment and loss. It probably came from a more instinctual, animalistic sense, where one must roam and forget with no time to bury the dead. If a hyena stopped to look at a picture of his dead brother or a girl he fucked four years ago, he’d have his throat ripped open in no time. You have to keep your wits about you out there.

I also think that a reflection of the past is often all too frighteningly similar to the present, minus the youth and exuberance, wilted relationships and untested ambition. If we look back, we see that all we did was try to stay alive while searching for solace, which is the same thing we’re doing right now. The fears and doubts still remain, the fear of rejection and alienation still intact. Our methods of quelling those fears are no different than the last futile effort, their form morphing from a blonde to a brunette to a bottle, each an attempt to run from what came before them. We have to move on so as not to see what happened.

Take a look at yourself in a photo from your past. The word ‘innocence’ certainly comes to mind, regardless of your status in that past. For most of us, even our greatest sins are committed in innocence, which decays with each passing year. And if that past represents innocence, then does our present reflect its opposites – blame, corruption, evil, guilt, impurity? Few can look into the eyes of their photographed past and not feel guilt or shame for what’s become of them, what they’ve let the world do to their souls. We want to jump back into them to relive youth and passion or bring back the dead or make belated apologies to former lovers or appreciate the moment more than we did at the time it was captured.

We tell ourselves and others not to dwell on the past, to move on, to let it go, to try and meet someone new. But isn’t our ability to look back to the past what makes us superior beings intellectually? Mourning, funerals, rememberances, laments - isn’t this the difference between us and the animals? And yet we ultimately run from it, as it has a tendency to paralyze us. To spend too much time thinking that a certain family member is missing from the dinner table is a much, slower, realized version of having a lion snap your jugular. To live is to move on. To move on is to dull the intellect.

 

How I Dearly Wish I Was Not Here Monday, Oct 6 2008 

This is What I Settled For , , , , , , nickjkirincic 17:53

The long distance phone call is drenched in sadness. It really doesn’t matter how the conversation goes. It could be pleasant. More often than not it’s either stunted or painful. But no matter what happens, at the end of it you hang up and realize that you are here and they are there. The technological advances in the communication don’t help to solve that disconnect any better than ink and quill. In fact, it probably accelerates the pain.

Ink and quill doesn’t quite capture the meloncholy of discovering that she has to hang up because she’s going to see a movie with her new friends in her new life. It can’t nakedly display the quiet desperation of a mother whose world has moved five-hundred miles away. It keeps you at a safe distance, where you can ache and wonder and read it again and again and again; but it spares you from the immediacy, from the feeling of being so close but so utterly far apart, from the truth. What we conjure up in our imagination – even our darkest nightmares - are never truly as painful as what reality inevitably provides.

And while the long distance relationship is unfulfilling and quite hard to swallow, it pales in comparison to the long distance conversation with a past relationship. Not only are you separated by geography, but also by history, by personal evolution, by time. There are whole portions of the plummeting graph chart that they’ve missed out on and I don’t know how to explain. I’ve learned to keep my distance from these sorts of exchanges, but sometimes you find yourself too drunk and lonely and vulnerable to resist.

“Hello?”

“Oh my God, he lives.” Her voice sounds more gravelly than I recall. She still snorts into the phone when she laughs, producing a shrill wooshing sound.

“He does, and he’s a little busy…Mulder is onto something big here. If the government doesn’t find a way to destroy the evidence, he may finally have the proof-”

“Where are you?” she asks with a laugh I’m fairly certain accompanies an eye roll and potentially the gnashing of teeth. “Why don’t you answer anyone’s calls?”

“Lexington, Kentucky.”

“Kentucky?” I can picture her sneer, although it’s probably framed with a different haircut than I remember. Lauren was born and raised in Long Island City. She probably envisions me living in a barn.

“Long story…how’s the second Bush term gone for you?”

“Seriously, it has been that long, huh?”

“Close enough…you fucked up?”

“Just drunk,” she purrs. “Why?”

“Wondering why you’re calling me at four in the morning.”

“I miss you.”

Perhaps she meant to hit ‘Danielle’ or ‘Dave’ and struck ‘Dan’ by accident. Maybe she passed a sushi restaurant we once ate at, or needed a refresher from Manhattan suitors and had to deep dig into her past. One too many drinks is also a likely motive. But she cannot miss me. She doesn’t even know me. I don’t really know her very well anymore. The last I’d heard she was engaged, but it could’ve been a joke. All we really know of each other is what the other wanted to be five years ago. We have become relative strangers. Perhaps that’s why she called. Probably why I answered.

“What have you been up to?”

“Uh, let’s see…won my fantasy football league three years ago. Fell in love a couple times…I think. Maybe just falling in love with potential, I don’t know. I graduated college, got a couple tattoos…and now I drink rum from a big plastic bottle and watch my mystery stories.” She laughs. They always laugh, just a little.

“Where are you working?”

“I am working…on this case. Apparently a government-engineered fleet of bees carrying the smallpox virus have begun to appear, and I need to figure out what’s going on before five, because they’re showing the Saved by the Bell where Zack dresses up like the Russian kid so Screech can win the chess-”

“You still try to charm your way out of talking with cutesy jokes.” I don’t hear a question mark or a snort at the end of her sentence.

“I’ve tried to cut back.”

“So what’s in Kentucky?”

“A sad dude talking to you on the phone…lots of horses. So where has NBC pagedom taken you? And please don’t say secretary.” There’s a silence that quickly deflates the mood from playful to throat-clearing.

“It’s a really cool place…on Bleecker. It’s not what you’d think. I wear jeans and a t-shirt.” I can’t tell if she’s selling it to me or herself.

“That sounds cool,” I whisper.

She is a secretary. She was supposed to be a fashion designer. I was supposed to be a writer. This conversation is a sharp reminder of who I was then, and what I thought of the world, where I had planned to be, where I ended up. I think I answered the call because I wanted to talk to someone who knew me back then, and has had that memory stand frozen through the course of time it took to get here. I want to go back to then, and this is the best way I know to do that. Keeping in touch is like masturbating to your past. A quick thrill, and when it’s over, the realization that it just isn’t the same.

“You introduced me to Wilco,” she says abruptly, leading me to believe that she’s as lost in her own little world of mythic past as I am. “I think of you everytime I hear them.”

“You fucked me in a wine bar.” I smile for a brief second, listening to the ice dance with my glass and the whoosh of static in my ear.

“I’m not really like that anymore.”

“Neither am I.”

We’ve tapped into the gooey sap within the time-tested bark, where we will trade old stories and give out snippets of life synopsis, which will most likely make us both kind of sad. No matter how the conversation carries, we will inevitably reach the point where one of us offers a reason they need to wrap things up, as the other quickly chimes in with their own version. There will be a brief silence, and we’ll agree that it was nice to talk to each other. Perhaps there will be a rebuffed invitation to visit, and then almost as an afterthought, she’ll tell me to take care, in that concerned yet patronizing way they always do.

I’d be willing to bet a bottle of rum that after she hangs up, if she doesn’t immediately rifle through her contact list for another ghost to call, she will sigh and look towards the sky. The sky is the closest thing we have to the universal. No matter how far apart we are separated by time or distance or perception, at that moment we are both living under it, just as we did back then. Aside from intangible memories or static artifacts such as Wilco records and old matchbooks, the sky is all that truly remains with us from that past. Once we turn our eyes back to the ground, we find ourselves right back where we started.

 

Once Upon a Time I Could Lose Myself Friday, Oct 3 2008 

This is What I Settled For , , , , , nickjkirincic 18:28

It’s two-thirty in the afternoon on a Wednesday and I’ve got half a Percocet up my nose, staring into the layers of a stiff rum and Coke – off-white at the top, with a light brown cascading down into the murky bottom. “Hey Joe” plays on the jukebox as I listen to a man wearing overalls and no shirt rattle off every member of Jimi Hendrix’s band, my mind seven years away.

I’m fresh-faced and charming, troubled but not yet broken, laying in a cramped and foreign bedroom with the friend of a co-worker named Jenny. She’s wearing entirely too colorful of an eyeshadow, and I will be showering remnants of her glitter off of my cheeks for the next few days. Outside I can hear the muffled thump of hip-hop bass and a sea of chatter as I grind the end of my cigarette into the alarmingly small pile of cocaine sitting on the nightstand. It lights with a dull fizzle.

“Care if I do a line off you?” I ask casually, squinting my eyes at the wave of smoke slithering from my cigarette.

There are two versions to this memory. There is the version that was formed as it happened, and there is the version I’m now rememering in a Kentucky dive. There is the version where I sound cool, spontaneous, desireable, and the version where I sound creepy, manipulative and pathetic. There is the version where she says yes with a purr and a slinky smile, uninhibited and assured, and there is the version where she forces a confident yes, betrayed by the burning shame and fear in her eyes. There is the version where she tells her friends about it with a wink and a tongue-in-cheek, aware of its effect on her percieved prowess, and the version where she tucks her knees underneath her chin and shudders at the thought. I think both versions actually happened.

That eighteen year old kid, the one who preyed on a girl’s desire to run with the cool kids in order to feed his own desire to run with the cool kids, the one who talked a sweet, impressionable girl into doing her first line, into letting him snort powder off her to feel powerful, is far more desireable to the world than the kid who currently finds himself in a nauseating blur of a day-drunk, listening to a man who looks like he would fit right in on Hee Haw  explain why Foreigner sold out.

Because the eighteen year old wanted to manipulate the world in order to get laid and make money. He is considered more adjusted because he had goals, purpose, drive. They were misguided desires, and his pursuit of them turned him into a narcissitic prick…but he made an effort to file in line, he chased the dollar, and he tried to talk his way into getting laid. And as long as you’re doing those things, no one’s ever going to tell you that “maybe you should go see someone”.

My eighteen year old self could engage in those sorts of pursuits because he didn’t question every aspect of every situation so damn much. He didn’t bother to think about Jenny, or who she was or what she feared or why he wanted to blow a line off of her inner thigh or why she agreed to do so. He didn’t wonder why it felt more comforting to spend the night with a beautiful stranger than with countless others who were wiser, wittier, more challenging (but most likely less physically attractive). He didn’t find every romance to be a hollow feeding of the head(s), he didn’t question why he spent the majority of his days making money for other people, and he wasn’t so haunted by the mindlessness of the world in and around him.

I want to apologize to Jenny, and I want to knock that eighteen year old kid’s teeth right out of his skull.