Monthly Archives: November 2019

Want and Need

I often find myself at the fork choosing between the paths of want and need, and, in spite of myself, but also what makes me me in the end (nothing ever really ends) I almost always choose need

Another Day

It was a day as normal as any other. He walked up the steps of the Barson building after having been invited to artist gathering on the second floor. His close friend Charlotte had an art opening above. 

It was pleasant enough.

“I’m so glad you came,” she said, in her characteristically warm and inviting way. For as long as he had known her, she had been more than just polite, but also genuinely interested in connecting with those around her.

He saw all the usuals, the eccentric lawyer, the artist friend who was doing her best with art too. Some local musicians, business owners. 

He always felt some uncertainty about how to engage in these environs. Should he play the game, put on airs like everyone else? But also felt at home in these places. It was ok if he disclosed his brokenness, his insecurity, his awkwardness.

He saw Paul, and felt angst. Would things be ok? They had an ongoing rift, some argument from some time ago that he couldn’t even really remember.

He tried not to fixate on it, although fixating was really the only thing he was good at. That and fucking things up in ever more interesting and inventive ways.

He sipped on the free wine and ate a few bites of the crusty local bread on the table while trying not too make too much of a mess of the crumbs. 

“Charlotte did it again,” he heard someone say. Charlotte wasn’t from Modesto but had bravely relocated here to be closer to relatives. It wasn’t easy for her, he later learned, but he never saw that in her disposition. She kept a blissfulness about her, maybe explained by her unrelenting pursuit of what interested and engaged her. Her contentment always showed through.

Paul approached him.  He always admired Paul, Paul bore an honesty about himself and his place in the world that James didn’t find anywhere, even in himself.  Even if the honesty sabotaged him, Paul stayed true to it. 

James, in contrast, had lost all sense of himself at some point, was constantly searching for it, he felt.

He vacillated between total commitment to some vague vision of what a community could be and an aggressive selfishness that bordered on solipsism.

“Hey bruh, what are you doing here?” Paul asked. It felt confrontational, but James tried to wave it off, absorb the blow with no notice. This had the opposite effect.

“Listen to me, man, I am talking to you”

James tendency to keep the situation cool or try to keep it from descending into conflict had the wrong affect. It appeared as if he didn’t care, as if he didn’t have feeling, like something he’d read about someone on trial a long time ago: a perpetrators attempt at appearing cool and reserved appeared as if callous, as if they had no care for their victim, which was not true at all whatsoever.

Paul became visibly agitated. “You know we never talked about it, and you never wanted to talk about it.”

“We can talk about it now, if you’d like,” James replied.

“You don’t really care, you don’t give a shit, you fucking piece of shit,” Paul said.

The words hurt like knives stabbed in James’ stomach. He felt a kind of love for Paul, a person with whom he’d connected like no other. But he felt things were de-escalating quickly in this moment.

He decided it was right to leave, that being there would no longer do good for anyone.

He made for the door, but Paul, who was much taller than him and always carried some esoteric work of literature, walked after him.

As he hurried down the hallway, the book to the back caught James off guard. 

Paul was livid, and they had gone back and forth in this way for years. His politically incorrect intuitions made him wonder: was this some kind of German-French antinomy from long ago rearing its ugly head? 

He didn’t know, but he did know the book hurt, and that he needed to leave.

“Grow up, you little bitch, who the fuck do you think you are? Come back here”

His blood boiled, but his flight or fight instincts told him to leave. He could fight, he knew, even if Paul was much larger than him, but what good would that really do?

He noticed the pleasant feel of the flannel on his skin, the sun in his face as he left the building.

“Come back here, coward!” Paul yelled as he ran down the stairs after James.

James didn’t say a thing, but fled for his car. Sure, he might be a coward, but this was to be resolved another day.