Exes

It's been a week of exes. Ex-boyfriends, ex-mother-in-law, ex job, ex boss.
If I weren't so bloody tired I would expound

Briefly: Had lunch with R on Friday, that alone merits a good thousand words, but I'll sum it up in several, pleasant, familiar, amicable, anticlimactic.

While drinking in a tres gay bar in the Castro on Friday night my former spouse and his mother phoned from the bowels of Target, to arrange a visit. Odd. Have not spoken to her in well over two years.

Tonight I guest bar-tended for my ex-boss at my ex-job, and was pleased to know that I am still a mean mixologist. I have not professionally poured a drink in three and a half years and I was slammed right out of the gate. I had fun, it felt good to be busy. For the first time in a long time I felt productive, as if I were actually working... I had half a thought that I might go home with French Toast, but he is still entwined with the Opportunist, thus I find myself wide awake (and sober!) at one AM, I had forgotten what it is to work at night...

What is about coming full circle, regardless of however circuitous the path, somehow we wind up where we began. Armed with... armed with, more experience, more age, a little more patience, a lot more forgiveness, a quicker wit, a broader spirit and a greater depth of sadness and a deeper breadth of joy. There is something so peaceful about making peace with the past, as if my younger selves were cordially shaking hands with my newer self, bridging the gaps and the aches and the soured relationships, as if we were Japanese, bowing, deeply bowing to one another. This is how it was, this it how it is, this is where the twain shall meet and continue ever onward, loop the loop, figure eights, forever greeting former incarnations and embracing them into the present.

Incredibly True Stories

Emma put her drawers on backwards this morning and did not remark upon it until much later in the afternoon, and only because we felt slightly baggy on the front end, if you follow our meaning. We were in the stall slightly aghast, principally because we are neither hung over nor love sick, just sick of not having any love.

Last Friday concluded several weeks of fete(ing) our Jesus year, the venue was Cafe Claude. We managed to allay our panic of being center stage by getting quite righteously drunk as to not hold ourself accountable for anything we may have said, or blundered and as a get out of jail free card for any drunk dialing we may have committed and apparently did... To our everlasting chagrin.

It's not that we don't like parties, we do, there were quite a few good friends who we don't see often enough and we had wished to be present, but we got stage fright you see, and bolstered our spirits with fortified spirits and had to spend Saturday prone in our bed, careful as to not let our poor aching head list one direction or the other.

We realize that we are being terribly, terribly glib, but the truth is that parties terrify us and we love the people who we love and want to give to them, absorb them, and then again we are easily side tracked by the prospect of getting laid, and have been known to tack in that direction heedless, oblivious. (just following the sailing metaphor, soon we will digress to talk sailor's knots and nautical knots and keels even and otherwise, what ho!) We found ourself on a sidewalk, suddenly quite alone with a sack full of fabulous loot and this is when we made our error. We made a call to Z who was is in a cab with S and asked him to "tuck" us in, I leave you to unravel the euphemism.

Z called to taunt us as we were holding a compress to our throbbing brainicle and trying to ingest our beloved Fauchon tea without hurling, we had no idea what he was saying as we had no recollection of placing said booty call, but after we had verified our shame on our cell phone, we sat down on the couch to absorb the shitstorm.

Principally (and we know that we should be recounting the pleasure of the company of our friends, and the jokes and the tales that were had, and just how extremely fortunate, that is before we were too blind drunk to know any better, we are in the blessed company of the fine people that we know) we were pissed because we violated our girl code, thou shalt not mess with thy girlfriend's boyfriend/bedmate/whatever and we did, and we are ashamed, and we had to eat a little crow, and it didn't taste so swell.

In other news, wherein we get older and life gets odder.
R. sang happy birthday into our cell phone and invited us to lunch on Friday. (And here we are sorely tempted to ease into the first person, but we are laminating the chinks in our armor and waging resistance) This, is of course, what we wanted, it just is about nine months too late. Curiosity prevents us from declining, and dare we say, we ought to, as it is the truth, we miss him, half wonder, half wonder... Half wonder if he wanted us back would we go...

Truth, half truth, probably, possibly, yes.

Then again, there is always that grand finale set-up cliff hanger at the Lemming Juncture, like, he now has a girlfriend he'd like to marry with our blessing, and we metaphorically take the Lemming triple sow cow (wait, that's ice skating) off of Lemming Juncture and sail into the sunset on the Good Ship Romantic Oblivion, or The Good Ship Invest in Batteries Girlfriend, Cuz You're Gonna Need Them.

Yeah, fucking tell us about it, good thing we requisition the office supplies and nobody notices when we pilfer a few double A batteries every other month or so....

Second oddity, which falls under How We Cannot Escape The Frogs, did we mention that R is French...

Several months ago our former employer made a rather unwelcome declaration of love, he is, of course French. He is also the former employer and current partner of our beloved French Toast (who is currently under the spell of a well known opportunist with a great rack and we are not bitter or anything, but that is beside the point)As of yesterday we have been shainghaied into accepting a guest appearance behind the bar, we so carefully tended many years back.

We are going back to our roots. We stopped tending bar shortly after (before?) our 29th birthday, to go back now is both comforting and derailing... There are so many ties, many layered, many tiered, many teared, bad blood, bad history, good memories, suffice it to say, that the last time we professionally poured a drink we were married and both our erstwhile husband and our poor self were embroiled in complex snares and affairs that only the most competent therapist could parse. Thank heavens she did.

Semaphore

This is your body at rest. A semaphore, my cryptogram.

These are your eyes shut against the gathering dawn, and the gulls crying.

Your face a placid mask, you sleep, a leg flung over mine, my arm pinned under your shoulder.

This still warm sheet your very own shroud of Turin, I roll into your retreating warmth.

I am the forsenic investigator, months later, intrigued. You are my cold case, and I am seeking the traces of me in you.

There is where I lingered by the window. There is my DNA in the carpet. There is the faintest trace of my perfume on the pillow. There is the remainder of the echo of my laughter and yours swirling in a neglected corner of the ceiling. Listen to us, listen to that, that is the sound of me loving you.

I'd like to imagine us a pair of predatory ghosts you and I. Haunting the periphery of our living lives... And then again, it could all be conjecture. Because the truth is, I have missed you all these many months, I have missed the metaphor of the semaphore of you.

Happy Birthday to Usses, or Shit Fire

we somehow managed to not save the draft we had been working on for the last hour, therefore we will attempt to summarize

We said, the events of the day augur well for an auspicious year, dirty thirty three, our jesus year.

A cab ride, a clear blue sky.

An unexpected ex serenading our cell phone, too many halves, half hoping, half reproach, half complicity, half expectation, half gone, half of a silhouette, a half of a fingerprint on a thigh, half of a curve fitted into half of a curve. Half a promise, now half forgotten.

perhaps a new job, perhaps a new life, perhaps.

old friends on telephone lines, mothers and fathers, a laid up brother.

A screening of Shrek 2, P, P and M, we laugh and laugh. Do you know the muffin, man? The muffin man? The MUFFIN MAN!! The perennial punchline.

odd days birthdays, one never knows what to expect when one expects nothing.

the bath is drawing, our earlier thousand word prose is lost, in one minuste we will be another day older and closer to death.

Friday night

darlin' sweet darlin' I'd gladly sell my soul down the river, for a pair of strong arms tonight and a kiss on the temple. Holler from my temple. Holler from my mountain, I've slept alone too many nights.

To all of the loners, the crazies and the zealots may your various gods grant you a night of reprieve, as the night is waning on my coast and dawn is breaking wherever you are, may the sun and the stars bring us all a pin point of hope. The most feeble shaft of light, let it serve as a beacon.

Let us pray now, pray from our insulated, secular cubes, let us pray, let us out pray those who would see us done. Pray to your Pantheon, pray to your Congresswoman, pray to your rabbi, pastor, martyred saint, pray to your newspaper, preferred website, pray for a bit of respite.

What would we do, what would we do, bombed out bummed out, swept up in a sweep, innocent in any other means. Stripped down, stripped out, hounded by dogs, clubs and guns.

I would offer as the Iraqi prisoner did when he was Saddam's guest, I would give seventy thousand prayers... Prayers unanswered, where is God in all of this?

What has happened to us, I believed in my native land, I believed in America. And what have we become, when Douche Limb-bog endorses torture as a way to "let off steam" and Bush and Co. dissembles and reassembles according to whimsy.

What happens when my father, he of the "Fuck Iran" tee-shirt of the late seventies. What happens when my father, hippie turned community leader says your mother and I are considering Vancouver. What happens when you are trying to console your weeping boomer papa, who is increasingly weepy with each assault on His America.

It breaks my heart, it is no longer His America we are a nation of bots, each toeing the party line.... I could go on to describe them, but the truth is that I am tired.

And as I said earlier, I would gladly surrender a limb or so to lose myself in a body that was not my own.

We know that we have been in absentia

but we are totally discombobulated by the new blogger format.

Emma's New York stories are being drafted, but we have a little nugget from the Department of Serendipity that we would like to share.

Some months ago we were rummaging through our desk drawer in search of something we undoubtedly did not find. We discovered an undeveloped roll film, it has been staring at us ever since.

...segue, the new Loretta Lynne CD, is, well, frankly righteous.

So it stared and stared, and we stared back. It intimidated us a little, it coulda been ours, but it coulda been our Former Spouse's, and if it were our Former Spouse's it could have contained graphic material, and not of us, if you follow...

We took our New York photos in for a chemical wash, and thought we would take the Unknown Roll in as well. Ya know, just for shits and giggles and curiosity killed the cat and all that.

Fate took our hand to the unknown photos first. The first picture was of a man we thought we didn't know, and yet somehow familiar. It was the wall and the wainscotting that made clarity blossom, the unfamiliar man was the Chef, one of our great loves.

Funny what time and distance can do. We were so sure we would have known him, the sound of his voice, the breadth of his hands, and there he is on our desk in the office and it took us a full minute before total cognizance.

The other photos were of some damning evidence of Ms. Brown and I gacked out on coke, having solved the world's problems in an all night natter-fest, I can still recall that we went out for red wind at eight in the morning to "sober up".

Other photos were of our bar tending gig, and long stay chez les frogs, of French Toast before he was my lover.

That was four years ago.

And it felt a little odd.

Getting ahead of ourself about the New York stories, the stitches came out fine, our physician had high praise for Dr. Smith. The black eye is fading to a charming shade of puce. And we have photographic evidence that Dr. Smith is just as delicious as our blood soaked, Armagnac brain thought he was.

La misere, ou la faute de la pleine lune

ire, fire,disparate irony
fathers and sons, fathers and daughters
the check is cashed, your goose is cooked

and the moon is racing the wind

bed, stead, sick head
lovers and traitors
the book is read, the sheets are fresh

despair, repair, cacophony
friends and foes
the hand is laid, the trap is set
________

the moon hangs heavy
the sky is impatient
________

we need a time out, we can't breathe. Formulate a clear thought, wrapped up in the spy genre, cloak and dagger, more daggers than cloaks. Assailed by the imaginative workings of our imaginative jailers, tired, so tired, in desperate need of an epiphany. Our weekend notable only for a tragic case of supreme irony, or in this case, (fuck it, no, really, fuck it)
it merits a good telling, no, we won't, we won't say...
(there might be a girl out there who might benefit from the telling....
...well it's it's all good and all that you have miraculously sprouted a conscious for your erstwhile sistah's, but....
... hold up, I've lost my train of thought...
... You know it well enough, the day late, dollar short scenario... Truth is you went to see French Toast on Friday in hopes of obtaining a little surreptitious nookie. Instead we uncovered that Toast had been fucking his roommate GiGi for a week, and need we mention that she is that much crazier than we are.

and threaded into that are many stories, storeyed, stored. We will keep mum. There is no other choice.

and the tide has cleaned us out