is the word 'diary' better than the word 'blog'? probably not.
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Caroleen, Huxley, Phil, and Charley.
This morning Caroleen and I took our dogs to the beach and took a good long walk down and up the path at Fort Funston.
I am currently in bed with a dog and a cat for three nights, while the Savages are out of town. Here�s me and Huxley.
And here�s Phil.
Right now the three of us are on the couch watching the huge flatscreen television.
Last night I went to a reunion party for Mr. Fives, a hiphop club I used to hang out at in the early 90s. Liz was a bartender there, I dated another bartender, and I was almost always on the dancefloor there, for as long as it managed to stay open. I have many, many good memories of those years. So last night I got to see lots of people I hadn�t seen for a very long time, and it was fun. Everyone is doing really well, and we were all marveling about how GOOD we all look, even those of us (not me) who have lots of kids now.
The evening also had its attendant sadnesses, as one of the five men who owned Mr. Fives together was my friend Creighton, who killed himself a couple of years ago. It made of the walk to and the days leading up to the event a rather reflective set of moments. An old friend brought one of Creighton�s photo albums with her, and Liz and I had a fine time looking through all the old photos and laughing at how we were fifteen years ago. �Wow. I�m glad I once thought that a silver bra could work as a shirt!� �Whoa. I almost can�t remember that hairstyle.� �Man. That is exactly how I want to remember him.� Etc.
Most of my conversations were fun and/or inspiring. A few were just normal or bordering on boring, with one person I ran into spending a bit too much time telling me about his life in a very earnest fashion. It�s what I call �bad earnestness.� I am all for earnestness and sincerity, despite the tendency this culture I live in has toward favoring ironic detachment. In particular I like it when people tell each other that they care about each other, or when one person communicates to another that something he or she has done has mattered, etc. But there are many ways of doing that. And �bad earnestness� lacks humor, I think. It can�t laugh at itself, or it fails to see how every story has multiple perspectives, and might even need to be told differently to different audiences or to the same audience in different settings. It is not self-reflective, and that is a bad quality.
But then I ran into an old friend I had almost forgotten about even though he was once extremely important to me. And the first thing he said to me was, �I just thought of you the other day, and how you saved my life.� Wow. When I was in college I used to see this really compelling looking guy sitting around all the time, by himself, looking anxious and also looking interesting. So one day, even though I am a bit of a social retard and don�t tend to make the first move in friendships, I just walked right up to him and introduced myself. Turns out he had been living in Berkeley for almost a year without making any friends. He was desperately sad and lonely. And so he basically moved into my apartment a few days later and we became really strangely oddly close friends. He was trying to be in love with someone in France (a mistake I�ve been known to make, too), so we never got romantic (and that tortured me, because of course I ended up thinking myself in love with him), but we were really good friends in a way that finds itself without a category understood by larger society. It was a really important time in my life.
And yet somehow I hadn�t thought of him for years.
He has this way of using my name while speaking to me, over and over again, at intervals, and of occasionally lightly resting his hand on my back just at the shoulder, or touching my arm while talking. These are all things a total playa might do, but they are also things that can be signs of a truly good earnestness, which is what they are when he uses them. And because they are bodily things and not just words, they transported me back very vividly to all that time he and I spent together.
So not only did I �save his life� without really knowing I had done so, but that�s how he narrates my role in his life to anyone he knows to this day, such as his wife, or Les Claypool. Ha. That�s right, he was at a party not too long ago and ran into Les Claypool, whom you may know as the excellent bass player for Primus. Les looked at him and said, �I feel like I know you. Why do I know you?� My friend replied, Actually, Jill S� introduced us many years ago.� Les yelled, �JILL S�?! CHARLEY?! HOW THE HELL IS SHE? WHERE THE HELL IS SHE? WHERE DID SHE GO?!� Etc. Yeah, Les also used to be a very good friend of mine, in a way that also isn�t quite captured by any labels we might find ready and waiting for us were we to label all our relationships according to societal expectations. And what a great guy. Truly. I wish I had not fallen out of touch. But it was sweet to hear he felt the same, you know?
And yes, he called me Charley. He gives all of his friends names that he makes up for them. No one has the power to stop him. Given that other friends of his were known as �Flapjacks� and �Curveball,� I was always pretty happy with �Charley.�
5:33 p.m. - January 06, 2007
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