My apartment is an oven. It's only 60 something degrees on the west side of San Francisco and most civilians are sporting light jackets or fuzzy sweaters as that classic late September breeze rushes past Ocean Beach and straight through the streets all neatly aligned in alphabetical order. My prayer flags are dancing in the sunny evening air out on my balcony which makes me smile and mutter aloud, "that's cute," but from the other side of a thick sliding glass door, my living room is steaming and incubating a harsh smell - some sort of confused collaboration between life and death - the reality of my roommate's stray hairs rerooting in stained 80's carpet and a fossilizing glass of tea breading new life on the tv table right next to me. The sunflowers I bought two weeks ago emit an odor only to be mistaken by stale sex and over worn insoles, but they still look pretty damn good so I'm trying to overcome, and the best way to breathe through this sweltering and stuffy situation is to slide that moldy framed glass door a little to the left to let a column of freshness press into my brave reality. The vertical blinds, now closed to keep the blazes out, are waving in the little bit of wind streaming through the happy column, and on the other side of my kitchen the shadow of the blinds' movement is strobing on and off, hypnotizing and seducing me into a situation I know not yet. I'm sorta looking forward to what is secretly bound to happen.
Not surprising to my dear, devoted readers, my most recent situations have lacked luster and good cheer. The synapses between my neurons have been gathering too much of my good things and holding them hostage to the rest of me, leaving my fingers to curl back in bitter hostility - deep and dark blog postings, the unfortunate result. (And you think it's uncomfortable for you?)
It's a long hall to go down to get to where one really ought to be. I realized that in the bathroom of The Little Shamrock on 9th Ave and Lincoln. It's a great lil pub, but dang they've got a long john; my tiny and spirited bladder urged me forward, over the slippery, scum tiles, past the boring-forest green painted and surprisingly untagged walls, to the toilet of no return. In the end I was relieved, and on my way back out, after accidentally splattering extra strength dial soap against the wall and managing to lather only a bit of it between my palms, the sincerity and realness of this particular loo dawned on me.
Going to and through shit is a long hall.
No matter how antsy and ready I am to find my destination on this crazy self-defining or defeating journey, I still gotta walk that green mile and deal with the now. I gotta embrace it if not simply laugh at it. I gotta breathe it in to fill every pocket of my lungs as if to hug the only moment I've ever got, no matter how crappy and stale and moldy it's revealed to be. Sometimes the Ultimate Now is a closet to shit in and sometimes it's a stretch of fresh air pressing into a clutter-fucked and over-incubated apartment of depression. Either who, when, where, or way, it's a hall I'm gonna walk down.
Earlier today, before the shadowy light show on my kitchen cabinets, I found myself at a Safeway I don't usually attend. With cart and grocery list in hand, I further found myself shoulder to shoulder with my dumpy, miserable excuse for human life ex-boyfriend's best friend/roommate. We were both deciding on a good cheese, and that kind of thing takes time. So in the unbearable awkwardness of the moment, in a situation we both tried to deny, under a cool, confident smirk, I billowed and beamed. When he finally picked out his American 2% singles and turned towards me to get by, my undirected smirk grew a little wider. I imagine young Charlie going back by bike to his own long hallway of an apartment on 27th Ave, gitty to tell Douche-Bag who he just saw in the dairy aisle, and explaining, "Yeah, she actually looked really good" before continuing his gripe about their equally lame, only stirred by drugs and scratched vinyl lives.
Checking items off my list and strolling down the food lined halls for any loose items, my smirk remained in full tact. I was certainly surprised that cyphering over cheese next to a brief moment in history produced such exponential momentum forward in my search for understanding... I guess it's proof that past pushes into future and you can occasionally use a run in with the enemy to appreciate your own internal allies.
At this point, the sun has completely set; the wind's died down and the smell of steaming death by sunflowers has settled into my realized apartment. It's still warm in here, warm enough for bare shoulders and sockless toes. When this sentence is over, I'll walk down the hall to the bathroom and hope my insights stay put: finding the Now is a long hall to go down, always has been and always will be, but it's unarguably worth the time.
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