8
taking a Dr. Pepper to the head; wondering, basically, if we can change the subject—since, somehow, I feel i’m in hot water. You have made me angry but that wasn’t her talking to me—that was her talking to her boyfriend—but since the things she said to her boyfriend might’ve been meant for me, well, she was talking to me, possibly, and, if she was angry, then, well, she was angry with me. Did it have to do with my ingrained, visceral, almost instinctive racism? I didn’t think so, because i think deep down Ursula knew, despite her need for assurances, that she was, in fact, superior to most white women, if not all of them, both because of her looks and, also, because of her job. I never met a blond that compared to Ursula, and it seemed more likely that I’d die a bachelor because of it. When it comes to relationships I didn’t want to feel like each new person was a step down—beauty-wise—from the last. If anything, they look better—to a point; the wild card being their age.
I definitely didn’t want a woman that was my age—I definitely wanted a woman in her thirties, if not younger, although, in defense of women in their thirties, women in their twenties—if they’re going to date someone older than them—like me, well, they’re not going to date me. They’re going to date a man that can open doors for them, or, if they don’t, then they are going to get bored (where boredom can be thought of as stupidity rising to the surface) and leave me for someone simpler, someone that won’t hesitate to make them think they are more beautiful than they are. ok, i pretty much pounded that Dr. Pepper, now. finished it off, rinsed my mouth with bottled green tea (to protect my enamel, if not the color of my teeth, which, I fear, will never look any whiter than they do now). Not so hot, i guess, for a generation that never cared for cigarettes—but they still have coffee, don’t they? So i won’t totally stick out.
You’re on a mission and it’s going nowhere; i know that is a very atheist thing to say, but come on! Are you telling me that you imagine you’ll be with your family in heaven? If they don’t look old, and you don’t look young, how will you manage that? But wouldn’t our appearance depend on a variety of factors, such as what we need to see—that which best supports the point we are trying to make? Or consider, just plain simple: you will feel differently about your parents than you feel about others—everything that makes heaven heaven—such as being an eternal family, would already be in it. “You don’t believe in heaven? But this life is impossible to fully understand; how can you not consider it, and, if you consider it, how can you not believe it, at least, that is, when you’re already feeling happy? Are you saying that, like the multiplication of a zero and a pole (math stuff) the profound stuff cancels out, and then you’re on the ball?”
“Are you saying that you choose not to think about it by running from it? That’s the only way you can escape the jaws of heaven—by running away from it.” But I knew better than to step into crazy land—where crazy land, fundamentally, is a function of challenging somebody’s world view—the things that they do or don’t believe when faced with the impossible—knowing the mind of God, in full. Now I didn’t want to talk about it. I knew that Cortez was atheist/agnostic—at least i thought i did. But that was part of what attracted me to her, i guess. I wanted to save her, and, in so doing, make her so thankful that our bond would prove unbreakable, at least, that is, until events should prove otherwise. what kind of events? “Events that are so interesting that we want to walk a little in that direction and see where it leads us.”
Contrary to what you might think—it was possible, at least a little, to imagine a life without Ursula. At least, that is to say, without her as a friend or partner—as someone or something that would forever escape me. But if I moved on to something more “present” than the first woman president, then, well, I wouldn’t find myself chasing anything, much less someone that, in the grand scheme of things, may never know anything about me. I could imagine that things would be different for me in the future—the future was a conditional and often subjunctive space that could shift meaning around indefinitely, even when, for better or worse, things start to get real. Now my ex—nobody that i had sex with or ever tried to make a permanent fixture in my life, at least for a sustainable period of time, spray painted a bridge or something, and it said, after me, “Make love real again!” By that, well, i think she meant love didn’t seem real because she couldn’t find anybody that thought she was attractive enough to build a relationship with.
Spoiler alert: when it comes to relationships, i do, at times, hold back, but, even when i restrain myself, my true feelings are expressed in sometimes slightly vicious ways. That, I think, is necessary, from time to time, to remind myself that, so far, anyhow, I’ve only been with bad people. Every last one of them is or was a bad person. Even that sounds like a cheap shot—what I mean to say is that every person I have ever been with (asexually or sexually) was never, and will never be, a good person. So? Is it possible for people to change? Yes, if they’re fundamentally a good person—but most people aren’t: they might, for example, expect you to give up all your talents (the intrinsic person that you are) and get a job as a bank teller or something. That way you can marry and have children, right? I choose, however, to be as close to truthful with myself as i can be, and that means that I can say, without pity, that, for the most part, every woman i’ve ever even been on a date with was a bad person. I don’t know why that is, exactly; but i think it probably has something to do with the fact that people don’t expect me to do everything in my power to be both true to myself and others, as opposed, for the love of God, to getting a job as a bank teller—or going back to school, at least, to get a job that would make it possible for me to be untrue to myself, and, in so doing, find a diminished net worth that would make it possible for me to raise a family.
But things don’t work like that. You be true to yourself, first, when getting a job and choosing a mate (if you can reconcile those two things) and then you raise a family. If you don’t do it that way, then, well, you wind up being a bad person—not because the life made you a bad person: life can’t make you a bad person if you’re a good person—never forget that—but rather, because you always were a bad person. Somethings are predestinated—not completely, but close enough, and, when they are, it should be of no surprise to us when we discover, that, for example, so and so will hurt others (including his family) if he doesn’t get what he wants—and by that i mean: if he never gets the chance to be something other than himself, then, well, he hates himself so much, that, well, he would do anything to be what he’s not up until the day that good people finally give in and realize that yes, some people are genuinely bad people, and you can’t change that—for all intents and purposes, when they show their true colors, there is nothing there. They don’t even exist unless you engage them, and if you engage them then you run the risk of not existing too.