Happy Disconnections

"happy disconnections" a story
Note: Just a story from a rather long time ago.

"...To accept the conclusions of those that are considered learned and have gone before is to also accept a life with limitations that parch ripe fruit as a decaying vine withers towards finite dissolve. To accept. To release the weights of judgment from our world weary shoulders and clear up time for productive living. A system to make life more livable? By eliminating the falling lights of questions that crush dreams. “I got things I want to do.” Here’s the pill, it’s been candy coated for ease of swallow. It’s been time tested, and it’ll even make you forget why you took it in the first place.
I do not remember the first meeting but I am sure that we had been introduced. It was probably, maybe 5 or 6 months later that the internal warning system that seemed to hold me under it’s toe shot red and gave light to something I had long forgotten. My motor showed the scars that are left by winters left abandoned in the elements not by pushing it over 80 on inclines. Nobody came up to me and said “hey, you haven’t changed since high school.” Two reasons, the first being my steadfast dedication of not associating with my former protagonists. The happenstance of our communion was not enough to tie me to eternal bonds. I left my ties to adolescence back with my full hair line. My professional life was one of obsessive anonymity and take offs from short runway airports, in prop planes that flew well below radar. I read Kafka and dreamed of the possibilities. Business casual, casual, weekend attire, all were the same to me. None of the outfits considered too conservative or too brash. I realized a bit far into the game that I dressed so everyone that approached could pull some sense of commonality from me. The slackers, would see the ironing not too straight, the suits would notice the quality pleats. Or at least I would focus on the items that made for common ground. I sought common ground. Not war, not higher ground, common. Connections.

My first love was 2nd grade, and she too had the determination for equality that was instinctual. Given an atmosphere that allowed for full flowering and not persecution, it would flourish when nourished. It could also engulf and crush, but at that point who was showing such foresight? Remember they weren’t even aware that computers could crash without 4 digits in the year, back in those days. I did not know the meaning of man and woman but I did feel a sense of the need for the union. I was on the playground, not the area with all the swings, or the area where the kids played soccer, or even the area by the doors where various cliques developed, but in the dirty trough by the fence where the trees were lined. A couple friends would gather and contemplate the miracle of bark, while someone mercilessly assuaged the living rights of a centipede. Karen would be playing hopscotch nearby on occasion with some of her clan, but I noticed her. Did I obsess on it? Daydream? Build the elongated scenes of life and love that I would be ever so wont to do nowadays when I catch the eye of a perfect girl across the bar? Are you asking me that now? I was only eight, for Chrissakes. My biggest annoyance would be to come to the realization that I was being watched the whole time by some instructor, thinking, “oh how precious.” Not to be caught in the early stages of hetero-lust, but rather to know that my emotions which I felt were being so brilliantly shrouded were actually on display and being judged for accuracy and “cuteness.” They’re mine, thank you, and I’ll trust you to unhand my feelings and give them back. It’s funny but my life-lasting lust for little Karen led to my near-nuptual later in life when I was a struggling twentysomething. Struggling? Well not freedom fighting, third world, dysentery struggling, but the kind of struggle that makes you do simple math calculations in bed at four in the morning as you try to figure out if you are ahead in the great equation of life. How does it go? Savings account balance times age divided by number of kids? or is it years to retirement divided by equity minus the months remaining on the mortgage? Whichever, I would think that the equation would always reach the same heartless conclusion that tells me that I have lived much longer than my sense of dignity would seem to indicate. So yea I was struggling, struggling into my twenties while the brilliant apparition of a girl from grade school hung in the air of every dim apartment up in the rafters with the cob webs and pot smoke.

Seems I met up with a girl at a work picnic one weekend, and she had known Karen back during her studious college days. Yea, Karen stopped rebelling long enough to graduate with honors and begin a career in bio-engineering. Knew there was something about her...

Anyway, Lizayne did not graduate with honors or with anybody for what it is worth, and had adopted a free spirit life. The cross country drives that always seemed to end up in either Kansas City or Chicago, depending on whether or not we stayed on the Pennsylvania Turnpike after the Carlisle exit provided me with a glimpse into the lives of others, which was the problem. Had it allowed for an instance of glimpse into myself it might have been rewarding. As it was I would see myself in the eyes of others, which I thought was playing off of that whole mirror theory. In actuality I was just losing myself in the unbinding parade of sameness which we paraded through. it all there, available to anyone, in just a few easy steps; create your own reality, bring others into it. Allow for no accountability of actions and you have got yourself perceived life experience. And there ain’t all that much variety out on the backroads of America to really keep attention beyond a quick been there done that cynicism. We can mock apes or fish or water flowing along a drainage, but really, what I saw was that free will was just the remnants of random probability being played out on a larger canvas. When you have seen one rebelling teen you have seen them all. Every now and then Lizayne would reenter that canvas, sprinkle in a few pastels, an occasional cloud, and allow for us to continue conjuring.

On the playground Karen would come over and chat with us, maybe join in as we ran a twig through the dirt, start to make the connection. I would talk to her, but all the while well aware that it was important that I pay way too much attention to her friends, just to keep anyone from knowing I was paying attention to her. As I started to drift towards her more and more I faced the prospect of spending all of my remaining time with her friends or just continue to be with her. I made the leap as soon as I determined that nobody could construe what we had as being anything other that friendship. She told me she would never get married, that men hold women back. She said she was going to be the first woman President. I though George Washington was President. She had ideas that were of a life of travel and independence, but most of all of being her own person. She saw it as rising above shackles, I saw her as wanting to rise above being female. I had no such ambitions. I did not seem to mind getting married, but I do seem to remember being apprehensive about having to kiss somebody in front of all those people. I wanted things of material, but I was quick enough to realize even at that age that such dreams would be dismissed as shallow. I also wanted to be able to remain with the same group of people forever. I had no problem with my classmates. I felt coddled in the heart of my family. I wanted to play every last inning of this game, and I wanted to play it with this team.

Well, we graduated, people move, people die, soon there is a new team, and you want to remain part of that group to grow, to share to watch the whole thing unravel. To be able to turn to someone and cite a silly little conversation from years past and weigh it against the terms of the present. I got fired once, or as I like to call it; "kicked out on my worthless, sorry ass," and I remember on the long lonely drive home with my crappy nick-nacks riding shotgun that the greatest bone of contention that I felt towards my former wage providers was that they had ripped me from a family that I had begun to grow with. That I was now removed from that connection, and nothing would get me back in no matter how many happy hours at the Rib Bar across from the office, happy hours I would now have to posthumously crash, I could not reconnect. I was an outsider, quite involuntarily, but disconnected none-the-less. Now, I have been around enough to know that people leave jobs everyday and do not seem to feel as though they have been taken out before the third act. I did. I did back in school, but when the ties broke, a nice summer day in June of a few years ago, the car was packed and the family ties broke. But I cannot help but rebuilding them, and once you have had them torn, torn unvoluntarily, for the second time, I might add, you tread carefully.

When we were not racing across borders, Lizayne and I lived together in a house subletted by Charles Janis. C.J. was a 19 year old only child who had lost both his parents to illness within the past three years. He inherited a house and money without debt or obligation. His parents had built up the garage into a nice one bedroom apartment with the intention of C.J. living there while he went to college, to both keep him close to home but also allow him his freedom. C.J. decided to still live there, and with a few boards and nails turned the house into 2 separate units. I am sure the local building codes considered it illegal, and on the occasional month that C.J. actually asked for rent I should have brought it to his attention. Lizayne worked a graveyard shift in global telemarketing and nights I would stroll to C.J.’s and we would smoke cigarettes and jam “unplugged” on a couple of electric guitars. I found work with a contractor that did enough indoor work to keep the business going relatively year round, yet he advertised sparsely enough to keep the load light. I fell 10 feet down his uninsured ladder one day, and out of maybe fear of prosecution, as well as a sense of pity, he let me work on his books. Since the pain of falling off a ledger hurts less than a ledge, a nice desk assignment spelled a win win formula for everyone involved. As long as I managed to get away from the desk every hour to keep my back from tensing up but not be away to long as to have my ankles swell, things turned downright peachy. I took enough of a shine to accounting to realize it was something I could do on a regular basis. It would take me about 10 years to reach that conclusion and focus in, and by then I realized that what I was focusing in on was not the degree of permanence that the word “career” has for a 20 year old, but rather the realization that jobs, careers, goals, life are all borrowed.

As if possible, Lizayne and I took trips that were longer but except for the desire to get to some life we were missing by staying at home, the trip itself would soon buckle under the weight of its own purposelessness. The charms I found in Lizayne were the charms that lead me to propose. We would drive miles with nary a word exchanged between us. We would meet up at some tiny Midwest bar with a whole new host of characters and not rely on each other’s experience to damage our own. We would drive out of town having just experienced the same thing but with two differing views. Imagine two video cameras tied together so that they both recorded in the opposite direction, none of the images were the same, but both borrowed the same point of origin.

Karen moved on to a private school in eighth grade. By then she had developed into a class leader, nonplused by either the cause of feminism or by it’s backlash. At the time it was a stance that I mistook for feminism. Anybody that brisked the tide, was somehow fighting for revolution. Looking back, revolution she did not seek. She knew her cage was made from shadows, and she was free to walk whenever she wanted. Let other’s argue the existence of iron restraints, real or perceived, lets all go out onto the back field and have an old tyme philosophers row. You can take up the side of man made constraints and then you over there can take up the cause for societal ills, and we will meet again next Tuesday to do it all over again. But do not call for Karen to wave a flag or even to watch the highlights on ESPN; all of the arguments on how we make our own prison, the size, the lack of air. She had better things to do.

Lizayne and I soon found that the differing perspective of our cameras was OK, but at the end of the day we really did not need to take the trips together. Actually, we knew that all along. But in the world we had created, of an endless stream of experiences and new faces and an ever changing landscape, we found we were meeting people but not making the connection., Soon we blamed this on each other. Once you consider someone a hindrance to connecting, it is gone. We moved on.
Which is why they remind me of Sandra. We made a connection.

Ah sweet connections. we are gathered here today to try and gain our fair inch of progress in evolution’s relay race. I know that in the few millenniums of recorded history from which I am somewhat privy to have access, we have annotated multiples of civilizations that sharing some god forsaken “I cannot really figure out why anybody wants it” piece of ratty turf have fought and fought and fought to no discernible conclusion. But no connection? I believe the connection was made. That may better explain the fighting. Anyway, connections do not really offer up a translation into groupspeak. Two people connect if they have fortune’s blessing. At the other extreme are millions thinking as one, spurred together in commonality, and from an aerial vantage, seemingly connecting. But I would argue that a million people are connecting on a framework which is built on a momentum caused by extreme peer herding. You may be a player in the cult of Bill Clinton or Mick Jagger or Bill Gates or Fozzy Bear, for that matter, but I refuse to believe that you have made a connection. Why, you ask, desperately clutching your director’s cut of Pulp Fiction. Well, because that’s, my goddamn theory. And you do not know enough about connections at this point to really be grilling me on the details. Somewhere in between the one-on-one and the million throng, there are the three-four-five people group connections. They may exist. But even that is probably just a rock-paper-sissor interconnecting of one-on-one connections. Think about that high school crowd, those four friends that sealed each week and dominated the walk home each day. They were speed dial before there was speed dial. That was not five people equally connected. They were pairs, sometimes unreciprocated, which broke off like mutant strains of cancerous cells latching onto another. Then that one to another, and then back to complete the circle jerk of teen cliques.

How can you spend a month in the front of a Ford two-seat Mustang with a person that you share your life with and find out at the end of the thirty days that you made memories but did not make a connection? And then across the street as you go to the local convenience store for a bagel because you had miss counted the night before and thusly today’s breakfast at home would be the one egg left in the carton, or dry Apple Jacks, and as you turn to avoid the glare of a low hanging early spring sun you catch the eye of someone else and for all of your life you believe that you made a connection?

The last stand for my hometown high school clique occurred a couple years after graduation at a time when we fed more off of the haze of bodies colliding than of achings to be. At that point you nobody would really have a problem if you had chosen one of the two byways of life’s journey. Live for the now or live for the future. Build something or take what you could. Of course the ship gets tossed once you can no longer see the coast line and the berth gets a little higher and you decide that you may be able to do both. Which means you wind up inevitably doing neither, except floating in circles and landing back on the shore which you departed."
(c) 2005 Brian DiMarco