Drunk Dialing
Posted on June 25, 2008
Filed Under bat-ass crazy, bitching and moaning | 15 Comments
In the effort to dismiss such things as my “reputation” as a writer; in keeping with he communal effort that is blogging, I am now indulging a sort of inebriated form of posting which, like drunk-dialing, is the solitary outreach of an intoxicated, lonely person with access to the tools of technology. It’s a blast of nonsense out into the atmosphere or blogosphere or, at the very least, somewhere other than their living room where there is only a cat asleep on the couch amid cracker crumbs, a few fallen soldiers (emptied wine bottles) on the coffee table, the companions to the remaining rind of a wheel of brie.
Tonight was book group night and a flock of female friends descended here to discuss everything but the book I’d chosen for this month’s read which is an excellent book, a fucking masterpiece but decidedly not a beach read and therefore was neglected by most in the group who gave up on all near-serious literature back in early May. I loved, loved, loved Gilead by Marilynne Robinson and could have underlined and highlighted and swooned over every damn line in the book but chose to really hyper-focus on one important passage conveying the true and consuming conflagration of new love,
“…there she was again. I was miserable with relief, afraid I might laugh for no reason, afraid I might look at her too long, trying to remind myself she was a stranger, though she had been my dearest, most inward thought for weeks, and that I might startle her with some unaccountable familiarity. I had been to the barber and I was wearing a new shirt, since it seemed only prudent to suppose that my constant, passionate, and most unworthy prayers might be answered. And I made a little experiment with hair tonic…and I thought, What an utter and transparent fool I am…If I had the same experience earlier in life, I would have been much wiser, much more compassionate. I really didn’t understand what it was that made people who came to me so indifferent to good judgment, to common sense, or why they would say, ‘I know, I know’ when I urged a little reasonableness on them, why it meant ‘It doesn’t matter, I just don’t care.’ That’s what the saints and martyrs say. And I know now that it is passion that moves them to their prodigal renunciations.”
The fact that this soul-slaying description of one man’s utter devotion to a total stranger was written by a woman shouldn’t surprise me. But it doesn’t much matter who wrote the novel, man, woman or extraterrestrial I will be reading it over and over again in this lifetime just to occasionally connect with the single most significant passage of romantic literature that I’ve ever read. And each time, I’m sure, I’ll throw my head down on the pillows and inwardly wail, If only someone, once, just once, ever felt that I was “the only true friend they ever had on earth,” then all this other stuff, this preparing brown bag lunches and selecting foundation shrubs and changing the oil and remembering my mother’s birthday and weeding the front walk would all make sense, or better yet, will all just become the pleasant backdrop to the pleasing complexity of my own true love story.
Instead, I will wake tomorrow, slightly hung over and entirely irritated with my children who refuse to abide by the sleep-past-six-summer rules. The morning will be sad and stale and same. I will make myself rise to the smallness of my life, vowing to drink less, to run the dishwasher before going to bed at night, to write thank you notes and wash the dog and try to remember that life, true life, does not resemble a novel, even a novel perversely devoid of plot,a novel full of religious connotations far beyond my secular grasp, a novel of ‘life sucks, you finally fall in love and then you die’. Because real, non-literary life, though just as tragic, is no where near as succinct. There’s so much wandering and muddling through between here and there that doesn’t make for clever commentary or character development. And this is something I’m just getting used to.
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