Tower of Babel

I suppose it is a play to my own version of the classic “mid-twenties existential crisis” that I have been listening almost exclusively  to Leonard Cohen this week. It might be the slow eternal sadness of his voice or the perpetual searching in his words, but somehow each song sits like a brick on the path I seem to be traveling on. Or maybe, each song sits like bricks stacked crooked upon all the other crooked bricks and the other songs that reach this part of me, on a shakey upward stretch with a goal to have its top reach the heavens.

Most of it, is the private construction of a place to hide. It is funny, to me, the things I keep private. The reasons I keep them private. Everyone thinks I have this strength that requires no outside help. Even the ones that help me think it is just a passing phase… a seasonal sadness… a stumble in a confident stride. Temporary. “She will be fine,” they say, “She’s Ashley Tippin. She’s always fine.” And then further, “She’s better off.” And though it is true the things that cause trip-ups and skinned knees do pass, and I may be better off, and I am still Ashley Tippin, and I will always be fine, the strength is all in the walls of my private, internal Tower of Babel.

And when I send out the S.O.S. to the people who have seen my tower, know that I exist in it, I wish they would stop thinking I was this strong. Because sometimes I’m not.

Now I dance on the stairwells inside this Tower of Babel I have made and the walls grow ever weaker. It, by God’s grace and wrath, or the sheer force of my thundering feet, will soon crumbled to the ground. All the common people and this common language we share will be disjointed and spread to the ends of the earth.

I just pray that I will always have these songs. I pray that I will always have the thick, syrupy affections of these songs. I pray that this, the only language I can understand in the rubble of a broken building, will remain one when the tower crumbles at the pit of my stomach.

“When you’re not feeling holy, your loneliness says that you’ve sinned.”

Ginger

My Ginger, while helping me move large furniture out of my current living space, was bequeathed a broken propane powered grill. Why he wanted it, I couldn’t understand. It had sat in my backyard for seven years or more without use for so much as a coaster during my many backyard “sun dates”. But we took it anyways, walking it down the busiest street in Lawrence in the middle of the hottest day of the year thus far.

I went to church last Sunday and while I was away he cleaned and fixed the dilapidated piece of rusted out crap until it looked as though we had used it at least twice since it’s death in my old backyard. It only took him an hour to coax the metal junk box from it’s coffin and back into a living, breathing, meat heating machine. The first light, after some jimmying of the starter, must have looked a bit like something of man first discovering fire on his face.

Then he made the greatest kebabs I have ever tasted on said grill with from-scratch potato salad to play side dish. It was terrifyingly good.

I told my mom about it a few days later. She offers unsolicited advice with complete sincerity dripping like marinade onto hot coals in her voice:

“Can you try to not piss this one off?”

Take it Easy on Me Just for a Little While

Curtis and I split a bottle of wine at the Bourgeois Pig last night. We sat at the end of the bar on bolted down stools positioned just a little too close together. I swung slowly like a pendulum between bumping shoulders with him, and bumping shoulders with the woman in her late 40’s drinking vodka gimlets next to me. I only apologized to her for it.

He jokes about me being his “perpetually single” friend and how my presence in a room is not one of a five-foot-zero-inch-hundred-and-ten-pound-twenty-five-year-old but rather that of a person 5′8” and not a day over thirty. He casually mentions mid-sentence that it “smells like summer sausage in here” and wraps his giant calloused hands around the delicate crystal glass. He has hands that look like they should be wrapped in a blue collar or waiting for a few nickles outside a Depression era coal mine. We each take a sip while still smiling. He is wonderful. I bump shoulders with the woman. She ignores my fifth apology.

I tell him that I want to be “normal”. He mistakes “normal” for mediocrity and we argue about this periodically for the next couple of hours.

“Robert says I will only be able to date men who are so laid back that they don’t care about anything or someone who is weirder than I am and if I even try to date someone ‘normal’ I will only find that they don’t like me.” I say over ‘Crimson and Clover’ (over and over).

“But why would you want someone mediocre anyways?”

I don’t correct him. He doesn’t understand. He talks about his ex-wife, the brief marriage he had when he was 21 and she was 19. Jenifer with one N. It lasted under a year. I tell him about my ex, Kenn, with two N’s. I tell him I am changing my name to “something with three N’s, just to be different.”

He laughs and says, “This is why you can’t date someone ‘normal’.”  I silently take note of his use of ‘normal’ as opposed to mediocre. I think he gets it now. We spend the next 45 minutes in meaningless chatter about the bartender’s music selection on this particular evening. I begin to crave silence. The kind of silence that makes you wonder if you have suddenly lost the ability to hear. Curtis hugs me goodbye after plans for coffee and further exploration of mediocrity are made for the following afternoon. I sit, still, in the numerous blurry bar conversations, none of which catches my attention. I put my jacket on, double wrap my scarf and walk out into the well-lit street.

Two steps on the sidewalk and it starts to snow. Big, fluffy, coagulated masses of snow. I head toward my car and walk past it when I realize that the only sound I hear is the muffled click and slide of my boots on the sidewalk that is quickly gathering a thick, wet, white carpeting. I left my car parked there on the street and walked home. It was almost the silence that I was craving. It was so silent in fact, that I could almost hear the whispering voice of Harry Nilsson, who slipped into my brain without warning. Without invitation. Without making a sound until the sound was already made.

I let the memory of my favorite exboyfriend, the one who loved me the most and the best, the one who was weirder than I, the one who sent me the first Harry Nilsson record in my collection, the one who stayed up late on the phone with me and sang “The Moonbeam Song”, walk me home from the bar in the snow. I was somehow comforted by the mere existence of him, even if it just a little intangible now. I was somehow comforted by the lack of mediocrity the whole thing stank of. He made me feel “normal”. I smiled and hummed along:

In the wintertime keep your feet warm
But keep your clothes on and don’t forget me
Keep the memories
But keep your powder dry too

Don’t forget me – don’t forget me
Take it easy on me just for a little while
You know I think about you
Let me know you think about me too

Assigned for the Third Time

I just amazon.com’ed In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida by the ever psychedelic Iron Butterfly. According to Amazon.com, people who bought this record also bought: The Very Best of Deep Purple, The Very Best of Cream, Steppenwolf Greatest Hits, and (big surprise here, kids) Vanilla Fudge by Vanilla Fudge. And gee… it could be mine on compact disc for only $10.98!!!!!!

In other news, my roommate, Adam D gave me a writing assignment today. I expressed a certain amount of writer’s block/dry spell at the tips of my fingers in the past couple of weeks and he promised he could remedy this for me. The catch being, I would have to drag up some not-so-fun stuff from the brain at the pit of my stomach. Since he is quite a favored writing teacher here at the University of Kansas, and having accomplished everything I could hope to do with writing and more (including an O.Henry award for short fiction) I decided to finally take him up on this challenge. He gave me six prompts and what follows is the only one I could stomach today.  A rough draft, the beginnings of something, who knows. The assignment was “The moment you knew that you and Justin weren’t going to work out” and I can say in all honesty that this was the last time I knew that Justin and I weren’t going to work out, certainly not the first. But sometimes women hang on to hope more than we should.

 

     He stayed just a day too long and in doing so ruined the five previous years of their relationship. He was visiting her in Kansas for the third time that year and for a rare moment her house was quiet, and he was serious. She was doing all the talking.
     “Would we have our own kids first? Or would we adopt and then have our own?” She never wanted kids of her own. The thought of pregnancy and giving birth turned her stomach much like the way bad sushi would, but he wanted to be what he called “a real dad” and so she gave him that much.
     “Our own first. And then, when they are grown maybe we can adopt.” They had talked about their would-be wedding before but never had it gotten past the music at the reception and the possible facial hair of the groomsmen. This conversation had started as lighthearted, but he had stayed too long and the house was too quiet, and they were too alone and so it slipped into the heaviness she always knew was looming and he never knew he feared.
     “Not when they’re grown. That isn’t at all how it works…”
     “Well, what kind of sacrifices are you making?”
     The arrogance in his voice when he muttered the question coupled with the previous ‘maybe’ made her ears feel as hot as burning embers but it was a different kind of anger than she was used to. This kind of anger felt more like a dump truck had been parked on her chest.
     “Childbirth.” She said it with a kind of laugh that was meant as a shield, but came out as a scoff.
     They wouldn’t speak again until the next morning when he loaded his guitar and duffel bag into the trunk of his car and kissed her goodbye as if the conversation hadn’t happened. They would spend the next two months pretending the plans would go forward while on the phone with one another, but each secretly knowing the ground had given way beneath them. Each was waiting for the courage to let the thing die.