OF A GOLDEN AGE

the phone makes me very uncertain; it taps into my insecurity and fear of liking people more than they like me. this is manifested in my near-crippling fear of calling people instead of waiting for them to call me, which is what i almost always choose to do. it’s nothing personal and i am only just realizing how prevalent it is in my friendships, how unfair to my friends that i so rarely pick up the fucking phone and call them first. such a passive way to live, such a contrast to the rest of my way of life.

seeing an old friend after two and a half years is a more positive, but no less impacting, way of getting hit by a bus. i was knocked flat by sense memories and the small things that were different. there was also a surreality to everything, a disbelief that showed up in facial expressions and the tone of conversation. it is always good, though, to realize that things can be put on hold for so long and become just as comfortable and great again with very little lost, especially during the transient college period of our lives, when everything changes.

sitting at carl and mel’s wedding today, between one of my best high school friends and one of my ex-boyfriends, i was steeped in thoughts and memories and feelings of growing up. when you sit at a wedding reception for one of the first people you met in college, worrying about your future career and thinking about which friends will be the next to marry, it’s as if the clouds open up and god smiles on you and says, welcome to being a grown-up. welcome to the next fifty years or more of sweating everything all the time.

i bought my favorite tshirt brand new from the goodwill on east state street in rockford when i was a junior in high school. some of you have seen it — it’s blue and it says INGERSOLL on the back in big letters. it’s been washed at least a hundred times, accidentally sprayed with bleach, spotted with hair dye, and resculpted with scissors, at least around the neck. yesterday i bought some thread and needles and i mended the shoulder seams where they’ve been coming apart for a year. my worn-in thin, three dollar, well loved, ever faithful goodwill shirt.

most married couples who have gone to college MET in college and that thought terrifies me deep in my soul. saturday my friend carl, carl who plays frisbee and prides himself on mixing gross things together in the cafeteria, who lived next door to my best friend from high school when we first got to beloit — one of the FIRST PEOPLE i ever met at beloit — is getting married. in what universe is my most immature friend the first one to get married? carl’s favorite drink used to be a bottle of 99 bananas mixed into a gallon plastic jug of fruit punch!

on the momentum of the stand, i figured i would dive straight into another thousand-page stephen king epic. it was very good but not even close to the quality of the stand or the shining, let alone the bachman books, which i hold as the epitome of stephen king’s greatness in my eyes.

this book is overlong. that’s my primary criticism. in a number of places, i found myself dreading entire chapters that were just not very interesting — i realize that details are helpful in storytelling but at a certain point they become superfluous. stephen king gets a little bit dickensian sometimes in his verbosity. sadly, he does not have “i was paid by the word” as an excuse.

anyway, okay: the story is awesome, incredibly scary, and ultra creative. seven friends come together in the summer of their eleventh year to figure out and attempt to fight an incredible evil that lives under their city. they have a showdown and believe the evil to be dead, but swear to come back if the evil resurfaces. it does, and they do return, and the process begins again.

this book is heck of gory to the point where it was sometimes distracting. i made a lot of abrupt noises and pinched-up faces while reading, without meaning to, because the words on the page were that suspenseful or frightening. this is one of the scarier books i’ve ever read.

maybe its greatest quality, though, is the powerful grasp of the childhood psyche that stephen king expresses. it’s like a much longer and more in-depth telling of the boys in the body (stand by me). the themes of childhood beliefs and the separation of child and adult worlds is important to this book and also makes it utterly relatable. at one point, a young character’s insanity is demonstrated by his willingness to openly challenge grown-ups, and as a reader, i never doubted for a second what kind of blatant move this is. i was a child, i understand.

this week, my highly lactose-intolerant father learned that his sleeping medication — which he’s been taking for at least ten years — contains LACTOSE. the world of medicine is strange and elusive and the way i try to fight certain afflictions is more like ritual than chemistry. faced with a blinding migraine earlier this week, i laid face-down with my forehead on a heating pad and then took a long hot shower. my father’s migraine medicine gives him digestive problems; excedrin migraine’s caffeine gives me bounceback headaches; i am happy to take simple aspirin or ibuprofen and apply occasional heat.

wanted: potentially messy (VERY messy), somewhat emotionally distant, pleated pants wearing, generally sartorially stunted, chronic mediocre performing or underachieving, logorrheic, mumbling, noncreative, immature, histrionic, melodramatic, arrogant, slightly deceitful, poor mannered, frequent drinking, reckless driving, a little bit overly critical, wishy washy, self righteous, pop culturally narrowminded, involved in minor drug use, snobby, aloof, gruff, somewhat pushy and demanding, ignores what i say, awkward, inexperienced, unmotivated, scruffy, noncommittal, overly involved in strange hobbies, with a bad haircut.

must be clingy or particularly jealous; must have poor hygiene; must be uninteresting or dispassionate.

stifling self delusion a must; strong ambient odor a plus.

this day i spent being touched by strangers, strangers with medical pedigrees but strangers no less. after a weekend of teary explanations to friends of what my body was doing, telling the doctors about it was comfortingly calm. maybe this is because in the face of people who have seen far, far worse conditions than mine, i had some perspective leaned against me. something the diameter of a nickel can seem like the biggest scariest incumberance or the most manageable twinge. i would rather stay in the frame of mind where i believe the latter, at least for right now.

indecision.

it’s easier to surround oneself with choices, perpetually, until they form a nest that any newsworthy hoarder would heap praise upon. almost mathematically, the more choices i have, the more likely i am to make an arbitrary decision: a self-fulfilling prophecy wherein i create the choices and then begrudge them their abundance.

when it counts, though, i can hammer it down to the important options and choose. it is small things — what i want to eat, how i want my hair cut, which of twelve colors of a certain shirt i want to purchase. they knock me over.