I should be exhausted, having only gotten 3 hours of sleep last night, and I have dozed fitfully this evening, but I keep waking up. Even a couple of glasses of wine haven’t helped me to sleep. My mind keeps running over the same things over and over, as if they’re all tied in together, but I don’t know how.
A few days ago a friend of mine mentioned reading an interview with Iggy Pop in Rolling Stone. Now, when I was younger (and a bit thinner) I strongly resembled Iggy (a fact pointed out to me by my high school English teacher when I was a Junior), and I like most of what he’s done musically, so I found the article on the internet and read it. I found it oddly disturbing.
Not because it shattered any illusions I had about Iggy, but because in many ways Iggy and I are alike (aside from the years spent doing heroin and being a minor celebrity, and a few other things) as people. I suppose I should find it rather cool that this is the case, but adding to that is what I found one time when I did a google search on my real name.
There is an 18 year old kid out there who shares the same first and last name with me. In looking at his photograph, he looks nearly identical to me at that age. He’s apparently got several successful internet businesses running at the moment (he’s some kind of consultant) , and I think to myself that had the internet been around when I was a young kid, I might very well have ended up doing the same kind of thing he’s doing.
So, in a way, I have two different versions of my life that could have been, but wasn’t. Which leaves me wondering what I should be doing with mine.
Then there’s what happened to me on Sunday night. I work part time in a Stop-N-Rob (it helps me sort-of pay my bills). Late in the evening a large pick up truck pulls up, and people pile out of the passenger side. One of the of them is a woman, the other, I presume is a man, I couldn’t really tell as whomever it was climbed back into the truck.
Now given that the woman was seated in between two men, it seemed pretty obvious to me that she was in a relationship with one of them, so I don’t really have any potential interest in her. After all, if she’s chewing on some other guy’s dink, it’s pretty unethical for me to make a serious effort to get into her pants, ya know?
And being a Stop-N-Rob clerk is a lot like being a bartender. I don’t know if it’s because people will come in drunk, or are buying beer or the hours, or what it is, but people will say and do the kinds of things that they’d normally only do in front of a bartender when they come into the store.
The gal comes in, and in taking a look at her, I notice that she’s not bad looking, but could stand a bit of freshening up (her make up’s mostly lost it’s luster, and there’s a look of having to endure something during the evening that she’d have preferred not to). The first words out of her mouth are, “Can you buy beer on Sunday’s?” I respond with, “Only if you’re over 21.” and the rest of our banter takes the tone of, “I’m not really interested in flirting with you, but if you throw out something exciting, I’m game to play along.”
She gets up to the counter with her beer and says, “I need a pack of condoms. Whatever your cheapest kind is, and, uh, this is really embarassing…” I’m standing near the rack of rubbers, thinking, “Whatever it is your embarassed by, it can’t be anything that I haven’t heard before.”
“Uh, how do I put this?” she asks, burying her face in her hands. I adopt a bored expression on my face while I wait for her to spit out whatever it is that she’s afraid to say. “Make sure they’re lubed.” She finally says.
“Nothing to be embarrassed about.” I say. “It happens to everyone.” I then proceed to recite which ones are lubed, and which ones aren’t, along with the prices, meanwhile thinking to myself, “I guess the relationship has lost it’s luster.”
As I’m slapping her selection of rubbers down on the counter a Mexican immigrant walks in and approaches the counter. She slides over a bit to allow him to come up to the counter, looks over at him, and begins speaking to him in what sounds like nearly flawless Spanish.
I took Spanish in high school and remember very little more of it than can be found on a Taco Bell menu, but I can get the gist of their conversation. She is rapidly trying to scope him out. He isn’t really interested in her, and is more concerned with getting change to be able to use the pay phone outside.
She gets her purchase and leaves, he gets his change and uses the pay phone. I’m struck by how all odd this seems to be. I’ve noticed that in a lot of folks as they get older there’s a “warhorse” attitude when it comes to relationships. They don’t really have an interest in their partner as a person, they’re more concerned with not being alone. She certainly seemed to have that attitude, while he seemed to feel (and I’d say rightly so) that she was only interested in him because of his ethnic origin.
I’ll admit to having made a wreck of most of the relationships I’ve been involved in, in my life, but I was always interested in the person I was dating. I never cared about their ethnic back ground, religion, or any other superficial reason for liking a person. It has always been their personality that’s attracted me to them (admittedly their physical appearance hasn’t hurt, either, but if I didn’t find the contents of the package “groovy,” the packaging was of no interest to me).
So why all these things should be keeping me awake, and why I should feel that they are interconnected somehow, I don’t know. Yet, there it is.