The table of university was a bit of a banquet. I'd been raised to be modest and mindful of moderation. There were moments when I was neither.
Once I was stinking of alcohol still and definitely crumple-clothes'd when a professor who'd been reading all our intellectual journals dialed it down. She rifled through every excuse I had for messing up and named each as what it was and short-listed the I get thats. But she also didn't psychoanalze me or lecture. I babbled for almost the whole twenty-minutes of check in time. Was embarassed that I'd not kept up with the readings and ashamed of myself for spending the weekend in a Gen X version of pop culture, at that time: anything goes and you can't kill us. My actual brain was refusing to pick up the shelving of my education. It was screaming fuck excellence.
It'd be easier, she said like she'd read my mind.
Why can't good be good enough?
That's complicated for six minutes.
A welcome silence. I looked at my grungy hands and shook my head. The screaming turned into a slow and gross-smelling exhale. She picked up a stack of papers to grade and started reading.
Am I free to go?
Quite. But let me ask you a question.
Okay.
How are you going to be good like that?
I met Beth at the Reader's Feast book and food joint. The hot sauce was crusted in a hard drip on the outside of a bottle. After assessing whether or not I'd blown anything major ("damage control") we ate quietly. She was remembering titles of books and checking to see if the place had these. She settled on a book of poetry, bought it and gave it to me.
Why this one?
Why not? No, not that, but if I get it, the poetry, there's a blend of compensating for not being perfect in an imperfect world, and, really beautiful, what you people call imagery.
Us people?
Writing, thinking types.
You're my people too.
Not so much as a vegetable-peeler and knitter
Oh, you've been hanging with your Mom's older friends.
She drank half a cup of coffee in one long sip while nodding her head. Of course she dribbled, laughed it off, and said, See, turning into one already.
They don't actually drool?
I didn't drool, it just dribbled out. Did you see any of these bands? She took an entertainment section of newspaper out from inside her cardigan that had been tucked into her skirt waistband. I looked at the list and shook my head. I wasn't looking for them.
Listening, so I fell in with an older crowd myself. Well, not old but like Middle Age and getting older.
Aren't we all?!
Did you know they already did all this social justice stuff?
Really?!
A double-look to register, sarcasm.
And who are they?
Well, they just have regular names now, but they used to come up with interesting names depending on which war they were fighting.
War?
Yeah, most of them, especially as we talked longer and longer, felt like, feel like stuff like poverty isn't just endemic, it's a war.
Which is how we've felt about drugs and alcohol.
Ah, yeah. I lost a battle with the bottle.
You still look like shit.
I'm sure I do.
Customers started coming in more steadily. Outside the weather was like wet cement, the rain and the traffic's lights blurred. It made the inside feel more like a home. And the smells of soup and sandwiches blended with coffee. I'm okay, I acknowledged. I didn't say, I wish this now could last forever.
You are. The world is not in a lot of ways.
Not sure I can or want to try and change it.
A lot of headbanging.
Yeah. I opened the book of poetry and found someone had died. The author confessed to death really being beyond our ability to academize human response. The author told story in lines and meter, bursting paragraphs packed into droplets of literature. In the story a woman brings a neighbor lasagna.
Thanks for the lasagna, I said as I put money on the table for my coffee.
It wasn't too long afterwards that I got to spend time with a writing mentor. One of the first things Fallaci did was have us go back to the hipster dive where I'd been somewhat entranced with the small crowd of fossilizing activists. I declined the chance to drink choosing bitters on ice instead. She busied herself with tying and untying a bag strap. And we worked through not writing like each other or anyone else really. It being a fairly truly lonely occupation/vocation. And where the world was heading in terms of "truth". She always almost spit on that word, truth. But it would take me years and years to understand why.
She waited until we were outside in the almost frigid cold that had come down from farther north and then said, "Those are not activists. Those were revolutionaries and now they are common international criminals."
My usual sardonic response was all I could muster, "Great."
Really? Beth asked.
I blinked a few times and frowned and considered how someone might react to what was coming out of my mouth. And realized in split seconds of thought, I should've thought of that before. But this was Beth. Long time confidante. Is it okay that I told you?
She lifted elbows off the table and turned her arms looking at fronts ans backs and said, No Revolutionary germs here.
I didn't know.
And now you do.
Indeed.
She also suggested I read Allende and Traba in the catching up. Did you know I've read one hundred and seventy two books this year?
She blew out the smoke of the Parliament and put lines through some of the bands and venues coming soon.
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