The Reading

I gave a reading the other night, cataloged in the prior blog, and it went all right. Unfortunately, S managed to steal the show by being imminently more comfortable on stage than I am. Of course, to try and stave off my bouts of nervousness I drank a healthy amount of white wine before leaving the house. I wasn't sure if I'd had enough, so I drank a glass or two of Kahlua.

G.K. Chesterton interjects:

Doubtless, it is unnatural to be drunk. But then in a real sense it is unnatural to be human. Doubtless, the intemperate workman wastes his tissues in drinking; but no one knows how much the sober workman wastes his tissues by working. No one knows how much the wealthy philanthropist wastes his tissues by talking; or, in much rarer conditions, by thinking. All the human things are more dangerous than anything that affects the beasts - sex, poetry, property, religion. Man is always something worse or something better than an animal; and a mere argument from animal perfection never touches him at all. Thus, in sex no animal is either chivalrous or obscene. And thus no animal ever invented anything so bad as drunkenness - or so good as drink.


I can only take that to mean that G.K. never had to deliver a reading to a group of people he didn't know. Obviously untrue but go with me. For in that instance, drink, and if not drunkeness, buzzedness is a great gift to man. After imbibing a bit more Kahlua I wasn't certain if I had obtained the right level of fearlessness to read. Shortly thereafter I was singing this song: ">

And when Lisa got to the bridge and I was turning my radio (iPod) up with her I knew that I might be ready to read. Needless to say I hadn't had nearly enough to drink, and I was still petrified by the time I mounted the stage. Odd word choice mounted. Was the stage actually a burro? Anyhow, I delivered a performance not worthy of Ms. Lisa Loeb, and I think that wherever the heck she is, she was probably disappointed in me.

People tell me that you get more comfortable speaking in front of groups by doing it consistently. However, I've been told the same thing about beer since I turned 20. Just keep drinking it and eventually you'll like it. Vile substance, the heavy aftertaste that almost always makes me wretch. I don't like Guiness or Michelob Light, or Sierra Nevada Pale Ale. No, they all suck. As will speaking in front of groups of people larger than two.

Just for those who think Lisa Loeb was a one hit wonder, she also had this song:
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Obligatory DFW quote:

Like living in Bloomington: one of the things that I do, I mean, you have to listen to a lot of shitty country music. Because that's pretty much all there is on the radio, when you're tired of hearing Green Day on that one college station. And these songs are just so--you know 'Baby since you've left I can't live. I'm drinking all the time' and stuff. And I remember being impatient with it. Until I'd been living here about a year. And all of the sudden I realized that, what if you just imagined that this absent lover they're singing to is just a metaphor? And what they're really singing to is themselves, or to God? "Since you've left I'm so empty I can't live, my life has no meaning." That in a weird way, they're incredibly existentialist songs. That have the patina of the absent, of the romantic shit on it just to make it salable. But that all the pathos and heart that comes out of them, is they're sining about something much more elemental being missing, and their being incomplete without it. Than just, you know, some girl in tight jeans or something...if you cock your ear and listen real close, it's deep, you know?

Fiction (Cont)

On a particularly warm day, we saw a movie at the local theater and I mistakenly sat to her left. Poor thing. She took my accidental lapse in memory as a sign that things were going to change. However, during the first half of the movie I sat rigid in my seat, aware of the judgment issuing from her seemingly benign face. She knew, or rather that part of her knew that the only reason that I stayed with her now was so that I would be perceive as a good guy. The sort who sticks it out when the, pardon my French, though I’m certain you’re used to bawdier things being said, shit hits the proverbial fan. And that this idea that I had of myself was far more important to me than maintaining an open and honest relationship with her. My discomfort became so intense that I retreated to the bathroom, splashing cold water on my face and attempting to forget the stare of her left eye before returning to the theater and sitting very quietly in the seat to her right. I contended that I only switched sides because the subtitles of the film were harder to read from the angle of my previous seat, believing the excuse at the time, and holding it against her that she got offended. I transferred up to Oregon that fall and she remained in Southern California.

Do you think she made the face or that the whole thing was a manifestation of my unresolved guilt? Why the hell am I asking you anyway? Can I smoke? What if a man came in here and told you this exact same story but from over there. Do you think that would change anything?