In Twilight Regalia

Went to the Editors concert last night and encountered in the flesh what I’d only seen hints of when posting in recent times on forums. I mean, I knew it was prevalent on the forums in L.A., but I guess I was naiive as far as teens and twenty-somethings in the last few years. I thought maybe it was only L.A.?. This may only be an Angelino thing, but WHAT WAS UP WITH THE EXTREME RUDENESS LAST NIGHT? and then the backing off thing too? Here I must address a need for some MATURITY. It’s obvious you all need to know who made the rock all of you are bashing around to now.

1) To the Gay Redhaired Guy in the impeccable rust-Southwestern-weaving-patterned suit: You muscled your way in front of us after we’d waited for an hour to stand in a good spot. When I say to my spouse next to me, “Oh Great, now I’ve got a giant head in my view”, you turn around and FLIP ME OFF. In front of my husband, who is so completely surprised that we just look at each other.
RUUUUUUUUUDE.
When I add another un-swearing sentence about your rudeness, I get “Cunt!” back. Sheesh. WTF??
AND THEN THE BACKOFF: Even you must have realized you were having a hissy fit at our hetero-ness or maybe you were just having a bad day, but you later retracted and apologized and said you were sorry and out of line. Apology fully accepted. Don’t worry, it had already struck me as a raging-queen thing to do. Both the insult and the retraction together, I mean. Or maybe you were just worried you might have been beaten up in the parking lot by my unknown-quantity-looking husband, but not to worry, those days are long gone for us, because WE ARE MATURE. THERE IS NOTHING WRONG WITH BEING MATURE. YOU CAN STILL ROCK OUT AND BE MATURE. Besides, I had indeed taken note of your impeccable haircut and interesting suit, even when I was pissed at you. THAT’S WHAT MATURITY IS.

2) To the drunk/stoned Mexican bouncer-sized kid who SMASHED through with your giant sweaty girth (all the while threatening sloshing your beer on my head) into a gaggle of tiny blonde girls in front of me AND the gay guy. First you made a crack about how I don’t own this place and can’t stop you. (That was after you stomped one of the little blonde girls into a postage stamp completely unwittingly in your drunken barrelling. I don’t think you noticed her under your armpit.) RUUUUUUUDE.
THEN, you buried yourself further with the justification that I couldn’t POSSIBLY have cared as much about The Editors as YOU did and you doubted I even was here for them.
“Why???” I asked, quietly suffering the same shock as when someone first called me “Ma’am.” “Because I’m older?”
“Yeah, like you probably don’t even know the songs.” you said. (Well ok, then he’s honestly a fan. Challenge accepted.)

AND THEN THE BACKOFF: I then recounted some of the lyrics I liked best and you were actually glad, and in your drunken recovered happiness at my reply, decided I was then your good buddy and asked me if I smoked weed. After I declined all been-there-done-that, you decided to invite about four more of your drunken/stoner friends to weave in and out of my path DURING MY FAVORITE SONG. When your shorter friend blew pot smoke all over us all, I didn’t particularly care, but I cared when you jumped the barrier up front, got kicked out and came barging back through to your same position AGAIN (One of the little blondes tried poking you with a toothpick elbow, but her hair was probably more dangerous.) Then you idiots got the security guards after you and they dragged your pot-smoking friend out and all I could see through another song was security badge. RUUUUUUUDE.

The strange thing was, they never came back for YOU. You stayed in front, completely oblivious, bouncing, all hands in the air and singing every tune and endangering every bordering toe. It was here that I really couldn’t fault you. You actually were a huge fan. A big Mexican guy in love with the whitest, most poetic band I could think of. It got me all patriotic for half a moment: What a great place this is. You just never know who you’ll reach. I was a great fan at your age and note, big guy, I STILL AM.
BUT PLEASE GROW UP, BIG MEXICAN DUDE. DON’T STOMP ON US. DON’T BLOCK US. Offer to put one of those miniature blondes on your shoulders so they can see. And I hope someone calls you “old man” some day and it bites you in the ass, but hey, that happens to us all, just you wait.

And here’s the MATURE answer for us both: GET THERE ON TIME, DUDE. That way you can be there early enough to stay in the pit where you can mosh out all you like. If you’re not going to be MATURE, get a place for it.

3) To the guitar player from Louis XIV: I looked right at you from a couple feet away after the show and called out that you played great (because I was in fact watching you), and you proceeded to look at me like I was some kind of Amityville Horror. RUUUUUUUUUUDE. You too will one day face what I once did: leaving the stage for a life behind the scenes. Yes, I too play, and not too shabbily. I AM ONLY MATURE, that is all.

4) To the kid (or maybe just server-person-at-Verizon) who typed into the screen above us “What’s up with all these old people?”: RUUUUUUUUUUUUUDE.
Music is a transcendence. This will be your salvation in later years. Know this and never cling to the style you grew up with. Keep growing and you will breathe free and never really die. Spoken by a MATURE (and white) PERSON who knows what’s on your iPod, owns two and knows where the best rap is. (Yes there is such a thing.) DO NOT ASSUME, my dears. NEVER ASSUME.

5) To the literally seventy-something balding skinny guy POGO-ing his ASS OFF next to me for a while. YOU are AWESOME. When you left a little early, probably to go change your Depends, I was sorry to see you go. ROCK ON, pogo-man. You are an inspiration to us all.

The next day my back was jacked up from standing for four and a half hours straight. Do I want to go through this again? ::sigh::

Yeah.

What can I tell you, my sister,
my killer,
What can I possibly say.
I guess that I miss you,
I guess I forgive you,
I’m glad that you stood in my way.

—paraphrasing of
Leonard Cohen’s
Blue Raincoat

A long time ago we were a unit, my two-married friends and I and he that I loved.
We were two of us alike, and two of us alike.
Half were fat and half were thin.
We all had glasses — and two pairs, with points.
Perhaps none of them felt so connected, but I did.
Even in my dreams we, all of us, are together.
They still live so freshly in my subconscious mind that they are there in my heart, doing the mundane and touching dances of life, even in my sleep.
I worried about them.
We shared our drinks.
I worry now about them.
We laughed over things.
I still laugh.
I educated them.
We kvetched about each other.
I was educated by them.
I planned things for them. I cooked for them.
We ate, we shopped.
We travelled together to foreign countries and had adventures.
We had jokes only we knew.
We cared for each other’s animals.
We breathed each other’s perfume and smoke.
We watched our lives sprawl out like wrinkled bedsheets.

We lived side by side.
They were my family, in ways even they would never have imagined, since all of them had families in their pasts, and I not much.

There was a day in which
(and I never thought this would ever happen)
I knew I had reached an apex of my life.
It was the day that I was doing nothing out of the ordinary.
A perfect, not-extraordinary day.
I was carrying my laundry from my little cottage to their part of the main house, a basket in my arms, in late spring. Perhaps it was early summer even.
The sun was late afternoon, not hot. The air a bit dusty and slightly breezey. There were plum blossoms on a huge tree near the driveway blooming at their peak and just starting to scatter flurries in the warm wind.

I was trodding over the stones when I saw the sun in the clouds that were starting to develop a hint of early sunset coloring. Just wisps.
I was thinking about nothing, my pets indoors, my dinner plans, nothing much.
My lover’s music was pouring out my cottage door past the good luck symbol and door chimes and bamboo by each side of the doorway. He was just tinkering with something, as he always was, music washing over the afternoon while he was under the desk with some configuration. I never minded that he did that. It was a little bit cute, my mad scientist.

My friends were in their part of the house a few steps away, two smooth dogs on the dirty carpet, snoozing with a blink here and there. There was a computer game playing, and noises of exploding crafts coming out the door. I knew my dear friend was in there squinting at the screen, he was winning, as he was always. He always seemed to win.

I knew somewhere there, maybe on the couch, she was painting her nails.

I stood in my long dress in the driveway, pausing a moment, breathing in something unfamilliar.
It was rest.
I looked at the day, the shadows on the rocks in the driveway, and the sun getting lower in the west, and the green around the edges of the side of the cottage, and I thought, with no small surprise, that I was probably in the best place that could ever be. Peace was at last in my life. I was sure of things. I was sure of us. I was not alone. I was going to have a life after all. Maybe this was what one waits for. I remember smiling.
Then I tucked up the weight of my laundry and went on, across the yard, to the cellar, where the laundry was and went back to things material.

We lost it all when she threw away the marriage.
At the same time, he left me, for her, and all the things I thought were rosy dissolved into chaos and hurt again and the music was worse and hard and worse.

That moment had simply been a crystal ornament, a facet turned just so, just for a second, in the scheme of all the sunchange a life goes through.

And now, past all the noise, she’s come back. Wayward, frivolous, belle and dark, ephemeral, nightmare, daughter-like, Maya of darkness of our lives.

I am with a different man, chosen in haste, as wisely as could be reckoned, from a far and away country,
and we in a far and away city, alone together,
uglier, not the design once hoped for, but a good enough place at the moment.
He is another story.

And her husband ever winningly wants her back.
My friend, the one piece that never shifted, so hurt once,
him that I nursed through the wreckage, is now taking her back, his muse, and soon, the mother of his child. What soft abyss, what bliss, what storm is that? Where does it go?

What can I say to you, the one who took our lives with you?
Did I waste time hating you? No. Not much.
Did I cry over you? Yes. And the pain you brought us, yes.
Did I cry over the one I had loved, that you took? Yes, twice in great ways, and more in many small ways.
Did I hold you to your promise so much that I would hurt you? No.
Can I trust you?
Can I?
I do not know that still.

My dear, my itching unsainted fool, my sisterful of frills and empty folly,
fragile as a kitten, with claws, where do you climb?

Do I care for you as I did?
Do I want to answer?
Do I rejoice that you are back and want to stay?

The folds of my eyes do not sit high and smiling as they were,
but
my older hands are open on my lap.
Put something there for me.
Bring me red envelopes of your cleansed hopes.
Tell me why
and we will see.