98-00

Wow. I love that the most ridiculous stuff comes into my head sometimes while I am hanging out with my mother. It’s like, she doesn’t know me, and as a result everything I can say is pretty much news to her. It’s like reciting my memoir sometimes when we speak.

But I heard myself talking to her tonight and recognized something: I have been here before.

Not Colorado, though technically yes, Colorado I have lived in before. But no, this newness I gave me, the fresh start. I have done this before, and I had really forgotten how hard it really is. When the affair I had with my best friend ended and all the splatter was wiped from my face (another story for another time), I picked myself up and I ended up in Jersey City. I didn’t know anybody. Not a soul. As I relayed to my mother, this is when my dating deviancy began. That is when I tried telephone dating. “Telephone dating!?” you probably ask. Yeah, telephone dating (I know I know), where your voice and what you choose to say are the only things identifying you as a worthy candidate for any kind of meeting. The commercials made it sound so appealing, a low or no commitment venture, and really what was I gonna lose? Some time, maybe. I was pretty good at this telephone dating stuff, mostly because I was great on the phone. I still am. Not good, great. I sometimes have found myself enjoying the conversations with my utility agents, phone representatives, salespeople, whoever is on the line. I can enjoy a conversation with just about anyone worth talking to, because to me it is an art form, the ability to empathize with and entertain people. I do it live now much as I did it on the phone then, and I have my deli men fans on the East Coast who have always loved my enthusiasm for their hellos and my ribbing them into ludicrous conversation.

So as I relayed to her, telephone dating is what I did the quell the loneliness after the move. My mother then asked, “were you desperate?!” Well, in all honesty I totally was, a thousand percent desperate to meet someone because I had no idea how to do it in a strange city. Actually any city. I had no idea what I was doing, and I was the shyest little thing in the world. No idea. So the guy I met, the only guy I did meet doing telephone dating was a really lovely specimen of a man, literally one of the hottest guys to this day I ever dated, all of the best blood lines (Turkish Italian Greek, Hotness, you know) combining to create this adonis, all for me. He modeled for Patricia Field, and every time I was with him I wanted to chew my own knuckles off in shock that he was standing in front of me off a telephone dating website. At the time I didn’t question why he was doing the dating thing via phone, because I felt just too damn lucky. And I guess he did too, because we rarely talked about it. Well, um, we rarely talked about anything now that I think about it. I had just moved from a dumpy little city, Worcester, MA to freakin’ New Jersey, which I had spent much of my life comparing as “Worcester as a state.” I knew nobody, and I stayed inside entirely too much, but it was Winter, and what did I know? I knew how to use the phone, that’s for sure. Oh and we did. Use the phone. And each other, plenty.

But that is neither here nor there, now. I did realize that I didn’t start forming my life, until 00-01. And all that happened with the meeting of B & H, who were stumbling for change at the PATH train entrance. I was sitting there in the station and had grown pretty angry at the crowd for not acknowledging these guys who just needed change to ride home. So I got up and berated the group of kids standing there and gave them their cash in exchange for a ten I think it was. And they stuck their dollars in, and that was that. I went home with them to B & G’s place and proceeded to smoke a lot of weed. I am talking European amounts, A LOT of weed–given the guy is from there and basically would burn pure THC fuel if you were to light him on fire. And the girl who really hadn’t smoked since she was a senior in high school like that, hung out the whole live long night with them, even letting them convince me that they were vampires. No really, I was scared, and they probably just laughed to themselves that I was just naive. They were so convincing that I just wanted to run the hell out of there at points, but was both too terrified and entirely too fascinated to go. I am sure my fantastical little mind had tried to figure out a way to sneak garlic onto their skin if they had tried to bite me, which they assured me of course they would never do. But that was their sense of humor and they both were still my oldest friends from there. And when I moved into the basement of B & G’s house, they became a kind of surrogate family to me. The surrogacy and family feel helped me ease into farm life with them back in September as well, and we were really good all the way up until Asa died.

I moved in October of 1998, and really didn’t notice life moving very fast until 2001, right after September 11th, and after I took over Uncle Joe’s Bar. After that point it was a marathon run through everything in my life really up until I left. Rarely did I savor anything, as that took time, something you realize on the East coast is incredibly hard to find.

As my mother said to me today, “your old life stopped, and you keep expecting this new one to start, and it will, just give it patience.” Patience, pssshaw. Patience is for people who don’t know what they want. But no, no…I am playing. J told me last night (yes, the same J from back in the day I talked to last night about it) told me that “patience is not just a virtue in Colorado, but a way of life.” “Yeah, um, thanks” says the girl who’s used to running at a million miles a minute. This patience thing is actually something you have to master coming from a place where you could do and get whatever you want whenever you wanted at any point in the day or night. I am talking ANYTHING. That is the beauty of New York for the emotional and physical consumerists’ minds. But, New York is full of anythings for lots of anyones, and I was one, until I decided being someone was better than being one of everyone else.

I just hope I can get a friendly little circle before the world ends on my birthday, October 21 (insert huge wink here). Or, definitely before December 21 next year. Yes, most definitely before then. I am kidding, kinda, though I am more afraid of people who put literal assignments of meaning or purpose on things as intangible as death and finality. The people who believe in this absolute end scare me more than the end itself, because they are just the kinds of people who would have no trouble manifesting an event to prove their point. I would hope not, because that would show lack of real faith, but as a country of hypocrites, you can only expect so much.

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