October 22, 2010 - Breakfast

I should have something to say here, but I don't. I feel behind on everything and I'm on my seventh day of having a cold; I'm tired of being in a fog. But here's something from my notes file, as proof that I'm writing.

I used to doodle in high school, and I liked to draw for whatever reason--I was fourteen--a picture of a human hand all with one line, often coming out of the water, the water itself part of the same continuous line. The continuous line was the important part. I'm assuming the hand was attached to a drowning person but I never really got that far in my thinking. It was just a hand coming out of the water in one line, and sort of gloomy.

I remember one slightly gothy girl, a sepulchral blonde. (I have no memory of her name. Wouldn't be able to pick it out in a list of Stephanies and Jennifers. I wonder what she does now? Art teacher. Bond trader. She could live two blocks away and take a cab to shop at Trader Joe's.) Perhaps she was a year older. She and I were sitting together talking. Study hall? English class? It seems so long since my life was segmented into blocks of time like that.

She had an advisory--slightly supercilious--attitude. It was a college town and a lot of the kids were the children of professors, as I was, although my folks were split and so my situation was different and a little less... carpeted. But then again who knows her situation? Her dad could have been a heroin addict. But we were, many of us, little professors ourselves. She was the type. And I remember she looked at my sketch of a hand coming out of the water and said, you know, that's not bad. And then she encouraged me to develop as an artist. In about those words: "You should develop as an artist."

It was a sort of patronizing thing, in retrospect, but kids are always patronizing. It's how they learn to be, from adults. You're patronized from birth, encouraged to develop your talents, told that you should chase a dream or two. Everyone wants to tell you about the dreams you should chase. That was childhood, adolescence. The mutual patronization societies. Those who couldn't stop patronizing, who found themselves addicted to the feedback loop, went on to become editors.

I remember this girl, with her almost-white hair, at the same time talking with me about going into Philadelphia on public transit. I imagined then that she was going into the city for boys, or music, or just to shop on South Street to get her supply of silver earrings. Perhaps her reasons were like mine, to visit her father. I'm sure I made a huge number of judgmental assumptions about her, as was my wont, my own form of rejecting patronage. My life, I knew, as a social isolate and kid of reduced circumstances, was infinitely more painful than hers could ever be. I spent the better part of my time at that high school in Pennsylvania--before I went to the one for poor kids, where most of the lives were disastrously worse than mine--making certain that I suffered the most. But here was a nice moment, connecting over buses and trains. I didn't know her music, then. It hadn't occurred to me. Music was not the single defining characteristic of my adolescent life, not yet. What would she have listened to? Public Image Limited, right? New Order? Wearing thin black sweaters. Flat hair, not hairsprayed. Small, thin, light, distant. The antithesis of the large feathered excess of metal. And that team ultimately won. No one will ever listen to Warrant or Poison, but Joy Division and New Order are in the canon. They all used the same drugs. Careful orchestration and alienation turned out to be more important than rocking.

Weight: 312 lbs