Mikarrhea

Well I've been up all night (again?)

Party time wasting is
too much fun.

Bart's 25th birthday. Got him the new André Codrescu novel, Wakefield, and Blood Siblings, a book of Coen bros. interviews. We're friends again. He's seeing a cool photographer, Galadriel (bestowing pseudonyms is fun), who's totally clever and presentable.

Bart's friends, almost flagrantly ordinary heterosexual couples (guys such total guys, girls girls), were a hoot nonetheless.

Some drunken drama. Damian's girlfriend, Phoebe, was loopily plastered and adorably flirty (she kissed me wetly & gorgeously). Bart's roommate, Peter, sort of slapped or patted her on her butt playfully and Peter's fiancée, Brenda, just completely lost it (How can he do that sort of thing when we're about to get married? I'm from a small town and I'm not used to stuff like that. . . .). It was like she found out Peter had just had sex with Phoebe in the next room. She wept in my arms for an hour or so. Then she lit into him and he --your standard stocky former frat guy in chinos and a hockey jersey-- started bawling fluently. I liked her tremendously and felt we completely bonded over the hugging and comforting but wished she could blunt her hair-trigger jealousy by a couple of orders of magnitude.

At seven o'clock, the only ones still conscious to face the day were Bart, Greta, and I. I had a craving for fried chicken (you have to understand, I'm mostly vegetarian these days, so that was weird). We went to the supermarket a couple of miles from our house. I dropped Greta and Bart at the door and then parked directly across the narrow deserted side-street from it, so I could easily see them come out.

Next, I opened my eyes, which I hadn't realized were closed, and I was in my car across from the supermarket. It was ten o'clock, sun high and bright, street bustling. What the fuck was I doing there? Oh, yeah. I had had a craving for chicken. Wait a minute. Hadn't I been with Greta and Bart? Had I dropped them off at our house before coming here? Where were they? I looked at my cell phone. A billion calls. Several messages, all from Greta, all saying some version of: Where are you? We're waiting for you! Where did you go? Are you OK? Please call or come back right away!

It turns out, when they came out of the supermarket, alcohol-hazy, chicken laden, they didn't notice the car parked directly across the street from them, about forty feet away, Mika unconscious at the wheel. After phoning a billion times and getting no response, and looking all over the parking lot next to the supermarket, they drunkenly trudged the two hilly miles to our house and passed out on the couch.

When I got there, Bart's cell phone was ringing. It was his new girlfriend. She had just awakened in Bart's bed and was aimlessly circumambulating a dismal post-partyscape in which, bizarrely, there were no people, sleeping or awake, anywhere to be found (despite the fact we'd left several vehemently unconscious partiers there but a few hours earlier). I drove him back to her, then went to hang out with my kids at my ex's. My ex was spending the day at the très intime Jack & Suzy show (a 400-million-dollar affair, in a couple of senses), to which, I suppose, I would have been invited, if we had still been married. Thank goodness for small mercies. I must admit to a sort of anthropological curiosity, though. They sure do seem different from you and me. Even if only, as Hemingway jibes, 'cause they've more money.

Greta slept all day. She woke about an hour ago, went into the kitchen, came out with some melatonin in hand and said she was going back to sleep.

So I step back thinking of life's inner meaning and my latest fling. It's the same old story--all love and glory.

Looking for love in a looking glass world.