12-04-06

We went to show where the lead singer had long, long curly hair. He wore it the way I way my hair, parted to the sides, falling out behind my ears and then back in again each time I reach over to tuck them back, and he played the guitar with his eyes closed. He was sort of timid and sometimes he played the same thing over and over and over again and I felt like I did in English class last year when I was reading the Scarlett Letter and pretending to understand why it’s important, and then he would take the guitar real low and walk on every part of the stage and my eyelids fluttered and reopened and I watched him like a crazy person. I felt like a crazy person. After the main act came on, I felt my fever coming on again, and I touched my friends Bonnie and Donald with the tips of my fingers and pushed my way through the crowd.
It smelled so bad that night. Spoiled beef jerky. My friend Tony told me the way his mom makes beef jerky is to literally cut a small slice of beef and set it out underneath the afternoon sun and let it bake until it was a smelly slice of jerky, and boy and boy that was the most delicious kind of jerky, the smelly kind, just like when you cook a rotten piece of tofu and you put the right spices to make it smell even more rotten, like a skunk throwing up trash, but worse, and it turns out that is the best tasting tofu in the entire world. I took a small detour to the bathroom and stood by the smaller bar—there were two bars in the venue and the small bar had its own room so that it was like a small living room with rows and rows of whiskey, vodka, draft beers, clean glasses and ups of neatly sliced lemon, lime, and standing in front of the whole damn thing was the guitarist pushing back the thick strands of his curls behind his ears, at the very same time I was pushing back my limp black thin nothing strands of not that beautiful, not that special, nothing to see hair.
It is normal to feel like you love someone before even speaking to him? He looked unshowered and one time my friend Tony told me it was noticing the flaws on someone that makes you sure you are in love with them, and even gives you the delusional force to believe that maybe the flaws you found are flaws that most people could never forgive or oversee in another person, and maybe even though you are not anything, not someone who is beautiful to merit a second take, not someone who stands like there is a constant arrangement of small daisies and hummingbirds flittering and circling right above your head, even though you are not a luminous, glittering sprite, you were quick enough to identify the flaws in the person who you do love, who does walk with small tiny birds singing above his head, and you could care less about those flaws, and could only hope with the tiny, most tenuous strand of hope that most people in this world did care, and that they would not forgive or overlook and it meant that the person you loved would never be loved by anyone else, even if he loved someone that someone would not love him back, and he would be forced to love you if he wanted love, so that the only potential problems were this:
1) What if he didn't care about these things?
2) What if he'd rather shoot himself in the foot than be with you, even if you were the last lonely girl on this overpopulated (but somehow decimated) planet?