How to Believe in Love Ever After: Or is there a link between Dejavu and Dehydration?

My friend recently went to Prague. He told me he had a dream the night before he left, a nightmare, in which he had been a witness to the creation of the golem. Later, wandering around the Jewish quarter after Octoberfest, he and his friends found themselves by accident at the very synagogue of Rabbi Loew, who purportedly created the infamous Golem of Prague, molded to protect the ghetto from the Holy Roman Emperor in the 16th century. When the golem became violently out of control, the rabbi scratched out the first letter of the word for truth written on its forehead, changing the word from "truth" to "death", and the clay robot switched off.

So maybe that's what our third eyes are actually, off switches.

Sometimes it's very hard to remember these are coincidences. Our minds so badly want to make every experience into a meaningful narrative, we naturally turn our lives into stories, write in the guiding structures and themes where none exist. Listen, sometimes it's harder being an atheist than you think. I could say that I fight to keep someone from scratching out the first letter on my forehead, but a religious person could argue that it has already been, truth is what we want it be always and so this is terrible metaphor.

I have coincidences happen to me all the time that I hold precious and also hate, like little drops of water in a great big lake of things just existing cause, betraying the existence of a coming irrational storm. This is a side effect of trying to be imaginative, you become a terrible romantic against your will. Even worse, something in the programming of my poor little brain is naturally and viciously inclined to moments of dejavu. Which I believe is a genetic chemical reaction, mean little neurons firing away, but when you are trying to suck every story possible out of your life, that's like a fucking affliction. Its crack for the creative, a false momentary sense of meaning and hope and predestination. Then I shake it off and remind myself not to get carried away. Oh but geez do I love being carried away.

I spent a lot of the week drinking, it was just one of those weeks. I'm going dry for the next two weeks, just to clear myself a little and work on some projects I keep thinking about, but am doing nothing towards. I needed it though, Fall was speeding too fast towards me, time was just slipping away, and the thing to do when you feel that way is have a lot of really good times, do some weird thing and rash unwise things, so that every day has it's own adventure and the week feels that it's going on forever. This summer lasted fresh a whole year almost, and I'm not ready to let that go.

The point is, drunk in so many different situations, I had a lot of conversations. With Tara, with Carrie and Sarah, bartenders, acquaintances that became friends. That conversation with Nate walking across the bridge last Sunday set the tone for the week, I hungrily sought out tipsiness and intimate talk. I'm not rude when I'm drunk, or loud, or mean. But I am willing to talk about anything with anyone. That doesn't sound like it would be a bad thing, but the social convention of how to interact with strangers exists for a reason, so people don't realize what a fucking weirdo you are. At a party, I was talking to a guy I had only met that night, and it was very civilized, careers and places lives and stuff, but then suddenly I found myself telling him this story of what happened to me Tuesday, which I find to be a crazy but funny and maybe a little poignant story, but if you're just listening to some drunk girl tell it on a patio as she smokes over the railing with dance music blaring, then it comes off extremely degenerate and slutty and maybe trashy? I've heard such good stories from strangers, stories of redemption and moments of humility when they found their calling or received thanks from the universe and stories about falling in love or escaping religious fallacies or getting out of small towns or small marriages. These people don't realize how momentous their stories are when they are telling them, usually you have to wring this stuff from people because they have no sense of the importance of their own lives. They think they are uninteresting. Then there are people like me and Buddy who think everything that happens to us is interesting, and everyone else is interesting too, and we are the kind of people who tell inappropriate stories to strangers when we are drunk expecting the same in return. It's something I love about Buddy, he understands my inclination to talk to everyone the same way, that it doesn't matter if he's known you ten years or ten minutes, we're going to be honest in the conversation and say exactly what we are thinking about. Let the conversation live in the way its going, don't force it to stay in the confines of polite society. Be yourself. Live under the assumption that everyone is coming to this conversation on the same level.

I personally think that's the best justification for being a talky drunk I can come up with.

Anyway, Buddy and I were driving home from that party, and I told him about how I think I had freaked that guy out. He responded "why would you tell him that story? You can't just tell everyone that story."

"But it's a good story! It's a great story. Also it's what happened." I protested.

"Yeah, I know, but you can't tell that story to guys you might want to sleep with."

" But I wasn't trying to do that. And anyway, that's a great story, and I don't want to sleep with anyone who doesn't get why it's so great."

So possibly I will use this story, which I'm sorry, I'm not telling you here, to vet new people I meet. Do they hear the ringing behind it, the thin line of sad beauty I see in it, or do they just think I'm a drunk slut? Which is sort of the same as me writing about dereliction in Cleveland, and either you see why it's beautiful, or you think I have Stockholm syndrome. Or maybe I will never tell that story again.

I also danced a lot this week. It's nice that Fall is for dancing and talking. Lots and lots of shows. I almost forget that every October. Lots of "oh yay sweater weather!" and "pumpkins!", but the best part of the weather getting cold is the city collectively tries to suck every tiny taste of life out of the day, like bears getting fat for hibernation.

I know I've been terrible about writing posts this past month. But it is important for me to work on writing things that aren't just blog posts you know. You can't have everything for free. Eventually you're going to have to pay for it.