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Wednesday, February 16, 2005 Spent a lot of the morning getting an old laptop computer ready to bestow on a 'puterless friend, prep. that consisted in part of purging a hefty pile of documents. During which I stumbled across the text of some old theater pieces I'd written and performed years back. One-person stuff, autobiographical. One of which caught my eye and got me reading. Felt kinda weird to find myself plowing through something from my past about other things from my past, but it produced enough chortles that I'm afraid I decided to inflict a bit of it on, er, you. From 'Hormones on Parade' (all of it true): ...in fourth or fifth grade, the kids in my class acted out a nifty version of the war between the sexes -- groups of one gender scoping out the representatives of the other gender, looking for one or two off by themselves, alone, vulnerable. Lengthy, languid bouts of reconnoitering erupting into sudden raids, hit-and-run skirmishes aimed at taking prisoners of the enemy sex. Which meant that if a guy played his cards right, he could actually find himself captured by women -- an unbelievably tantalizing prospect. Nothing much happened once you were a prisoner, of course. No real mistreatment, no unspeakable sexual whims. No one actually knew what to do with captive combatants, so that all the deliciously tense anticipation -– the game's foreplay, I suppose -- gave way to boredom, impatience, existential disgust. The war skidded to an abrupt halt on a day I'd managed to get caught and found myself hanging suspended just above the playground earth, Karen Schneider pulling on my right arm while Paul Mortensen tried to save me from capture, pulling on my left leg. They jerked me back and forth, me facing up, studying the sky -- there was a light cloud cover that noontime -- until Karen dropped my arm, suddenly tired, no longer interested in our clown show. "This is so stupid," she said. "I'm not playing any more." It felt to me like all that tugging, all that pulling me back and forth had stretched my little body until it became long, attenuated, ribbon-like, rippling in the breeze like a pennant. When Karen let go I snapped back to my normal shape, landing in the dirt. She turned sharply away and walked off. Paul looked at her, looked at me, then exited in a different direction. And war gave way to sad, boring peace School life resumed its normal droning tedium after that, me distracting myself by drifting through crushes on various females. I developed a jones for one of my classmates, a diminutive, button-nosed minx named Carolyn Sutton -- a bit of longing that climaxed in an especially vivid dream. I found myself in a dream version of our classroom, other kids around, the school being terrorized by a gunman who lurked outside, out of view. Shots were fired through the windows, broken glass and capsized desks littered the floor. Tension, angst. And then Carolyn took a bullet. And as I knelt crying over her sweet, dead body, I woke up, tears streaming down my face, dismayed to find myself in my waking world and refusing to accept it. I turned over, willing myself back to sleep. And found myself back in the classroom amid chaos and mayhem, Carolyn still alive, the dream replaying itself. This time at the crucial moment I threw myself in front of Carolyn, taking the slug meant for her. And as I lay heroically expiring -- sprawled amid the wreckage of the classroom, bleeding profusely, noble as hell -- my dreamgirl hugged my chubby little bod, weeping, and I woke up a second time feeling pretty good about the way things had worked out. I mean, not only had this babe draped herself over my fallen body -- awash in grief, declaring undying love -- but my finer qualities had been showcased in a way I definitely approved of. It was after that, that I first fell in love. At some point during the school year, seating arrangements in our classroom changed, I found myself sitting next to a girl named Sherry. Just neighbors at first, planted at adjoining desks. Time passed, we became acquainted, relations began to loosen up. We entertained each other another through hours of boredom, drawing silly cartoons, passing comical notes back and forth. Until the morning we sat enduring a lesson on electricity and Sherry scribbled out a pun in the margin of her notebook about a three-ring circuit. Right there, sitting next to her, enjoying the joke, studying the goofy smile on her cute face, I realized I was smitten. Knocked upside the head by the Hammer of Love. I grabbed my pen, scrawled "I love you" in my notebook, I think the first time I'd ever expressed that potent phrase to anyone. And to my amazement, when I showed it to her she didn't laugh or turn white or throw up. She exclaimed, "Yeah?" seeming pleased. Not pleased enough, though. A short while after I showed Sherry those three little words, she hooked up with Ralph Hippoletus, the two of them became the fourth grade version of an item. [more to follow, er, at some point....] Madrid, te echo de menos. rws 3:09 PM [+]
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