I must be recovering, well, maybe not entirely or perhaps I am too reflexive for my own good or something, but last night I realised that I was talking to a young woman who was breath-takingly pretty and I was enjoying it.
We were getting on alright, I spoke her language, which is not the language of the ‘academic elite’ and we were both simply having a few beers and a few laughs. I respected the way she spoke, like someone who was honest, perhaps sometimes brutally so, about what she said; therefore only her content modulated, never her expression, which was perfectly singular in its differentiated repetition. I was speaking in my usual counter-charming manner. She was once a Catholic school girl and her parents were once publicans so she could handle the discursive lubrication of my near constant swearing, and probably could have let me know a few new choice lines. (I even told her about the Catholic school girls song by the Red Hot Chilli Peppers, haha! http://www.lyricsdepot.com/red-hot-chili-peppers/catholic-school-girls-rule.html)
Every now and then I would smile and eventually she asked me what I was smiling about – we had been talking about the recent earthquakes, including the one near Tassie as she is from Tassie, but now works with a mate’s girlfriend, which is how she came to be at this function – and I almost said because I am talking to an extraordinarily pretty girl, but I hadn’t consumed enough Dutch courage (I was driving, as was she) and she had just been verbally molested by some silly bugger who had consumed too much, so I just told her it was because I was in a good mood. This was, of course, entirely true.
Between now and the fiasco in Pittsburgh of the recent past I certainly have chatted with and been in the presence of many attractive people. However, in spite of their obvious attractiveness – looks, personality, or otherwise – no spark had burned inside me to talk to them because their mere presence willed me to simply continue being there. I think I was suffering from a distinct and perhaps entirely self-absorbed inattentiveness. It is an odd feeling to realise that you are in fact happy just to be around someone; it is far more odd to realise that you hadn’t really felt like that for a duration, really it is something of a shock. It forced me to excuse myself to the gents and that was an event if there was ever one. Not the gents mind you, it wasn’t that sort of pub, but the realisation that as I was looking into someone’s eyes at that precise moment I would not have preferred to be anywhere else. So I would punctuate such moments with a smile…
It takes me ages to get over my past loves. I think I have evolved a form of denial that forces me to think about things too much. Not reliving things in my mind like some form of weird Dr Phil torture, but trawling through the past like a treasure hunter. I choose not to live with bad memories and really want to hold on to those moments that are worth it. Not repression, but affirming the best in the worst to realise how I have to come to be where I am at the moment – an assemblage of forces, desires, sadness and joys. This is all well and good but I don’t want to live getting prepared for moments that have past. The future is what I am talking about. What are going to be the next building blocks in my life? You know, like the Lego’s that everyone played with when they were eight years old.
Are they going to be like those cool coloured-clear pieces of Lego bling that were used as police lights or spaceship lasers, is it going to be a piece of highly-complex technic Lego that allows me to transverse some crazy life contortions, or could it even be one of those big pieces of Duplo that allows me to build the foundations of something else? Every kid is a Deleuzian when they are Lego-d up, at least when they bugger the instructions off; playing in the virtuality of what is becoming as it is actualised as a singular assemblage (of Lego’s or events). Yeah, fuck.
Anyway, I enjoyed last night.