Same old song and dance

"...and leaves delight in transience."
-Basil Bunting

I sit here looking at the computer screen in disbelief. It's not a particularly engaging image, but it is spurred from an important event. An event, sad to admit, I just learned of through the omnipresence of Facebook. It came innocuously packaged in a note titled with some romantical drivel, but I had just enough knowledge to get a feel for the foreboding that was to come.
Now, this story does not involve me, well, not directly, but it does effect two of my closest friends, call them Steve and Paul for the sake of anonymity. Paul, a good two years younger than myself, fell into success running movie theaters. He makes a good deal of money, and not just by college drop-out standards, but it requires him to relocate across state borders to mystic lands like Mississippi and Texas. Those places are weird, man. Seriously. We once went to one of his old places of residence on a whim during one of his numerous trips back home. Driving around the entertaining city of Little Rock, Arkansas with a guy who can't get into any of the bars, despite his impressive facial hair, makes one long for something, anything, to do.
"Hey, we could drive to Memphis!"
Ha, ha, what a delightfully oddball notion. I had work the next day at noon and he had to drive back to Texas. More driving and being bored it was.
"Its only like, three hours. And I bet I could make it faster."
Hmmm........ Memphis could be fun. It was only around eight thirty-ish. Get there around eleven, head home around one, sleep and get to work. That could work.
As we crossed the Mississippi we again realized that the age factor would probably bar (is that a pun?) us from all the really fun activities. Luckily, there is always a Plan B.
"Tupelo is only another hour or so. I can call some of the people that I used to manage down there and you can finally get to see my old theater." When you become a manager somewhere it is forever 'yours.' I know this first hand. I may despise my job, but I still feel the store is mine. As in, "Those two just walked out of my store with those DVDs," or"Those corporate idiots are killing my store."
Cut a few hours ahead and I'm sitting at an IHOP table at two a.m. and sharing an appetizer sampler with two other people I had meet just an hour earlier. And no one so much as batted an eyelash. See? I told you they were weird. Or maybe thats just theater workers in general...
Anyway, they were an ecclectic crew of people that my friend couldn't get to know very well simply because they worked under him. This little epiphany occured to me as I was soaking in the magnificence of the rising sun while taking a leak in the middle of a cornfield somewhere in North-eastern Arkansas. It was at that moment I truly understood what kind of solitary life Paul had carved out for himself. Enter my other good friend Steve.
Steve, like myself, is a late college starter with a tendency to try and understand the complex and screwed up world around us by writing about it. He's pretty good, too. Even had a potential interview with a member of the editorial staff of the L.A. Times. This opportunity was through the college in Kansas that he had been attending for the past two years. A community college in Kansas. There are, from what I hear, two main types of guys at community colleges in Kansas. Cowboys and Mexicans. And all the girls there are interested in two things. Cowboys and Mexicans. Steve is neither a cowboy, nor has he any Hispanic descent. This makes for a slightly lonely time for Steve as well. This fact may have directly contributed to his leaving/being kicked out of that community college and not ever getting that interview. After being misguided on how many credit hours and in what subjects he should take to graduate in the standard two years, Steve found himself looking at another year with an alcohol and drug abusing roommate. Not that Steve was a saint, mind you, but he had mellowed appreciatively over the last few years. I think that so many people we knew were getting married and popping out kids made him restock his life. It sure made me. So, he quietly decided to take what credits he could and leave Kansas and transfer them to a four year, exactly what he had been planning, just with a full Associates degree instead of a long string of credits. However unfortunate the circumstances, and no matter how tired you are at the thought of living for another year with someone, every goodbye deserves companionship and drinking. And so it commenced. On his last official night in the dorms Steve got remarkably drunk. And as a result made several trips to the group restroom shared by all the dwellers of the dorms second floor. Being a college campus there was the requisite graffiti covering the walls. Like I said, Steve is a writer. Such abuse of the written word couldn't be tolerated. Something had to be done.
Enter a drunk poet with a marker.
Steve spent the better part of the night scribbling furiously onto the bathroom walls and creating fairly decent poetry. Even, and he was particularly proud of this one, writing a poem backwards near the mirrors so that looking at you reflection you'd see it the correct way.
"I was amazed! You wouldn't think that a drunk Steve could have pulled that off without fucking it up."
A few days later and Steve gets a phone call to come to Dean Something-or-other's office. Figuring its last minute leaving college stuff he isn't too worried. Turns out, however, that the faculty is enraged at his poetic scribblings and wants to know who did it. And, being the only student leaving (and since someone was a squealer) Steve was at the top of the suspect list. Really, he was the list. And they were furious. There was talk of everyone's grades being held until the culprit came forward, a forensic specialist being called in, and legal action being taken. I shit you not. I mean, how dare someone write poetry in the bathroom? The bathroom of all places! That place is reserved for bodily functions and anti-semitic scratchings only. And maybe some gay bashing. But poetry, especially in washable red ink, was unwelcome.
"Can you believe it!? I was the nicest vandal ever! The ink washes right off! They told me that they are going to have to hire a painter to come in and paint over it, and that I had to foot the bill. I told them that I would come in and clean it off, and, get this, she told me that that would work, except that after I came forward I was banned from the dorms! And she was the one who banned me. I think they just want me to pay for the whole bathroom being painted so they don't have to."
There was subsequent talk of a late night incursion to said dorms for a little late night guerrilla cleaning. I can't say if that ever happened, but I don't think that any money ever changed hands between Steve and that little community college.

To be continued.....

Collage

Under a Red velvet sky,
In the back of the room,
They come to me in Torrents and floods.
Drinking from the nectarous Nepenthe
For far too long has clouded not
My judgment wholly.
Words from kindest friends, words
Of pain and suspicions and
True notions free from
Me
The fantastic fantasy
Of dreamt-up lies.
Under the light of a plaster
Moon you shine in
Technicolor brightness and sincerity
Of your true self.
Far more mortal I find
You than my fancies had me believe,
And prone still to the things
That separate ethereal
Quite magnitudes.
Free from burdens past I forge on this day to
The prosaic future of
Happiness.