Every Saturday, we’ll be posting a new illustration by David Lester. The Mecca Normal guitarist is visually documenting people, places and events from his band’s 26-year run, with text by vocalist Jean Smith.
I was thinking about the pool hall, the reddish light in the western sky, those old guys fighting. I liked watching you. It seems to me that enjoying liking you requires that I give up a bit of who I am, who I think I am. I disappear a little bit, into the process of enjoying you. That’s a good thing. For me, anyway. But it also causes a feeling of overwhelm in the returning to the self departed from—maybe that frayed and slightly fractured sense of wanting to put it all back the way it was is called processing. Either a re-scrambling or a re-unscrambling. Process or processing?
I liked the pool hall. I’d like to do that again. The whole thing. So far, everything we’ve done, I’d like to do again, but since everything is good, good enough to do again, I wouldn’t want to stop the flow of good—like your sauce over chicken, filling the building of what it is we’re doing, which is good. Maybe even really good. Like your sauce, your chicken—finding out that you hack up dark chocolate with a machete and from somewhere in your cantilevered kitchen, nice little figs arrive with chunks of ginger for me. Finding out you got the ginger for me felt good. I liked that.
I was riding my bike home last night, covering the same ground we drove during my disconnect, before I gave you directions to the main street. It was really warm out, very dark and raining. I’d been to the store on my way home and I saw Carmen—the clerk who knows hundreds of customers’ names—but I don’t think she recognized me. I was wearing the helmet and I had my glasses on: slightly foggy and rain-splattered. After the strange day at work, I didn’t really like it that Carmen didn’t say, “Hi Jean.” Like usual. Like normal. Maybe she decided not to. Sometimes it’s just too much to only say hello to each other, the function of proving, over and over, that we know each others’ names, as if that is some sort of fucking miracle in today’s world.
Riding through the Church’s Chicken parking lot and out onto Garden Drive—into the dark—I felt detached from the road. More air in the tires may reduce this sensation. I was already pretty wet, blue jeans tight on my thighs as I pedaled up the slight incline. I’m re-thinking riding the bike in the rain, in the dark. It’s dangerous. Maybe I should run to and from work instead.
I got to the flat section and maybe because it was dark and the road was both wet and shiny and my glasses were blurring things, it was difficult to place myself on solid ground—plus I was off-balance after my four-hour shift; I felt kind of doomed, thinking what-will-become-of-me? thoughts. I wanted to return to you, being with you. That seemed like the solution. I wanted to tell you about my day, about what had happened, what was bugging me. You would be that entity. I wanted to be hugged and held and kissed. By you. And I would feel better. I suppose it’s worth isolating, setting it up to examine, to wonder how it is that we carry human patterns with us, to collide with the variables others represent. Our species—profoundly unintelligible, mysterious to ourselves—we heartily expect new entities to comply, to know what it is we want. And, weirdly, sometimes we do. I almost hope there is someone watching our humantics. Blind acrobats on unicycles careening into each other in Petri dishes labeled according to whatever it is we are being tested for. Case studies on a long counter below the high windows of a basement lab. “Inability to learn from repeat exposure to pain-inducing stimuli” is hand-written in purple ink on the clipboard next to the unicyclists who don’t seem to realize that they could just get off and walk the rest of the way, feeling their way around the glass wall of the Petri dish.
I was on the darkest part of the ride, next to the elementary school where, day after day in the summer, I checked to see if they’d removed the completely flattened rat from the side of the road. And, day after day, it was still there, and I wondered about this, in a big-picture kind of way. An elementary school with a dead rat on its quietest perimeter, between the carefully formed and yellow-arrowed speed bumps. A dried-out rat. Splayed. If you were a kid and you decided to kick it, you’d discover the skittery sound a dry flat rat on pavement makes.
Maybe that sense of not understanding why no one had disposed of the rat was what freed me from my job concerns, allowing me to be part of the warm, rainy darkness and because you were in my thoughts and I wanted a return to the night before, at the pool hall, by the window, watching you enjoy Dino and company, their passionate accusations of cheating. “You just want to be right, that’s your problem.” Hey, do you think they, like us, emailed each other later to remark on any possible clumsiness in how they handled things?
The warm air, the rain, the darkness. You. The moment I was in. These were not problems to be solved. They were all one thing: my thinking. Just my thoughts. Just thoughts that resulted in emotions. Constructions I make, and unless I understand things differently, maybe I will keep making the same thoughts about different things.
1. Reacts differently to similar stimuli
2. Reacts similarly to different stimuli
3. Reacts similarly to similar stimuli
4. Reacts differently to different stimuli
Why don’t I know the answer? Or is it the question that eludes me? Maybe there is no question and, therefore, logically speaking, no answer.
