The Blues Are Still Blue
If life replicates art, and art is some tedious movie (as has been explained by our dethroned hero), then this is the segue, with the flipping calendar pages (or Rolodex, depending on your bad movie montage of choice). The days roll by, and more significantly, the weeks and months. Constants during this period may include any one of the following, and often several at once: walking around in an un-induced trancelike state, being in continuous possession of a Belle & Sebastian album, and adult onset ADD. Some things never change, and here I find myself in the same office chair, with fellow coworkers floating lazily by my window, like pollen. Spring is also experiencing the delayed onset, and so maybe the whole movie segue/ pollen analogy is a bad one. It’s a passage, but one that often lends itself to nothing in particular. Tim Drawbridge, the tragically named weather person on the local station, animates this on the morning news, the flickering ghost images flashing on my walls in the early AM. I love this person because he’s a boring human in charge of making a boring subject matter entertaining, therein revealing its entertainingness to me. The other anchorperson has no idea how to deal with him, awkwardly passing the minute segment of time they have to fill together until the next spot. “It seems like we’re just going to have to put up with this frosty weather for a while longer,” he says dogmatically, as I laugh out loud.

At work they have reduced my computers’ functions to the space of a barely adequate hard drive, comprised of two fully functioning programs. I drink black coffee and clack ferverishly at the keyboard. It seems to create the perfectly lined vacuum which blocks out all outside stimulus. What exactly is accomplished in this state, I don’t know, but I can’t quite endorse it as therapeutic. “I just seem to be getting dumber,” I’ve recently explained to a friend. “I used to read the newspaper and things, but now I just sit listlessly in the corner.” “Well it seems to be working out pretty well for you,” he tells me, and I have to admit that seems at least somewhat true. No longer will you catch me standing on street corners speaking about the fascist tendencies of reality programming, choosing instead to take in the latest episode of Cheaters. Some tectonic plate seems shifted, within.
....................................................................................................................................................................

Interoffice fashion critique with a coworker. “Boy, here comes your girlfriend,” she says. Coming up the way is the elusive girl, walking by my window everyday. Today she is wearing a peculiar aqua-colored dress which does not go unnoticed by my coworker. “Man, she’s wearing her Easter-edition getup,” she says. And it’s true: her outfit does seem unglaringly funny. Augmenting the aqua dress is a similar colored blouse, which only adds to the overall effect. All we can do is shake our heads at one another, the razor-sharp fashion critics, having missed our calling, and ended up here instead.

I try and examine exactly what it is that makes this so hilarious to me. The girl likely purchased this dress from the store, and possibly even stood before the dressing room mirror, before making the executive decision that this garment is perfectly acceptable for presentation to the outside world. At some point in time, she may have even checked the price tag, and determined that it was a worthwhile purchase. Meanwhile, it’s the most hilarious outfit Kalish and I could even imagine. It’s not so much the outfit itself but the dichotomy of perception which makes it so funny to me— the almost unfathomable outfit choice which seems to the espouser perfectly acceptable, while to me it denotes that the wearer may inhabit a reality completely unlike my own (which may also make some amount of sense, because I’m not a 23-year-old woman. But still, it’s invariably gut busting and funny.

I’m trying to become a ‘better person,’ I keep telling people, although that’s a concept which may just be shrouded in ambiguity and meaninglessness, even to me. A better description might describe changing without having finite terms in mind. I like that better; although that, too, is misleading. I try to imagine the movements which actual change might imply, and all I can come up with is an automobile routed firmly in tracks. For years I’ve been confused by the destination that change ultimately implies, conceptually or geographically. It all just seems like landscape and broken promises to me. But thinking in these terms hasn’t gotten me very far. And so I’ve decided that it’s probably better to place the emphasis on the act of change, and transit, without having such finite terms in mind. Whatever that may mean, which in my case is fairly complex and difficult to articulate to you.

Dina, the chef at Mezzo and apparent PR person, sits down next to me at a bar recently. “I’m just going to eat here,” she explains to me. “There’s no other tables available.” “—Oh. OK,” I say to her. A friend of hers arrives momentarily, and it’s not long before I find myself not knowing what to talk to them about, and so end up mercilessly making fun of their suntans instead (suntans which, here in the frozen tundra of Spring, seem inordinately vain and funny to me. Although, it occurs to me that maybe I’m just jealous that my own pasty and office-imbued complexion falls short of the invigorated skin of my sanguine-faced table dwellers). Shortly they are taking offense to this. “Are you making fun of us?” Dina wants to know. It does seem like particularly bad form, openly making fun of strangers like this, but I’ve had too much to drink and what can you do? “You shouldn’t do that,” she admonishes. “You shouldn’t prejudge. –She’s Italian, and it’s hot in here.” The way she says this to me, calmly, it’s clear that she’s not actually mad or upset, but sincerely instructing me on the dangers of making fun of humans with red faces. I try to imply the good-natured-ness inherent in my fun-making but before long the band has launched into some incredible assault of their Hootie and the Blowfish cover, and there is just no way to explain. And so there we sit, people of all varieties, red and white-faced, wildly coifed and inarticulate.

Sitting there, in the dim-lit bar, it’s hard not to realize that a band like this could only really exist in Albany, New York. Albany is, as anyone whose paid a visit, a vacuum unto itself, channeling in strickly vapid influence and hackneyed pop culture reference. Next to Cleveland, Ohio, it’s probably one of the most notoriously losingist cities on the map. And you can’t help but feel, listening to music in a place like this, the crushing weight of it all. It seems the perfect music for the hideous bar, within the confines of a hideous city, the layers of horribleness accumulating like the spackle on a wall that is crumbling beneath, and which can only be appreciated for the eyesore that it is. I can only shake my head at myself. It seems almost inconceivable to be so disconnected from an environment you’ve spent an eternity in, shambling amongst its inhabitants like an actual alien. There were people out there like me somewhere, I find myself thinking, even if I never found them.

Before leaving, Dina turns and thanks me for letting them sit with me, and that it was, actually, a good time. “I’ll see you around,” she says to me, as she cheerfully clinks my glass. It seems weird, but I can’t help but think something good has come from the encounter, and that some innate connection was made, even if she does have a real bad suntan. Maybe the whole personal evolution thing is not lost on me, after all, I find myself thinking; Maybe there’s hope for me, yet.
.......................................................................................................................................................................
Easter Sunday: what a day. Tim Drawbridge is probably pointing out the unseasonably terrible weather somewhere. I am meeting my parents for brunch on short sleep. I saunter over to the the mirror to find sleep-depraved eyes staring back at me, the maniacal visage of someone whose life is out of control. It’s embarrassing, really—not quite a look conducive to entering the public arena, with its dramatic angles and bad lighting. I realize I cannot present myself to my parents looking like this, and so a trip to the store is in order, to buy eye drops.

The Colvin Avenue Hannaford stands stark in the midmorning sunlight, the architecture itself issuing forth the magnetic hum which has vagrants of all sorts producing forth to hang out lazily in the morning sun. This has been my favorite place in Albany for some time now, if only because you cannot leave the premises without some variety of dull anecdote to relate to someone. And as if on cue, en route to the eye care aisle, I see Dina, the girl from the bar, walking straight towards me. She looks right into my eyes, and then through me. I almost cannot believe and so I say, “Hey, what’s up?” She fixes on me, and then all at once my face must prompt the imagery of the person she was sitting next to at the bar the other night. We exchange a lackluster greeting, and then depart, her through shadowy monolith of the grocery mart and me to my battered car, shaking my head once more at my own sense of transparence.

.......................................................................................................................................................................
At my parents’, I am early for once. The TV plays the meaningless banter of the national news people. It’s funny how much more urban these people seem by comparison to the square-seeming newscasters on the local station, whose lives, you imagine, are so much less exciting. They’re featuring a segment where they corner pedestrians and ask them about the significance of the Easter holiday. The masses seem perpetually confused, and totally unable to define why Easter is celebrated with any degree of correctness. And it seems unreal for people to be so dumb, from even a totally secular perspective. Neitche famously declared God is Dead, but here in the blinding light of the new dark age, he seems deader than dead, without even the mere suggestion of anything but more deadness. Although, that adds up, too, and I find myself hard pressed to defend things from any high moral grounds. It just seems kind of strange to be so disconnected--so dumb. But then, I've never experienced this variety of solidarity. I'll probably just get worse. It feels OK.