Prayers for Rain

Today was a good day. There haven’t been enough of those recently.

Several things have been going that have been making a scenario such as a good day fairly unimaginable, let alone possible. But today was different.

The big issue had to be the age-old question, no doubt pondered by the likes of Sophocles or Nietzsche, of how far a man will go in pursuit of someone they really want to fuck, but don’t actually like.

We all have this problem. We all have had those grim periods where you meet a person and as far as your groin is concerned pursuing him or her is simply too brilliant a prospect to forgo, even with the heart and mind doing everything they can to hold that raging motherfucker back until finally they become too worn out to fight, only to have the groin thwarted time and time again, to lay lifeless in defeat as the heart and mind wearily re-establish their thick list of grievances.

This is not a particularly pleasant problem to have to deal with. This is the kind of problem that will infect your thinking and corrode your soul. Suddenly the entire world becomes one enormous engine of woe all pointed in your direction. Nothing goes your way. Your job, your family life, your total life all decay before your eyes. Everything is just another thing that is pissing you off at the moment. Everything is a parody of a parody of a parody. This is a problem that makes you question who you are on an uncomfortably penetrating level.

You can’t sleep when you have this problem. You can’t enjoy liquor or candy or music or even the masturbation you’re committing in mind of this person.

I wanted to like Katie, I really did, but those nagging bastards were always there, humorlessly reminding me that though fucking her would indeed jazz up this miserable thing we’re going through, fucking her is all i’ll ever want to do, and even that will probably cease to be a comfort faster than I can imagine. 

I was sitting there, punching in mindless data entry in an ambient hell of confusion, alienation and despair. There was no way out of this problem. I felt doomed to the damn thing. I didn’t know whether to march downstairs and tear my heart out in front of her or write her a scathing condemnation at some frightening hour of the morning.

It doesn’t help when the person in question doesn’t even notice the damage this is doing to you. They seem completely oblivious to the idea that the phrase that is passing through your head every day is "living hell."

So I decided enough was enough, and began stonewalling her. I was a Colonial Mennonite, she was the town whore. I would sit there and wait for proper acknowledgement at least and an apology in writing at the most. But even this seemed futile. Simply put, I don’t take much pleasure from being unkind to others. I just don’t have it in me. Further, this did nothing to keep down the bile always creeping up my spinal column. In my dark, quiet moments I composed symphonies of hatred. I wanted to go downstairs and reduce her to a pile of rubble and tears. There was even one day when I finally decided to. My heart and soul charged downstairs like a rabble of torch-bearing villagers after Frankenstein’s Monster. But of course, when I finally marched down and actually found her at her desk, she smiled and said "hi" and my groin ambushed heart and soul at the moment of victory and I lost all the words I had at once and sulked away after stammering and blanking through a brief conversation.

I could never have a good conversation with Katie. You know what I mean by a good conversation. The kind where you’re not thinking about what you’re saying at all, but everything makes perfect sense. The two of you are simply gliding across each other, all sense of time vanishes. You’re both talking the way you talk when you’re having a good day.

A good conversation is a hard thing to find. There are people out there who may talk their whole lives and end up noticing they haven’t enjoyed any of it. Life can be cruel this way. When you have this problem, you can’t help but notice all the ways life can be capricious to the point of horror. You think of all those victims of the bubonic plage, the holocaust. You think of all those murder victims, all those crack addicts with stillborn children, all those cavemen. You realize on a base level that it is immensely easy for life to make you question every value you hold dear for no other reason than because why not? What makes you so special? All of these things have to happen to somebody. At times it seems pointless to believe in things.

This, ultimately was the problem. The "whose side are you on" problem. The one where somebody asks you if you act from love or from hate.

I have trouble with hate. It’s not something that I enjoy. It doesn’t make me feel good. Yet here I had a perfectly acceptable reason to switch it on. Why not take it out for a spin? Why not, just this once, take the time to rip a fellow human being’s head off?

And yet, it just wasn’t something i felt comfortable doing. So instead, I made a decision to do the opposite, and I went downstairs and apologized to Katie. I told her I was sorry for ignoring her. Then she said she hadn’t noticed. It was at this point when my delusions of grandeur were thwarted above all.

But I felt better. I felt at last that I had actually solved the problem. The problem was that there was no problem. Which I would have felt stupid about, except that I just felt good, that I hadn’t done the wrong thing.

It was raining when I left work, so I had to take the bus home. As I got on, I noticed there was a cute girl on who I had seen once before. We had been sitting across from each other, and got off at the same stop. This, unfortunately, was in the back of the bus, and when I stood up, trying in vain to look cool, ended up hitting my head on the low ceiling. Still, she giggled and smiled and let me go first. So as you might imagine I was moronically letting optimism have a word in, but when I got on and sat in one of the available seats behind her she didn’t seem to notice. Nor could I think of anything to say to her that didn’t seem completely stupid and off-putting (personal favorite: I don’t know if it’s the whiplash, but I find myself drawn to you). She didn’t even notice me when she got up ahead of me and climbed off as I got up myself resigning myself to my usual hunch that there still isn’t much point in thinking you’re entitled to anything. But as I climbed down the steps, without banging my head, I looked at her seat and saw that her umbrella was wedged in the corner of her seat. And for once it seemed like maybe the universe occasionally notices you standing there looking pitiful and throws you a bone, because why not?

I picked up the umbrella and went out after her and said "excuse me," but she didn’t turn around. I said it again, and still got nothing. I then began to worry about what the proper title one twentyish man uses to address a twentyish girl. ‘Ma’am’ was obviously out of the question, since it brought to mind images of weathered women with indifferently-ke

pt bodies bearing shopping. And ‘Miss’ just seemed, I dunno, too French. Oh, and I tried "hello?". But then I shrugged and walked up to her and tapped her on the back and though she seemed surprised, she didn’t seem horrified at all and proceeded to remove her ear buds. So I returned her umbrella and then, actually managed to have a good conversation. Nothing deep, obviously. We talked about our proximity to a supermarket, and I discussed my suspicion that some of the neighborhod children are practicing satanists. And when we parted ways she told me her name was Jamie, and it turns out she also rides the bus when it rains.

I don’t know where this is going. It could well end in pain and suffering, just like everything usually does. For now though, I feel okay thinking that good things can happen, as I silently hope for more rainy days.