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Breakfast

I met Mr. Kirrene for breakfast at the Lucky Cafe.  He had suggested that we meet there over Facebook.  He was the first person over 40 to friend me on Facebook.  I knew him primarily as my high school english teacher. I arrived first.  The Bold and the Beautiful was playing on a black and white tv mounted to the wall.  The lone employee, a tall man with long black hair, pockmarked skin, and clothing from several decades previous was locked in conversation with an old man sitting at the counter.  I felt bad for thinking it, but the choice of restaurant made me wonder if perhaps Mr. Kirrene, a resident of the nicest neighborhood in town and employee of an expensive private school, had perhaps recently fallen from grace in some way.  

He at last arrived and slid into the sticky vinyl booth next to me, greeting me with my high school nickname.  I was pleased he hadn’t forgotten it--- he gave it to me.  Perhaps there was no fall from grace necessarily but certainly there was a transformation taking place. I had remembered him as a very skinny man with crowded teeth.  He had bulked up quite a bit as though a personal trainer had entered the picture and evidently so had an orthodontist.  He was wearing braces.  I remarked favorably upon these noticeable positive changes, but at the same time I couldn’t really understand why someone who looked dorky his whole life would, in his 40s, want to look less dorky.  I suddenly wanted to recall if there were any pictures on facebook of him with his wife and kids.  I could not recall them.  The waiter, who was really quite striking up close and was wearing an unusual beaded necklace, took our orders.  I ordered a waffle that had bacon inside it.  It occurred to me that I have never had occasion to eat with my high school english teacher, nor had I ever seen him eat.  Like seeing a teacher in jeans at the store on the weekend, the strangeness of Mr. Kirrene being my teacher a decade ago and somehow also being a person in a diner next to me could not be totally reconciled.    

As we drank refills of coffee that was really just tepid brown water, the conversation veered towards how I met my boyfriend.  I was sharing the story, I think, as an example of triumph over shyness.  I had approached my boyfriend and told him of my feelings, an act that was, at the time, out of character for me.  Mr. Kirrene said “Wow, I couldn’t imagine doing something like that.  You are very brave.”  Did something he said suggest he needed encouragement in the arena of romance?  I remembered his classroom persona, which was an odd, inappropriate and potent mix of coy flirtatiousness and cruel volatility.  I was very surprised that someone who so obviously relished the power of commanding a classroom could in fact struggle with low confidence.  Even as my hopeful story about my relationship escaped my lips, I wondered why this man was seeking counsel from a 22 year old woman.  I wondered why he was seeking breakfast with a 22 year old woman.   He then brought up the clique of blonde girls in my class, Sary, Mary and Carey, and said over and over again how “special” they were with a wistful twinkle in his eye that gave me a sensation of mild disgust, but I might partially attribute it to the undercooked waffle with chunks of bacon in it.  I assumed he failed to recognize my disgust, but the lens of several years now allows for the possibility that he was relishing in it.  He then told me that my mother is a gorgeous, sexy woman.  “You don’t resemble her at all,” he said, with unmistakable disappointment.  At last the waiter glided over with the check.  I waited, but ended up paying it.  He made thin promises to get me next time, but why would either of us ever want to do whatever this was again?  Two months later all his facebook pictures were with a pretty blonde woman about his age, and his braces had come off.  

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Erick

When I was a sophomore in college I very briefly had a boyfriend named Erick.  He became my “boyfriend” by default because he was always at the house, but he would never sleep in my bed or otherwise spend any time alone with me because he thought it was too awkward.  We would go on “dates” occasionally wherein we would just drive around in his car listening to music.  I remember leaning my arm over the seat and playing with his hair but that never evolved into making out or other touching of any kind— I don’t even remember holding hands or hugging.  These dates would only last about an hour as he was preoccupied with what my housemates might think. He claimed that he liked to write poetry and fiction but was too embarrassed to show it to me (awkward). I was a 19 year old virgin and felt like I didn’t have a lot of time for this kind of fey, eye contact avoidant behavior and just needed to rack up some sexual experiences before I turned 20.  He was 25.  I thought because he was older he might be a likely candidate to initiate me into the world of sex but I obviously gravely misjudged the situation.  Perhaps I should have noted his tendency to spend all his free time hanging out with a bunch of teens in a glorified dorm and made this realization earlier.  It became clear right away that basically any other guy would be a better choice for what I hoped to accomplish, and I sent him a break-up email.  I assumed he would be relieved.  

Given his apparent lack of interest, I was dismayed by how often he would message (for this was the era of AIM) my housemates solely to complain of his unrelenting heartbreak, hoping always that it would get back to me.  Eventually he broke his straight edge and started drinking.  Then he would message me directly, drunk, to express his confusion over why it ended.  In my mind it never began, but I would give a thoughtless “not you it’s me” style response just to stave him off.  It didn’t work.  I could count on him messaging me several times a year for the next 4 or 5 years to rehash “what went wrong.”  Finally during one of these conversations I revealed the truth: I was young, he wouldn’t touch me and I wanted to seek out sluttier companions.  That answer seemed to satisfy him at last.  

I received no messages until 2014, when he resurfaced via Facebook.  He revealed that for a period of 2 years he lived in the same town as me.  He listed a number of times and places he saw me but did not say hello (awkward).  He made a clumsy attempt at apologizing for whatever he did or didn’t do while we were together.  I said “well that was ten years ago” and all forgiven, though quite frankly I was reeling.  How is it that he came to be living in the same town as me?  I was actually afraid to ask—my instincts were leading me to a scary place.  He told me he had gotten back into writing and would I like to read a draft he had going?  I said sure.  I pulled up his draft.  A Fight Club-esque tale of an insurance agent who starts fights with derelicts for the adrenaline?  Page 2 we meet the narrator’s lover, Rachel.  I closed my laptop, having read enough.  

I was recounting this story to a coworker on a slow evening at the bookstore once.  Naturally we decided to look him up.  He was pretty easy to find— several websites promoting his self-published poetry and short fiction and—aha! here we go— some photos with his girlfriend.  My coworker remarked that she looked like the poor man’s version of me. I couldn’t help but see the resemblance. Awkward.  

Last year I was shopping with my husband at Streetlight Records in Santa Cruz.  Out of the corner of my eye I saw Erick browsing the hard-core vinyl 7 inches.  I was careful to be on the opposite side of the store.  I was grateful that my husband is the kind of man who is crazy in swift, short bursts, not the kind of man who obsesses over an abortive 2 months of his life for ten plus years.  

I know the best course of action is to just never speak to Erick for any reason, but what I want is to reach out to him and ask him to “publish” this piece of writing in his next zine.  

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Lauren Martin

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The sudden uptick in unstructured personal time has helped me see that I’m not so evolved as I thought.  While awake I am drawn back to metaphysical and psychological books.  I have no control over what’s going on during this pandemic, so maybe I can make myself feel better by focusing on my mind powers of positivity, blaming astrology or maybe even astrally projecting to someplace else (not quite there yet).  While asleep I return to my darkest self. 

I’ve been having a lot of disturbing dreams in which The EEL (Elderly Ex Lover) is the central problem.  In these dreams I am with him again, or at least, he seems to be wherever I am.  I am both embarrassed of him and fearful that he will ruin my present life, so I am ever vigilant for possible escape routes.  Whenever I think I’ve successfully dodged him, he’s there again. 

About 6 months ago I received several phone calls and text messages at around 4:00AM.  I had to google the number to verify but of course it was the EEL.  He used to have a penchant for taking an Ambien and rather than go to bed, he’d stay up drinking wine with ice in it and hop on his phone for a little dramatic, nonsensical texting.  He always claimed that he couldn’t remember any of what he said or did once the Ambien took hold.  Perhaps about just this one thing he was telling the truth.  I hoped those calls were just mistakes and his days of washing down sleeping pills with sweet white wine are behind him, but in my experience people don’t change that much.   I want to believe he has repaired his life, because it’s just too sad to think he’s the same and reaching out to 28 year old, insecure me, expecting me to be the same too.  My phone number hasn’t changed but the person he knew isn’t at the other end.  

It is amazing to me my mind and body are still processing something that I participated in more than 5 years ago.  I have to wonder if I am going to be dealing with buried shame bubbling up around this situation forever.  For awhile I was concerned about enduring a karmic repayment, but I’ve come to see the traumatic memories surfacing whenever and wherever as punishment enough.  I believe we came into each others’ lives to learn a lesson.  I thought I learned mine.  Evidently there is more to glean from the worst thing I’ve ever done.  Maybe self forgiveness is next on the list?  I’d love to just go back to dreaming about missing a test in high school again.  

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Last night I dreamt that I went to a Grateful Dead concert.  I paid for pretty good seats but didn’t sit in them both because my entire family was seated in that section and they were all hyper-critical of the way I was wearing my hair, and also I brought my cat with me and she wanted to hide in a hole in the grassy seating area and I needed to accommodate her.  It was clear that the sound personnel clearly did not like the Grateful Dead very much because they turned the band down to the degree where they were barely audible.  Thematically, this dream was “mediocre time.”  

During this quarantine I have been listening to the Grateful Dead nonstop, as I find their music joyful and soothing and speaking of happier, sun-drenched times.  Also I have been preoccupied with my cat.  Dreams and reality are blending together in the absence of external stimulation.  I’ve always thought that without soul-sucking work to do, then my soul would elevate and become a channel of greater spiritual knowing.  I see that this may take a little more effort, unless of course my cat and jingly jangly hippie music IS the highest achievable spiritual plane.  Thematically, this spiritual plane is “mediocre time.”  

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Aggressive Breastfeeding As A Power Play: Has This Happened To You Yet?

I deal with a surprising amount of confrontational and aggressive, surly behavior from the clientele at my job, which is Scheduling Coordinator at a pediatric dental office.  I get it.  Dentistry is stressful and expensive.  No one understands their insurance-- most believe that theirs is much better than what they are actually getting, and I am the person who tells them how crappy it really is. They conflate me with the insurance company, and believe that I, personally, am screwing them over.  One time, a bitchy mom dealt with this disappointment by whipping out her breast and aggressively breastfeeding her 2 year old on my desk.  Her choice to breastfeed on my desk was obviously designed to upset or disrespect me.  I felt upset and disrespected.  Her insurance still sucks, nobody wins here, but ok, I guess she took her power back from the hapless customer service person and her child’s dental office?  I figured it was a shitty day but it was an isolated incident I could move on from with relative ease and she is an unhappy person with zero coping skills.  Last week a second bitchy mom, unrelated to the first, pulled the same move-- aggressive breastfeeding on my desk in response to not liking some news I just delivered.  At this point, I can only conclude that Aggressive Breastfeeding As A Power Play is a thing.  I will not deign to join any Roseville/Rocklin Facebook mommy groups to read the thread on using this alarming strategy to torment customer service people.  I don’t need to read it.  I just assume it exists, and those two bitches are heading the movement.   

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Very, very VERY special occasions

While shopping at the local natural foods co-op I overheard the cherubic voice of a child of about three implore, “Mommy, can we please get raisins?”  To which Mommy replied sharply, “Raisins are for very, very VERY special occasions.  They have a LOT of sugar in them and we can’t be eating them all the time.”  I wheeled around to look at the mother who issued this bleak moratorium on raisins.  She was probably my age but had a grim, dustbowl hardness about her that made her look ten years older— a husk in REI outdoor performance wear.  Her face and body language told the story of many more instances of needless austerity in their lives, all in the service of “health.” I imagined the little boy pulling a baggie of bulk-bin raisins out of his christmas stocking and cheering, then only being allowed  to eat 3.  I have been thinking about this brief encounter for several weeks now.  I want to tell her that grimness and deprivation are not in the service of health, but joy is.  

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This reminds me of Kerry Cottle’s story about her friend receiving the unsolicited AIM chatroom inquiry, “Doth m’lady have a shorn poon?”  

oh mine god, i accidentally hath sent thou a picture of mine cock and balls...prithee delete it!! 'Lest...thou desire to look? haha I jest, delete it...should thee crave... haha nay, banish it...'lest?

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Gene Clark

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furniture

At one time it was a strange point of pride that I had never purchased any of my own furniture.  I type this remembrance from an orange leather recliner I got on the side of the road, badly in need of reupholstery.  Most of my furniture came from my family, though it was hardly family heirlooms.   A sagging Hawaiian print hide-a-bed from the early 1980s.  An unremarkable lamp my stingy, well-off cousin sold me for $20.  I’ve reached a point in my life where this is no longer a point of pride.  I’m 33 years old, married, and my furniture is a hodgepodge of 90% chipping particle board ikea furniture (my husband’s contributions) purchased in a sad, bachelor moment, and a few sticks of the coarse, peasant furniture I inherited from my grandparents and great grandparents and convinced myself are “antiques.”  The problem, at this point, is no longer lacking sufficient funds for suitable adult furniture.  What’s happened here is two adults accustomed to “making do” with ad-hoc crap for most of their lives have come together, bringing their own individual fears about investing in large-ticket items with them.  The best example is the bed.  Our bedframe is a handsome cherrywood number from the victorian era that once belonged to my great grandmother.   Being an exceptionally short woman, someone sawed the legs down so that she could, if taking a flying leap, get into the bed.  It is a double, which is too small.  If one of us so much as moves our heads in the night it creaks and groans.  It needs a new mattress. Trapped in an impoverished mindset, we can only think to replace the groaning (but antique!) frame with a mission-style Ikea number that, in the long run, won’t improve our lot at all.  The price of a decent mattress  is anxiety inducing particularly for my husband, because although he is in his 40s, he has never purchased a new mattress, instead relying on the mattresses of girlfriends or odd assortments of almost-body-sized pillows or lumpy futons for sleeping.  I can hardly fault him.  Prior to purchasing the mattress we have now ten years ago (which required me to make a huge cognitive leap) I shared a hand-me-down twin mattress with my then boyfriend, and prior to that I slept on an air mattress for several years.  

A strange woman who has been hired at my work under the dubious credentials of “consultant” likes to spout inspirational quotes she probably found on pinterest.  A favorite: “if you can see it in your mind, you can hold it in your hand.”  I can’t even picture what nice furniture would be like.  All I can see is clunky beige wooden bedroom sets from the 90s in Goodwills across America.  The bold-lettered Swedish titles in the Ikea catalog like a threatening radio transmission from another planet, saying “particle board is good enough for you.”  

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Thinking about my goals for the new year

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Tyler Lammerding where are you

I was thinking about my old friend Tyler Lammerding tonight.  We used to always do projects together in high school and college, and I remember one winter night here in Sacramento much like tonight, we had finished working on our project and detoured to the park by my house for a game of hide and seek.  We were a little too old for it and I remember having a self-aware feeling of getting older and innocence fading, but it was still fun, and the memory is a fond one.  Though now a lot of my pleasant memories of Tyler are tainted by a more recent memory.  

Back when karaoke was the crux of my social life, I ran into Tyler’s little sister at the local dive.  I asked her what was new with her brother.  She said, “oh it’s really sad about Tyler.  He and his wife joined this Christian cult and they cut off all contact with us.  We’re all broken-hearted, he won’t talk to us at all.”  I was shocked.  A couple of years went by since my meeting with his sister, and I ran into him and his wife at the health food store. I could tell he recognized me and was going to ignore/flee, but his wife saw that I was advancing right towards them and escape was futile so she greeted me.  She had a wild, caged-animal furtiveness and I knew right away she wanted to be anywhere but talking to me, but she greeted me warmly enough and asked me some questions like a perfectly normal person.  I recognized Tyler only from his face and hair, everything else about him had changed.  He couldn’t have been more than 29 but he was dressed like a 50 year old man, and not in that ironic way young men dress where they wear ugly jeans and new balance shoes and purple thrift store windbreakers, but like he was actually 50 years old.  He had on a white polo shirt tucked into khaki slacks.  He had on large, out of style glasses that serial killers always seem to be wearing on Forensic Files.  I was less alarmed by his weirdly out of touch style of dress than by the fact that all his mannerisms seemed to have changed.  I didn’t know that a person could change the way they blink, the way the walk or they way the hold their head, but somehow Tyler’s mannerisms had become unrecognizable.  I don’t want to say he was “dead behind the eyes” but that’s a phrase that came to mind.  Certainly, looking into his eyes, I could tell that the person I had been friends with was no longer in there.  After about 30 seconds of cordiality which felt like an hour, we parted ways.  I was shaken.

Reflecting on my last meeting with Tyler, and upon him in general tonight, I see that perhaps there were some signposts on the way to his joining the creepy christian cult which I can of course only recognize in hindsight.  Should I have paid more attention when he returned from summer vacation every year with a completely different look and personality?  When he left UCSC junior year, citing vague feelings of “homesickness” should I have investigated that more?  There was probably no way for myself or any of his friends to truly alter his trajectory from bass-guitar-loving weirdo kid to dead-behind-the-eyes cult member.  It frightens me a little that none of us could see this possibility lying there in wait for our friend.  

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