We Are the Remnant of the Latch Key Kids
"Ambidexterous? You know that just means you can use both hands, right? What's that got to do with math?"
"Yeah; it's cool in tennis, but my brain hasn't picked a dominant side, so right now the dumb one is in the lead."
We both started laughing, because it came out funny. The joke now is that "my dumber half is in control." But he had a point. It made more sense in his mind before he said it.
He believes that once he develops more his brain will allow him to grasp mathematical concepts better.
He's got this ambidexterous concept down pretty well, though, I see.
Tylere leaves the country on Monday. He'll miss spring training. But he'll be back just time for the season openers. Maybe I'll surprise him and fly him out to Boston for a Red Sox game? He bought me a U2 ticket two years ago and I've never found a way to repay him (except with my friendship, which he claims is enough).
I'm ill at rest with the condition of things regarding this young man. Three years of multi-dimensional conversation, on any topic, that never wearies. Suddenly I'm in the midst of a seven-month-stretch of sporadic phone calls/emails but no visits. I feel unimportant when he shows no attempt to talk to me, but I feel atop a high tower when he does.
The perfect comfort and pleasure I enjoy from his company is unlike any one man I have ever met (and I've sought replacements) but he feels towards me like any other good-thing in his life.
He's complacent and careless.
He pursues nothing. I would love to see him ache with longing, just to know he could do it.
Fortunate for him good things come of being attractive and clever. Like semesters in England. It's like he believes good things are inevitable, and if that girl he likes (who gave him her phone number but he never called her) starts dating another guy, then it wasn't meant to be. Like he believes life is good, and the shit comes from when you fuck it up. Contrarily I believe life is shit and the good is Providence.
He's good to me. I don't expect good things like him. I don't expect to have his friendship forever. He does.
He says he's cold and calculating, but if that's true, and you couple it with his passivity, then all he's doing is counting his losses.
I've maneuvered the topic of apathy in so many forms for him that I don't know what method could strike a chord and snap the apron strings that suspend him in his false-sense of security. Sometimes I want to call his parents and ask them to cut him off so we can see him flail desperately to find his own footing. How proud we would be of him.
He's heard all that I've told him. It's filed away somewhere. Someday it'll all come together. Like the way he was unaffected by smokers, but then one day he just asked me for a cigarette. When his mind is made up it is made. But there's not a damn thing in the world that can change it.
This lifestyle doesn't bother him - except in small doses - becuase he doesn't sense a lack for anything. There's no problem that pizza and a movie, or a walk in the rain, or a football game, or a jam session can't fix.
There's no survival instinct being used. No urge to produce and accomplish becuase of the long-term necessity. The storing away of goods for future famine. He doesn't anticipate the fall, and he doesn't anticipate love, either.
For an entire semester I produced for him from my back-pack a Dum-Dum sucker every day. Every day he was surprised.
I think that anticipation of a friend's love makes that love more savory. He craves peanutbutter M&M's and cigarettes, but not me. Or you. Or that other guy.
He would argue many points of this exposition on his character. He would look at me like I had misused my X-ray vision and should be ashamed of myself and say,
"that's not true."
Who're you gonna believe?
He's such a fucking John Cusack (I think more the Rob from Hi Fidelity than any other movie) and it turns me on!
I'm starting a diary-ring called "powdered creamer" because nothing stays fresh in my fridge - metaphorically speaking.
