...alien love forms...
...the ballad of footeastman [part three]...
[link to part one here]
[link to part two here]
"Trust me on this one, I've been wrong so many times before."
-ALF-
School is a horrible place to learn about love.
In grade school I learned about rejection. When passing valentines that said “do you like me?” I’d get a variety of responses, from not sure, to no thanks, and mostly who are you? I kept my crushes tied deep in the clouded and confused shaggy shack of dreams where they felt safe and possible.
A dream won’t reject you. It might turn you into a sunglassed cob of corn working with Scooby Doo to investigate haunted turtles, but it doesn’t say no. It might say who are you though. Or who you are.
During childhood I night-dreamed about flying, living in abandoned malls, and floating down lazy rivers of chocolate milk on innertubes made of a sprinkle glazed donut. I never dreamt of love because I had a hard time understanding it.
My parents were not great lovers. They weren’t even great likers. They were tremendous fighters, fine child rearers, and extremely hard workers but the love they shared with each other had long since re-directed to prostitutes and shopping by the time my mind could wrap around their union.
Without home or school to learn about love I educated myself how any other clueless sap might. I browsed pages of stolen porno, pretended to marry a stuffed mermaid, and took sitcoms at face value. Music helped. You see the power of love is a crazy little thing. You can’t buy it, and you can’t help from falling in it. I wanted to know what love is. I wanted somebody to love. But love was a train and a shack and a battlefield in an elevator and probably tainted. Love bit, love hurt and I was all out of love before I even understood it.
The love I saw on sitcoms was cliche. The will they or won’t they of Ross and Rachel on Friends. Or Sam and Diane on Cheers. Or Jim and Pam on The Office, and so on and so forth [laugh track]. Love was sassy, love was Lassie and love was a messy little thing unattainable for a dweeb caught up on besting his space invaders indexes.
Champagne and I had met like episode 81 on season 9 of a sitcom called The Big Bong Theory. All we were missing was a cliffhanger turn to kiss interrupted by a wild dog biting me on my balls. It was the year 2009, and maintaining our modernity we had only exchanged e-mail addresses during our one magic moment.
When one receives an e-mail address from a romantic interest pursued, their immediate thought might be that the pursuance is already over. It is like going hunting for a lion and being given a juice box and a silver scarf to get started. The odds of you bagging a beast on the hunt are slim at best with those weapons. You are statistically better off letting the lion gnaw you to pieces. At least then you are an amusing obituary for some grandma to giggle at during her daily morning newspaper death reading.
Charged with only e-mail as a sabre, my relationship with Champagne was a cliche will-they-won’t-they. I had toyed with online flirtation, haunting the hallows of craigslist with poetry and abstract photography, occasionally meeting friends nice enough to share burritos and failed fumbling.
Online anyone felt like real life no one. The ghost I presented as, wasn’t as spooky as I wanted to be in the flesh. The ghouls I got to know were tangibly intangible. Makeup, then mist, then dust settled and brushed from the sidewalks of time I hiked home from.
"Let’s have a snack now, we'll get friendly later. You got a cat?"
-ALF-
I assumed Champagne saw me as a show promoter more than she saw me as a paramour. So I promoted shows to her. Oftentimes shows I wasn’t even attending. Being told to go to something someone else isn’t going to is an easy way to never get talked to ever again.
My first e-mail to her was 14 pictures of Alf, the alien from a planet called Melmac that likes to eat cats. He talks like a man in a pork pie cap doing dinner comedy in the Catskills. If Champagne was who I thought she was, I might get dolphin pictures in return, or perhaps an invite to a gravy gathering. She replied with some talking whale photos.
And for months this was the dance we did. Jpegs of dragons. Bad jokes about beavers. Gifs of erotic paperclips and invitations to parties happening underneath the decayed highways of east and west bays.
I had never asked anyone out before and clearly was doing a good job not doing it. Anyone watching this show would have likely tuned out at this point. Perhaps you have even given up on reading about this. No one wants to watch two turds typing and tapdancing around trying to talk again.
Three months of attachments and links and subject headers that said “Hey Look at this Turtle Beatboxing”, and we had yet to link or attach in the real world we both attended. The internet was our approximation of doing. We were in a communication simulation. A simcom if you will. And it was this time on TV you would either commit to the bit or move on to new plot lines. I finally invited her to a show I had no choice but to attend, because I would be playing it all by myself.
The best first date is to the woods.
Bring a tent, snacks and a fire and see if the stars have anything to say to you both. Worst case scenario you leave with crotch ticks. Best case scenario you discover the promise of the primitive. If the world ends tomorrow, and driverless cars grow violent and overpower us into a cavemanned regression, you can discover over a night camping how you both might survive a coming Carpocalypse.
The best second date is one where you are sharing something you are good at.
Showing off a skill can be sexy. I am not a skilled musician so it helped that Champagne didn’t make the show I was playing that night. In fact no one I knew made my performance. Several strangers snapped at me, and a gallery of folks fingering fondue acknowledged my horn and hair, but all told the show was a bit of a bust.
If a man makes music for no one, did he really play anything at all?
An underrated aspect of being a musician is the amount of loading and unloading it takes to make it happen. Every single show is a trip to a space to grab things from the space to bring to another space and then bring back to the same space at the end of it all. We don’t give enough respect to the roadies, those radical rocketeers who make their living on space management. In the future, when we are all riding some tech zealot’s wet dream to Pluto, the roadies will be the ones ensuring everything is stored and fit such that we can float eight eons and still have our xbox accessible when we land at sector zargoff-94.
I packed my ship up, said thanks to the art gallery and was ready to bring my spaceshit back to my spaceship when Champagne emerged from the fabled San Francisco fog on a bicycle. Her beauty pierced the dusk like a rainbow freeze pop bursting through its cardboard husk 95 degrees and melting after a tee-ball scrimmage. I was glad I had saved my milk money for this moment.
We took a seat on the sidewalk and shared shadow puppets on the wall. Just as I knew I would know about her by the ALF exchange, so too did she know she would know about me by offering a late night snack of ants on a log. She unfoiled for us two sticks of celery, peanut butter and raisins and we each crunched them beneath the lamplight.
The top five sitcoms I watched when I was growing up were Small Wonder, Martin, Benny Hill, Unsolved Mysteries and Alf. The top five sitcoms I wished I had watched when growing up were Live Action Garfield High School, Live Action Scooby Doo High School, Point Break Die Hard Road House High School, Get Really High School, and Mr. Belvedere 2. Here I was on season 29 of “Whose Fis Is It Anyway?”, finally figuring out if I would jump the shark.
[footenote link if you are unfamiliar with the term]
Beneath the lamp, at the end of a concert for no one, on the heels of hundreds of e-mails mentioning moronic memes sat two turds wondering will-they-or-won’t-they.
If you have been to San Francisco you have no doubt seen way more than two turds on the ground. The next time you pass them perhaps pretend they are some star crossed lovers, born of ants on a log and months of missed connections. Or get grossed out and cross the street.
That night, on that street, these two turds shared the quickest kiss and it might have been the most missed romantic shit on earth. The anticipation of endless alien consummated in a round of silent studio applause. The roadies came and cleared the set, Champagne exiting stage left, and me taking another car full of gear back home to a warehouse to fill the space I left with the fillings that filled the space I just left.
Falling in love can stink. You can learn about love wherever you watch it. Good, bad or gross we live in a world full of it. Be careful not to step in it or you might slip and fall.
...the turd curve confused me...