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Sweet Thursday returns
Monday, March 5 2001
I got home from work after another frustrating day, took a nap, and was feeling cranky when next I saw Gretchen, returning as she was from her day spent tending to the many non-Gus social calls she's been neglecting. Anyway, I guess I didn't greet her with sufficient enthusiasm because we immediately got trapped in one of those bad feedback loops of negativity I remember so well from back in the day (and also from my days under the Bathtubgirl regime). Some of my female friends (such as Jessika, Wacky Jen and Deya) are easy-going and non-reactive, allowing events a little play before letting them adversely affect their moods. This is not, however, the case with Gretchen and it wasn't the case with Bathtubgirl either. One thing I came to realize tonight is that Gretchen has a tendency to immediately react to absolutely everything, no matter how trivial and nonsensical, without giving events any chance to play out and develop context. Jokingly I said such non-sequitur absurdities as "chicken!" and "horsey!" to see if Gretchen would give me her trademark look of concerned judgment, but unfortunately she read my mind and knew what I was up to and the results were inconclusive.
After we'd managed to work our way out of this particular "problem," Gretchen presented me with a gift: a used first-edition hard cover copy of John Steinbeck's Sweet Thursday. As you might recall from an earlier entry, Gretchen had given me a copy of Sweet Thursday once before, back in the Fall of 1988. It had been her own personal copy, and she'd wanted to celebrate our mutual love for things Steinbeckian. She'd written an inscription and everything, but when it became clear that she was never going to be my friend again, I'd returned it to her wrapped in black paper with a sad little note. Practical Capricorn that she is, she'd whited out the inscription and reincorporated the book back into her personal library.
There was a lot of pain associated with that book, perhaps for both of us, and tonight's gift was an attempt to heal the accumulated emotional damage and perhaps redeem the book. "Keep this one always," she'd written on the first inside page.
Later on John and Fernando returned from a sushi dinner celebration of Fernando's birthday (tomorrow) and watched a videotape of The Kings of Comedy (a movie we'd seen before). It's every bit as hilarious the second time on a small screen and for her part Gretchen (who had never seen it) enjoyed it immensely.
Again Gretchen and I stayed up late into the night, until something like 4am, talking and talking and reading poetry and all that complex cerebral stuff we like to do when we're not consorting like primitive beasts. I can't stress enough how thoroughly impressed I am with Gretchen's poetry. Each one of her poems is like an intricate little contraption. I want to set some of them to music.
We also shared some of the delightful catty talk we used to so enjoy back in the day. By October of 1988, Gretchen and I had formed a clique so exclusive that the rest of the world seemed (from our vantage point) like nothing more than a bunch of chuckling squirrels. With our narrowly-defined sense of the profound and the absurd and our superficially-superior traits (such as non-attached earlobes) there was no one else who quite measured up.
But these days the only people we still have left to be catty about are people we remember from years ago back in Oberlin. There's the guy with the horrible case of bacne. There's the guy with "absolutely no personality." There's Dan Re!tman. And then there's the girl who started off not too fat and then rapidly expanded on a relentless diet consisting mostly of Philadelphia cream cheese. We quizzed each other on how much we'd have to be paid to have sex with these various unworthies, a quiz very similar to one we'd once had centered around a hypothetical kissing booth.
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