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the beautiful ones
August 24, 2005
\kkk (lee pushed those buttons and said, "look, you're a racist." this bears no relation to this post.)
so, i just went to see "the 40 year-old virgin" with my friend laurel. laurel plays on the women's basketball team i coach, and on our coed team. and laurel, you see, is also my secret love. well, one of my secret loves.
well, secret to everyone except the large number of people i've told about her.
not even she knows this. she speaks glowingly of my writing, but we'll see if she still visits the blog. i'm not afraid of her seeing it. i think she understands, and i think she'll get the weird sort of joke, and i think, i hope, that she'll laugh.
i've described to several people one of the hottest, most inspiring things i've ever seen a woman do - and i am surrounded by impressive, inspiring women. it was in a basketball game. laurel had already been incredible, like a woman possessed, rebounding in heavy traffic, flying in from nowhere to grab missed shots.
there was this one, just slightly errant shot, and the ball rebounded flat off the back of the rim, straight back but high, out towards the free throw line. from nowhere, she appeared, all six feet (plus?) of her, streaking in, leaping, moving so quickly that the she overshot the ball slightly. she reached up, her fully-extended body arced back impossibly, gracefully and powerfully, and she caught the ball a good two feet behind her head.
the teenage boys at the scorer's table rocked back in their chair and hollered in respect. she looked like a beautiful, snarling kevin garnett rushing through the air towards the basket, the ball captured and wielded like a weapon, and for a split second, anyone watching believed she was going to throw the ball down with two hands.
it was a supreme moment of passion. confidence. drive. ability. focus.
i was visibly shaken.
yeah, she's hot. yes, she plays ball. yes, we'd have beautiful, basketball-playing children. more importantly, she's got a great heart, she's funny, and she's sharp, focused.
but no, it ain't happening. the overlap between our worlds is a great place to be, but we do exist in different spaces.
those distances, those impossibilities in life and love have always frustrated me, made me sad. but lately, real-world dating has been even worse.
do you really think,
that love is gonna save the world?
well i don't think so.
well do you really think,
that love is gonna save your soul?
well i sure hope so,
oh yes, i really, really hope so...
i don't think so...
- the cardigans, "do you believe?"
so, the movie was funnier than i expected. as big a fan of the daily show as i am, i was always a bit lukewarm on steve carell. hell, i'm still not clear on how to spell his name.
but it was freakin' funny. offbeat, but not so over-the-top that it was just an exercise in absurdity. more "nuance" than you might expect, or than dick cheney might like.
but in all the wackiness, there was still something about love, and it was not lost in trying to push the comedic envelope with either characters or situations. a lot of people seem to be so pretentious that they scoff at these kind of stories, because if they speak to us on some simple, fundamental level rather than on some lofty, attenuated intellectual level, well, then it must... suck.
except they'd use bigger words.
to speak to them, i'd argue that the film portrayed a relatively new, yet systematically recurring archetype in the human experience - that of a simpler love that is driven by imagination, happenstance, a sort of harmonic convergence, outweighing the old paradigms of crass biology, or dogmatic, traditionalist loyalism.
more simply, the movie had a heart. i always feel that i'm plagiarising somebody when i say that funny is easy, comedy is hard. comics like carrill are under a lot of pressure not to go all john hughes and temper their wit with sensitivity. but the movie overcame that hardcore comedic taboo - it was not ashamed to be a little sappy, to give us a glimpse of what so many of us really want - a love that is a fairytale. love at first sight, the vision enduring. love that immediately turns our head and heart, love for which we're willing to overcome some part of ourselves to make happen.
that's not what i've found lately. my friends ask if i'm excited about a date, or how a date went, and there's a pause. the response is so often lukewarm. "ok," "nice" just aren't adjectives used in love stories.
don't make me waste my time,
don't make me lose my mind...
paint a perfect picture
bring to life,
a vision in one's mind,
the beautiful ones
always smash the picture,
always,
every time.
- prince, "the beautiful ones"
i want the fairytale. i do. i always have. it is sappy, it's "pretty woman," it's julia roberts with frizzy hair, and richard gere before he thought he was the single focal point for the world's positive energy. and hamsters or gerbils or whatever. it's winona rider before she tried to steal shit, and johnny depp with goth makeup and latex and scissored hands, slicing madly through the ice to make sculpture of his love, sending whirlwinds of snow to the town below.
watching the movie tonight, i remembered what it was to want that, to want the fairytale. for so long, though, i've gone about it backwards - i've painted perfect pictures, visions in my mind, and tried to bring them to life with people that were really just available, or worse, that possessed something i mistook for beauty. those pictures, mostly false visions to begin with, do invariably end up smashed.
more and more, though, it's still about the beautiful ones, though now, i am no longer so easily swayed by face and skin and eyes and legs. my head turns, i see, i watch, but the beautiful ones today for me possess something more, imagined or real, and it seemingly strikes me the moment the reflected light strikes my eye.
laurel, for example, possesses those things. and tonight, it was comforting to sit beside her, close and a little far, in the comfort and stability of my own understanding and acceptance of what is and is not.
now i sit at the coffeehouse. it's pretty much cleared out now, but she - julie - is here again, just over there, her back to me again, big headphones, working away at midnight designing websites, the little virtual touchstones for other people at other coffeeshops. she smiles and says hi when she sees me. she's one of the beautiful ones, but maybe for reasons only imagined, though i think they're reasons sensed, divined, picked from the air between us. and, she still won't turn.
and in california now, it's time for the evening news, not so late as here. the kids are in bed, or should be. maybe she, one of the ones i actually knew and was so sure about, reads; maybe she washes dishes, maybe she watches t.v., maybe she makes love. so far away, so many miles and years and lives away.
these are people i know or think, or imagine are special enough to help create something, not just fill in a blank. and now, today, tonight, i don't have to have them, be with them, have their love anymore - they just have to be there. we can be friends, or we can be lovers, or we can never speak. it doesn't matter. now, in my life, the wanting, the quality of that, finally, matters more than the absence of it hurts.
i'm drunk again, but i'm not sad tonight. i just am. i look at julie across the coffeehouse floor, her headphones on, her back to me, and that's ok. laurel has a life i don't know and am not a part of, and that's ok. mary's so far away from me, in so many ways. and of course, there's palomita's heart, so close to me now, an extraordinary thing i could only hope and pray to find again.
there's all of them, there's so much, there's a universe of stars that i will never travel to, and there's so many things i might never see or touch, and so many people that i will never know as well as i might wish, but the fact that i want to, that i appreciate that it doesn't come so easily, that i know what is and what will never be, and what is possible - that's what matters, that's what means something in this little life of mine.
i'm not chasing ghosts anymore, not chasing ideas. i just know the dream, because i've dreamt it so many times, lived it a few, and believe it could happen again. and that, finally, i hope, is enough.
baby baby baby, listen to me
i may not know where i'm goin' baby,
well, i said, i may not know what i need,
but one thing, one thing's for certain, baby -
i know what i want, yeah,
and if it please you baby, please you baby,
i beg you down on my knees,
i want you...
yeah, i want you...
Posted by Rob at August 24, 2005 12:06 AM