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Statute of limitations: one decade
May. 30th, 2006 09:26 amOne of the people I visited on my cheese tour was an old friend from San Francisco. We had a flirtation for years across the cheese counter, going back to our old store. We had a little fling when she was between girlfriends and before she moved back East.
Her ex would come into the store and glare at me even though I didn’t break the two of them up and we didn’t fool around until after they ended. After awhile the glares became glances. As more time passed I think both of us would see each other and see "someone I know" before "someone I hate/someone I avoid". As more people got evicted out of town and the dot com economy changed everything, there were fewer of us who knew each other from the old days. Even though we only knew each other in a contentious way, the contention grew to seem better than the new reality. Glances became grunts of acknowledgement. From there we actually started chatting: the changing city, the co-op world, food, old friends who moved away (though we avoided one in particular), and the sex toy business.
In the early ‘90s there was an open mic at my local bar. We hated it. Though in retrospect I can say it was a wonderful thing for the writers who got their starts and encouragement there, at the time it took our household mid-week outing and made us go elsewhere. We would make a point though of sitting there until it started then leaving when the first performer started reading. It was our pathetic little this-is-our-bar gesture.
For years I hated![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
bucky_sinister for this open mic. Not a burning hate really, more a feeling of being wronged. This was intensified the day he bumped into our table while setting up and spilled all of our beers. He refused to pay because he didn’t have any money. Yeah, like we were rolling in it. That’s the kind of thing people get beaten up for in bars. But I’m not really that type of guy.
A few months ago I saw him read. His story was about those days and I felt a warmth towards him instead of warmed over hate. I missed those days, those housemates, that bar, even the annoying poets. Plus I had realized years ago that it was someone who just looked like Bucky who spilled those beers. I continued to hold it against him for a while longer on principle. Some kind of principle that gets harder to name and to feel over time and that probably didn’t make sense in the first place.
Her ex would come into the store and glare at me even though I didn’t break the two of them up and we didn’t fool around until after they ended. After awhile the glares became glances. As more time passed I think both of us would see each other and see "someone I know" before "someone I hate/someone I avoid". As more people got evicted out of town and the dot com economy changed everything, there were fewer of us who knew each other from the old days. Even though we only knew each other in a contentious way, the contention grew to seem better than the new reality. Glances became grunts of acknowledgement. From there we actually started chatting: the changing city, the co-op world, food, old friends who moved away (though we avoided one in particular), and the sex toy business.
In the early ‘90s there was an open mic at my local bar. We hated it. Though in retrospect I can say it was a wonderful thing for the writers who got their starts and encouragement there, at the time it took our household mid-week outing and made us go elsewhere. We would make a point though of sitting there until it started then leaving when the first performer started reading. It was our pathetic little this-is-our-bar gesture.
For years I hated
bucky_sinister for this open mic. Not a burning hate really, more a feeling of being wronged. This was intensified the day he bumped into our table while setting up and spilled all of our beers. He refused to pay because he didn’t have any money. Yeah, like we were rolling in it. That’s the kind of thing people get beaten up for in bars. But I’m not really that type of guy.A few months ago I saw him read. His story was about those days and I felt a warmth towards him instead of warmed over hate. I missed those days, those housemates, that bar, even the annoying poets. Plus I had realized years ago that it was someone who just looked like Bucky who spilled those beers. I continued to hold it against him for a while longer on principle. Some kind of principle that gets harder to name and to feel over time and that probably didn’t make sense in the first place.
