OK, a couple days before college started, after my brother had left following my trail of footsteps back to Governor's School, I found a yo-yo in my car's glove mitten box. He used to be big into that, so I assume it was his.
LISTEN: I'm in a car, going down White Horse Road in Greenville. My friend Peter is driving. He's asking me about my summer. He asks if I met up with that chick I was in love with. I say, you're going to have to be more specific. Skip forward. I say to chick-friend Rachel, I'm tired of falling in love; I'm ready to fall in hate.
ITEM! My family, we have a tendency to repeat stories. To each other or to others, we don’t care. We're bad at saying something once. My dad encouraged us to try to "perfect" the same stale jokes through constant tinkering with the delivery.
LISTEN: I was saying to Barrett the other day how with my mom, her constant repetition drives me crazy, what with her catching phrases and torturing them to death. Whereas, with my dad, the repetition of story or speech is comforting. He lays the world out in a comprehensible package from driving to retirement with stops in college. Maybe it's just how I let it get to me, but I think my dad must have some sort of stylistic advantage as well.
OK, one of the girls at college I wanted to see again, let's call her Setsuko Myers. Not that I'm concerned about security or privacy, I just like the name and was waiting for a chance to use it. Anyhow, I met her and her roommate, Asuka, way back at the
into existence. Flash forward two years. I'm at home watching another award show, while at Governor's School, a new issue is out. And they said it'd never last. Me, too. Well, there you go. Kids I don't know made the new issue with a neat "Tetris" theme. Very clever. Meanwhile, people brandish statuettes of Buzz holding an MTV flag and thank other people for musical success. Art as the individual?
LISTEN: I'm at the dance and I lose Rachel pretty quick, but I see Setsuko, and–get this!–she runs up and hugs me! So we do in fact know each other in some place other than my imagination. We talked about our summers and whatnot. I told her about how thrilled I was with having a car, even if it’s a 1987 Civic. And-—get this!-–she says that '87 is the best year for cars, as it is her car's year. And she talks about doing her own maintenance stuff, which is very cool as she is petite and twee pop cute. So at this point, I'm in a complete doki-doki panic. Anyhow, Setsuko is all about breaking mad steps like an angry fat man on a ladder, so I let her talk me into dancing barefoot with her posse for a while. Eventually, the music got undanceable (we decided the DJ must not like people) so we parted, but not before I fake fell on to my back. She and her friend were talking about something and---here I run into a limitation of writing. There's no way to convey half heard dialog, as writing is very precise, so I'll say that it felt to me like I was being discussed as a dance partner for the slow R&B with which the DJ was frightening us. Anyhow, that's what they could have been discussing, so I fell over slowly to disrupt it.
OK, at the start of last year, I was so surly. Understandably so: I don't like meeting nice friendly people. Setsuko worked as a photographer for Orientation week. She says she likes hanging around the freshmen, as their lives are still open and not locked into clique routines, etc. I dunno about all that. I mean, sure I'm against the concept of fraternities as anything other than a source for rooms with high bass music, but I still like knowing people better than meeting them. Solomon said the end of a thing is better than the beginning. So, probably, we can infer the middle is also better than the beginning. Here's one tip though, all those people who are desperately friendly at the start of school years–avoid them. They didn't have friends last year or something and now their trying to start over. Usually, there is a good reason for their previous dearth of friends. These people always turn out so annoying, etc. Right now, my hall friends are trying to ditch a guy who is very annoying and conceited, but has no friends from last year so annoys us as punishment for living on his hall. The bastard.
ITEM! Having a car at Furman made me excessively happy for the first week back. I can now go to the grocery store whenever I desire. Because I could, I finally stopped at the "Rubber and Gasket Store," which has no interesting qualities to anyone else. Plus, the pay per item food court area has the classic Governor's School-style napkins again, whereas in the end of last year they switched to crappy bumpy brown napkins. Unfortunately, the cafeteria proper still has the poor napkins, which confuses me. But on the whole, many good new things are afoot.
LISTEN: The bastard from my hall, he knew where a party was being held the night before classes started. So, I followed him alone in my car, since we didn’t really want to stick together. Anyhow, I get there and I’m waiting around outside the building as IDs are being checked within and I’m jump-hugged from behind. This, I think, is a good thing.
OK, Setsuko can be atrociously cute. She wears pigtails and a blue ribbon stating, "I can dress myself," graces her backpack. She’s rather tiny and is adorned by a hemp necklace. The show of hers and Asuka’s on WPLS was like Saturday Night Live’s "Delicious Dish" skit, only with more giggling and a slightly less overt lesbian-vibe. They played Cookie Monster’s "Lost My Cookie at the Discothèque" and tons of Ani Difranco. How I know Setsuko is mostly from dances, in which she and her roommate where like terpischores, blessing a DJ’s beat with their presence.
LISTEN: Setsuko and I talked before being let in and danced together for the rest of night (with her friends still about, semi-sadly…). I brought my yo-yo this time and she shocked me by saying that she considered bringing a yo-yo to school as gimmick, but settled instead on wheelie-roller skate shoes. She expressed her dissatisfaction with organized dances moves and my tiny heart went flutter, flutter.
ITEM! Music, I think is best with repetition on themes. That’s what people are always saying about classical is that its progressions are the shnizel-snap-zap. Meanwhile, techno and rap and everything else cool these days are based around samples. Old fashioned guitar based music just plays similar chords in a repeating pattern. The constant repetition of a beat is needed for dance, as dancers need to be able to predict the coming beat and move in response to it. Repetition makes prediction possible and prediction is vital. Recorded music just ups repetition another notch as now the same exact pattern of sounds can be summoned at will.
LISTEN: Since then I ran into Setsuko whenever possible. That’s trickier than it sounds as we have no classes together and live on the other sides of campus. I’ve tried to build up a stable of running gags and conversation threads. At dinner the other day, she chose to sit with me and my friends, who are complete strangers to her. True, she claimed her alternative was eating alone, but I say this is another good sign. So at this point, I'm pretty obsessed with her: writing her name over and over in the notebook of my mind, thinking wistfully thoughts, and making another magicant for two in my mind.
ITEM! They (the they who say things, frequently) say that there are only a couple of basic stories. The main one is boy-meets-girl, the classic love story. I’ve looked at my DVD collection, and they all have a love story right smack dab in the center of the plot. I’m not surprised.
OK, so I’ve been on this seasonal haircut thing for a year and a half now. I did it again for fall. I think it’s good to have something to remind you about time’s passage. To remind you how the world grows and shrinks, seasons come and go. In the sky, the moon waxes and wanes, ever changing, ever the same. I do this to try to clue me into the patterns and repetitions of life and probably death.
LISTEN: I went through a lot of rigmarole to go to a "Jump Little Children" concert with Setsuko. I was going to go with my friend in town anyhow, but she mentioned it on her radio show, which, happily, precedes mine. So, I emailed a bunch and called some and eventually a plan was drawn up. Around 9:00, she came over to my dorm in her little red Japanese ’87 stick. I gave her the autographed CDs and poster that I bought for her that afternoon at an in-store promotion which she was unable to attend. She promised to pay me back with the change from the concert tickets. I said no big deal. And then we were at the show and our arms brushed together, made electric by the tiny hairs on my forearm and the erotic focus of my mind, while we jumped and danced with the music. In one of those calculations at which I’m so good, I put my hat on her head at what seemed an opportune moment. "Jump" played loud and well and I tried to think of the right things to do and say.
ITEM! Yo-yos fall and spin and come back up again. They loop-the-loop, go around the world, but in the end, they end up in the same place, right in the palm of your hand, ready to be thrown down again. And that’s the way life is for a yo-yo, not that it notices.
LISTEN: The show ended and we started heading back. I asked if she wanted to go to Waffle House, but she said she was behind in her school work. We talked and laughed, but she admitted she was, "falling out of love with ‘Jump’," after having met them in person some time ago. She told me a story about how clubbing in Columbia, she and her friend pretended to be lesbians to get out of dancing with creeps. I laughed. We got to my dorm and parked and kept talking for just a moment when a terrible word slipped out of her mouth. "Boyfriend" as preceded by not "ex-" as one would hope, but "my" as one fears so well. I betrayed no emotion, politely continued the conversation, thanked her for taking me, said good-bye, and left. This isn’t the first time that’s happened to me; I know how to play cool in situations like these.
LISTEN: I’m still pretty dazed. Those words erased all words around them. My memory is fogged around them, yet those two words are still clear. But, I can’t put them into context; I can't try to separate from them other possible meanings or interpretations. Maybe there was a past-tense verb nearby that I missed or something. I can’t tell anymore. There are worse things than just being friends with Setsuko. In fact, that would definitely be a step up in the friend department. But still, I thought I was making things clear. And I thought she was too.
ITEM! Everyone has a childhood sometime, either as a kid or later. I think I’m just coming into mine. I’m stacking on gimmicks as the years go by: plaids, hats, napkins, sport coats, mittens, now yo-yos. Maybe I am just a big dumb kid after all. Setsuko definitely has the punk five-year old chic going on. Pig-tails and brownie uniforms, for cry out fuck’s sake. That’s what I like about her. I guess I just shouldn’t have counted on no one else liking that, too.
OK, I’ve been reading Kierkegaard again, and as one could expect, he talks about love and girls and that stuff. In this book, "Repetition: An Essay in Experimental Psychology," he says that repetition, unlike hope or remembrance has the key to happiness in it. Hope and remembrance are both isolated by time. And it's true, there is much beauty in the repetition of seasons and stories. When the past and the future let you down, repetition exists here and now. If it exists at all. Where I last stopped reading, Kierkegaard had decided that repetition might be impossible. He was disheartened. I’m sure he’ll perk up in a chapter or two though. Repetition is real. Repetition is as real as the phases of the moon. Repetition is the old boy-meets-girl story. Repetition is the old girl's met someone already story. Repetition is my life, but I don’t seem to notice until too late.
