Smoke and Mirrors or Fog and Windows?
A Retrospective
When I was a kid, I played Trombone in Jazz Band. I was pretty damn good. Been thinking about picking it up again. Well anyway, we played this one song called Smoke and Mirrors. From what I remember it had a real sort of jazzy gangster sound. The upper classmen in the band gave each song a perverted nickname. Stephanie’s song became Stephanie’s Dong, Dizzying became Jizzying, and Smoke and Mirrors became Fog and Windows.
So I’m sitting on my bed just thinking about it, trying to remember the tune. I’ll remember it later.
The only fog on my windows tonight is coming from the air quality, which is still poor. It’s certainly not a lonely night, by any stretch of the imagination. I said hello to the girls at the local bar, inadvertently walked into a restaurant where they were filming an advertisement, watched the process, asked if I could be an extra (they laughed but didn’t say much else — of course that is not unlike asking if the product is free at the grocery store to the checker if it doesn’t ring).
Then I chatted with a few neighbors, made my way home, made some more Chinese Rose Tea, talked to my teapot, and listened to some classical music. Fog and Windows. I remember a time long ago, when the girl from the grocery store in RSM California told me that she’d gladly give me a blow job and then never see me again.
“But you mean more to me than just a blow job.”
Oh what a fool I was.
Those windows were foggy, but only from my stupidity.
There were foggy windows elsewhere too, when I told another girl that I’d go to Bangkok, instead of spending the weekend with her
“Ok.” She said, and smiled.
But I think, in retrospect, I made the right decision, or the only decision that I was cognizant of making at the time. In both cases, I needed to be understood more than I needed to be physically loved by the person sitting next to me. Of course later, I would want that physical love from them—but the doors would have shut, and I would be left in a pool of red pain, slowly rising and increasing in temperature.
But one must take responsibility for one’s actions, even when they are actions that one does not even truly understand until years later and after the action was made.
Responsibility, of course, does not mean that one must apologize or even admit an action to be wrong. There are enough actions that, as we learn to process them, we find that we acted as the only viable way given the abnormal circumstances surrounding an indeterminable outcome. Inexperience further fuels things as this.
It’s I guess what some people might call cringe. I call it reordering one’s uncomfortable moments to prevent further anti-socially conscious behavior. Whatever it may be, it is, largely, something that most people experience.
Anyway, this next song is called Fog and Windows…
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