Another late night.
I'm listening to "Hejira" by Joni Mitchell, after reading posts about it all week at the Cafe Utne forum to which I post and read.
This was a day chock full of happy events. I received an e-mail from my friend Marcos back in Pennsylvania. He and his wife had their second child back on June 4th, a boy they named Lennon. Marcos is quite the musician. It was a marvelous piece of news. He also produced my live album roughly four years ago, which has sold the extremely modest total of two copies.
I also fell into a nice IM chat with former co-worker, scratch bowler and all-around hockey nut Brian. He and HIS wife are expecting their first child in late-October. For a while, the lax job market was pummeling them in unfair ways for such sweet people. Things are now back on track, and baby will soon make three.
Now, tonight's contribution from The Writ Of Common Wisdom stems from a time when I dated all the wrong women for all the wrong reasons. I dated this girl named Amy who claimed she was a telekinetic. She was also a hypochondriac. This is not the person you want to be around when you are in the depths of a budding drinking problem. I met her on my 22nd birthday. She ended up being a present that lasted for three months. I have to admit that those three months seemed magical, as do a lot of days you have in your twenties. They were days full of reckless abandon and seemingly endless sunshine. Outside forces were conspiring to pull us apart, it broke up badly and I reacted by crashing a car while drunk.
Fast forward two years, and our paths crossed again. I was dating a girl named Susan, and had been for over a year. Susan was younger than I am and was just entering college when we started dating. My relationship with Susan was filled with pain, unfortunately mostly on her side as her father died while we were together. To add to her devastating loss, she loved me, and I was unfocused and was beginning to feel the walls closing in faster than I wanted them to. A mutual friend invited me to Amy's birthday party at a bar close to her house. We got together again. Sue was crushed, and I still feel like a horrible person for doing that to her. She certainly deserved better, but all I could see at the time was Susan's increasing reliance on me, not realizing, as I do now, that she needed me as the man in her life in a time when there was no other after her father passed away.
Amy and I lived together for 17 days. It was a horrible experience. As was becoming my custom, I reacted to the breakup with a car crash.
I still shake my head to this day at my stupidity of crashing two cars over the same woman, a telekinetic hypochondriac with a laundry list of similar low self-esteem issues that shadowed my own far too closely at the time for us to ever DREAM of making a relationship work. I haven't seen or heard from her since I moved out after that period in 1990. Someone told me that she was a realtor in Northern California. If you live in Northern California, and are buying a house from a realtor who seems to be taking a lot of tablets for her headache, and suddenly the front door of the house opens by itself, tell Amy I said hello.
The following song stemmed from a dream I had about Amy many years later. It's a country song that bears a strong rhythmic resemblance to "The Return Of The Grievous Angel" by Gram Parsons.

Another Dream About The Car Crash Queen


And I saw you again in a different place than the one you had before

You had a new mom; you had a new man and a noisy aluminum door

And your man was nervous that I’d come to you to sweep you off your feet

But that was then and this is now and the two will never meet


The mom that you had was annoyed by you and the burden that you were

If it means a thing, if it matters at all, you should know that I didn’t like her


You hair changed colors and so did your life; it was all so bittersweet

‘Cause that was then and this is now and the two will never meet


You were the love of my life

When my eyes were open wide

And my heart beat fast

Shoulda known we’d never last, never last….


So in my sleep I still have you and that’s good enough from here

You’re a juvenile hole in my heart that only I can feel

And I think of you when I drink rum or a double Dewar’s neat

And that was then and this is now and the two will never meet

And so it goes. Now I'm engaged to the love of my life, a person I wish I had met so many years earlier. I place this song here knowing that it was written at a time when I didn't see my true love ever finding me. She did. This song stays in the Writ as a Ghost of Relationships Past. May it always stay right where it is as I approach my new life with Lovely Lady Leslie.