my girlfriends

have often been my best friends well before 'fag hag' made it into the cynical repertoire. beginning with high school, the-girl-who-gave-a-shit-about-me, who stood by her closeted pal was a consistent fact of life. she championed my obsessions, my trafficking in the emo underworld and my starry eyes about art and life. we'd become inseparable, inter-dependant and shared a world view with made-up vocabulary, in-joke humor and x-ray insight. what i overlooked, shamefully, were those rare girlfriends who loved me too much for their own good. who over-worked our un-sexualized connection even as they knew, heart deep, that boy-girl love was not in the cards. they'd listen patiently to my crush rants in the same way i'd listen to straight boys carp about their shitty girlfriends. those unreachable guys i'd mirror with undivided attention as i (weakly) camouflaged desire. i became the straight boy in reverse to my sympatico girlfriend. she'd bite her tongue and console me about the kid who hadn't made it all the way across the bi-bridge. she would wait and hope for more of me for herself, fantasizing that she alone could deliver the missing link in my loser love life. we got strung up in some dizzy parallel karmic love-trap, a half-requited but not unrequited maze, as if 'put there' to teach our sophomoric hearts what had not been learned about full-on soul connection. we slept in the stale bed of unequal romance even as we knew, separately, sadly, that we would suffer. we do that, don't we? choosing in 'best friendship' someone for whom we feel way more. where the imbalanced heart longs for level ground, longing eyes, erotic touch. it's hard to not believe that the person we feel so much for can not, on their side, feel the same back. i've been super lucky. i've had several astonishing, talented, strong-souled, brilliant women nurture my better self and believe in me with spotlight eyes even as it hurt. even with whom the over-the-glasses bar-code scan of drunken locals inspired nasty fiction. 'look at that one. he is SO into his hair', we'd laugh. we were side-by-side. we'd share art, absurd ambition and disappointment all until the unguarded heart broke, or until i woke up and saw how she'd been let down. or until she threw in the towel and chased after a straight kid who could truly love her back. from these great friendships difficult wisdom grew. i love them all, i still do, my best girlfriends. the one's i hurt i didn't mean to. the ones i did not continue to smile from their perch on an elevated dollhouse stage with a great laugh, head back, getting me getting them. maybe in a distant lifetime we were lovers. maybe we sustain a truer thread by not ever being all that we can be.

college

i wonder if we need to go, straight out of high school, into the firing line when we're not even sure why. just to move a kid out of the house and onto the dogtrack of binge drinking, shirtless screams at a sports cam, knocked up or riddled with STD's, studying at the last gasp on amphetamines with useless info shitting itself out like bad brains into the next day exam toilet. the money spent or borrowed is an Everest of debt. we are led to believe that the ladder climb to success, respect and riches begins with a college degree. but what about the slackers who squeak through high school and are not ready for prime time? why spend the cake? could the Pandora promise of college life be a let down? could a dull job snap 'real world' hardship into focus and step up a seizure of introspection about what a rightly directed education might prove down the career highway? could this then and not prematurely make a cogent blueprint once he or she knows what the fuck they really want out of life? in the days of white shoe, when boys (not girls) joined the frats their fathers rushed, a hollow leg up the Wall Street skyscraper could be won with little more than the ability to get stinko drunk or hit the whore house of letter sweater intimacy. i for one, as much as college taught me about my twisted heart, my hidden drives and my obsessive probing of the withdrawn, burned up dad's money like a forest fire. i could have learned as much or more on a tramp steamer, or hitch hiking across Australia. there is something to be said about testing one's self in the fish stew of peers. to find out with whom you can catch your breath, or learn the odd degrees of difference, or at least scab off the sophomoric whims of 'i will be a doctor/lawyer/hot shot' as soon as that chemistry course nails you to the floor. or 'i will be a writer' when at the bottom of your paper in American Studies in red pencil you read the comment: 'this is either the best or the worst thing i've ever read in my life'. but to spend or owe that much money to learn all the places you fail is false advertising and bought into, like the credit cards handed out like candy to freshmen, only to be abused. all these kids gobble up is the pretense of discipline when on a good day it's really about learning how to get by, to cheat, to do the least and still make the grade. to wait until your life finds focus might not be such a bad idea in hurry-up America.