Never Comes the Day, Part 6: Your Wildest Dreams

I’d heard something on the radio while driving in to work a couple weeks ago.  “Men never get over old girlfriends, they just learn to live with it”, or something like that.  I guess it’s true.  I’d learn to live with her memory.  It isn’t that I never think about her, just not that often.  Whenever I do, I’m left feeling wistful and sentimental.  I hate feeling wistful and sentimental, it makes me feel like I’m in an F. Scott Fitzgerald novel.  Or a Justin Hayward song.

I'd decided to say screw the diet and picked up a half case of Fat Tire and two bags of Doritos on my way home.  I opened the first beer and randomly selected a play-list on my media server and pumped it through the stereo.

But, when the subconscious gets involved, is anything random?

This is probably why the first song was Pete Townshend’s “A Little is Enough”.  I’d heard a story about the song, that he once asked his wife if she loved him, she said “yes, but only a little”.  When he told this to some guru, the guru asked if love was not infinite?  Pete said that it was.  “Then,” said the guru, “A little is enough”.

I guess a little was enough.  I must admit, what we had was the best of any relationship I'd ever had.  We met, became friend, grew close, fell in love and then...  And then it was over.  There wasn't enough time for shattered expectations and broken promises, drifting apart and externalizing our shortcomings and neuroses onto the other and growing to hate each other, eventually watching it all slowly crumble.  Nothing but victims of self projection.

On that happy thought, I finished my beer. I headed into the kitchen to get another and the chips.  An Alan Parsons Project song started.  I'd say it was the one about dissolved relationships, estrangement and alienation, but I think that would cover most of their songs (the rest being instrumentals).  What play list did I put on?  Rippy the Razor's Songs to Cut By?  I grabbed the remote and stopped it and started looking for something else to play.  I laughed when I saw it: David Bowie's Tonight.  Not one of his better albums, but I remember she loved this album.

I walked into the kitchen singing along with Loving the Alien and pulled another beer out of the fridge.  Laughing, I put it back.  I decided that I wanted a cappuccino instead.  While everything heated up I queued up everything from Space Oddity to Tonight and hit shuffle.  I wasn't in the mood for bitter, angry and drunk.  Those days seem behind me now, besides, these memories don’t call for it.  They call for Glam Rock and caffeine, like there was when they were made.