Style Versus Style!

In the past 8 or 9 months, life has been incredibly hectic. Job changes, firings, hirings, pregnancy, quitting smoking, no drinking. When life is hard I tend to look to the past as proof that things can be better. As I mentioned last time, nostalgia has been snuggling up to me like a warm, fluffy puppy, making everything in the present seem like a cold, bleak ghost compared to the golden times of yore. Yeah right.

One night in the early spring of 2001, a couple of friends and I went out on the town. What began as a few beers quickly turned into a night of revelry. We got kicked out of one bar for staging a fake fight, and another for having the most radical moves on the dance floor. Clearly I needed another drink, so I decided to go visit Angela at the bar where she worked at the time. Before I even get to the door Angela came running out of the bar.
“My ex-boyfriend is in there, please don’t cause a scene.”
The ex-boyfriend who treated the love of my life like garbage.
The ex-boyfriend who had caused the best woman in the world so much hurt.
The ex-boyfriend who didn’t deserve to breathe the same air as Angela was in the bar.
Without a first thought I burst in the door and demanded, “Which one of you is Jamie?”
A guy at the bar, who looked more like a regular guy than Satan or Hitler, looked at me funny and said, “Me, why?”.
I stared him straight in the eye and said, “I just wanted you to know that when you decided to treat Angela like shit all those years, you lost the best girl you’ll ever have in your life.”
“Fuck you,” he said.
“Stand up and say that to my face.”
He didn’t.
“That’s what I thought,” I said.
I grabbed a beer from the bar, chugged it down, and walked out the door.
Now stop right there.

I should’ve walked outside, bent Angela over backward with a passionate kiss, and gone home, knowing I had finally told that dastardly jerk what he needed to hear.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t done being mad, so Angela and I had it out in the parking lot.
Eventually, the bar owner, her boss, asked me to leave and go home. I left angry and feeling like a fool. Because of my blow up, I was banned from the bar for quite some time, and I didn’t set foot in there for years to come.
Since then, I’ve hung out with that no-goodnick Jamie quite a few times, and he’s not such a bad guy. A confused, stupid, messed up boyfriend, maybe, but really not a bad person at all (although he DID loose the best girl he’ll ever have in his life, I was right about that).
Sometimes the past is more like a beer soaked rat than a warm puppy I guess.

Why write about the past at all? Because I want my soon-to be born daughter to read this some day (when she’s older, of course) and know her father was human. I triumphed, I failed, I did stupid stuff, I did some great stuff-we all do, and that’s life. Many parents (mine included) hide their imperfections and their past failures from their kids and in the process loose some of their uniqueness, their humanity. It’s these similar stories, these shared experiences, which help bring people together and bind us to one another. So here is part of my story.

A good quote by Jim Harrison (author of “Legends of the Fall” which I’ve never read or seen):
“I like grit, I like love and death, I’m tired of irony…I would rather give full vent to all human loves and disappointments, and take a chance on being corny, than die a smartass.”

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