The lost decade
Dec. 6th, 2008 11:25 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
randy_byersWell, I really should be cleaning the house for Vanguard, but instead I'll use the looming chore as motivation to write.
So I got together with Hazel at the Big Time last night for the Alumni Employees and Customers Night of the 20th anniversary celebration. Most of my questions going in were asked and answered, I think, but that's neither here nor there. One of the challenges for me in Hazel's renewal of our friendship is that it makes me think about how dysfunctional I was in many ways during the '90s. As I've mentioned at least in passing here, I spent the decade pining after Hazel from various distances, occasionally encouraged by dates when she was between boyfriends. The early parts of this pining were pretty pathetic and mostly confined to my journal. Eventually I outted myself to her, and it was better after that, even if still pathetic. At least we had become friends by that point and I got some affection from her that way.
Why did I remain fixated on her for so long when she was so obviously not interested in anything other than friendship? That's the question that always comes up when I see her now. The best theory I've come up with is that following a series of heartbreaks with Sharee, Robyn, and Nahid, I preferred an unrequited longing to a painful rejection or break up. Still, why not just give up on romance and relationships entirely? That's more or less what I did when I finally decided to stop pining after Hazel after a couple of disastrous date-like interactions in 2001. (Thus Sharee was forced to hit me with a clue-by-four in 2003 when we got together. Good thing she chose to be persistent! Not that I wasn't encouraging her "subconsciously". Ah, what a tangled web we etc.)
Anyway, there are other aspects of my life in the '90s that in retrospect look like stasis, particularly in terms of my writing. When I started writing for Apparatchik in 1996, I finally started edging my way into a niche where I could be productive creatively, although it took another four years or so for the real explosion to happen, sparked by the Seattle Corflu in 2000. That's also the year I turned 40, and I've often said that my 40s have been my best years. Perhaps that's when I finally shed the expectation that I was some kind of genius and could accept and engage with my limitations. Including my romantic limitations, for sure. I accepted that I was going to be single, and that it was okay. Well, it seemed like a good theory at the time.
I'm just rambling, really. Procrastinating from housework. Last night, standing with Hazel in the Big Time, where I first met her in 1991 -- getting on toward twenty years ago! -- and watching other former bartenders cluster or stand alone looking vaguely forlorn, I felt a little removed from it all myself. This was not my family, not my community. My community is coming to a party at my house tonight. Integrating myself into that community is what I did during the '80s. It has borne creative fruit in the '00s. What did I get from the '90s? Maybe I just got lost for a while.
"It's like we were all living in our own little bubbles," Hazel said.
So I got together with Hazel at the Big Time last night for the Alumni Employees and Customers Night of the 20th anniversary celebration. Most of my questions going in were asked and answered, I think, but that's neither here nor there. One of the challenges for me in Hazel's renewal of our friendship is that it makes me think about how dysfunctional I was in many ways during the '90s. As I've mentioned at least in passing here, I spent the decade pining after Hazel from various distances, occasionally encouraged by dates when she was between boyfriends. The early parts of this pining were pretty pathetic and mostly confined to my journal. Eventually I outted myself to her, and it was better after that, even if still pathetic. At least we had become friends by that point and I got some affection from her that way.
Why did I remain fixated on her for so long when she was so obviously not interested in anything other than friendship? That's the question that always comes up when I see her now. The best theory I've come up with is that following a series of heartbreaks with Sharee, Robyn, and Nahid, I preferred an unrequited longing to a painful rejection or break up. Still, why not just give up on romance and relationships entirely? That's more or less what I did when I finally decided to stop pining after Hazel after a couple of disastrous date-like interactions in 2001. (Thus Sharee was forced to hit me with a clue-by-four in 2003 when we got together. Good thing she chose to be persistent! Not that I wasn't encouraging her "subconsciously". Ah, what a tangled web we etc.)
Anyway, there are other aspects of my life in the '90s that in retrospect look like stasis, particularly in terms of my writing. When I started writing for Apparatchik in 1996, I finally started edging my way into a niche where I could be productive creatively, although it took another four years or so for the real explosion to happen, sparked by the Seattle Corflu in 2000. That's also the year I turned 40, and I've often said that my 40s have been my best years. Perhaps that's when I finally shed the expectation that I was some kind of genius and could accept and engage with my limitations. Including my romantic limitations, for sure. I accepted that I was going to be single, and that it was okay. Well, it seemed like a good theory at the time.
I'm just rambling, really. Procrastinating from housework. Last night, standing with Hazel in the Big Time, where I first met her in 1991 -- getting on toward twenty years ago! -- and watching other former bartenders cluster or stand alone looking vaguely forlorn, I felt a little removed from it all myself. This was not my family, not my community. My community is coming to a party at my house tonight. Integrating myself into that community is what I did during the '80s. It has borne creative fruit in the '00s. What did I get from the '90s? Maybe I just got lost for a while.
"It's like we were all living in our own little bubbles," Hazel said.
