for a friend.

Note the time. (before 7 a.m. on Saturday morning…)

Saturday, November 08, 2008

6:40 AM

And I'm wiiide awake. I suppose what I have to thank for this is the pretty neat-o great seats I just found out that I had to a most-exciting street fight outside my window. Luckily for me, it was on the other side of the street which, since my bed is just below my one window, made for excellent blow-by-blow action. Ahh, Brooklyn… now I know what made biggie so notorious and mary j. so… blige, if you will.

Anyway, while I'm up, figured I'd throw in a few minutes on this thing and lull myself back to sleepytown in the process. The theme of the week being 'courage' and all, I should update you on how that's working out for me.

So far, I've succeeded in alienating every 'friend' I thought I had in this lovely town. This town being the WORLD of course, and also- keep in mind that I don't really make friends so much… and the ones I am referring to now include the lovely and lithe L, whom I have called one of my nearest and dearest for only a hot decade or so now.

The fallout was not unprovoked, unless you consider eating another's remaining 1/4 of a ben and jerry's quart of phish food 'no big deal' as I obviously had to think in order for me to commit such a heinous act of dishonor.

But alas, L was merely looking for a simple apology from me… which she got, and could not just be satisfied with. Once she realized that I was, as per usual in these circumstances, going to just roll over and take all blame for everything wrong in her fucked-up little life on account of my penchant for scavenging her freezer, she didn't hesitate to seize what must have looked like a golden opportunity to tell me that 'my shit is getting old' and she's unable to 'trust me'.

Well, what L couldn't have known was that she'd just picked a battle with a courage-warrior… and this was my week's mission to 'stand up for myself' regardless the implications. That's right. A motherfucking warrior, in life and also fighting nowhere more than in my own angry mind. I mean, really? After calling my boss a DICKHEAD, it did seem trite to now begin to curb my anger and rage towards anybody else who dared step to me, as it were.

(where Brooklyn at? You ask… why, right here, in the flesh. I am.)

Aaanddd, unfortunately for Lindsey as well- stood the cold, hard truth she could not avoid. Nor did she try to really, and I must admit that I did a nice job of not-so-delicately revealing these unspoken subtleties to her in a retaliatory attack of hers on my text inbox… take THAT you verizon-loving bitches!

The fact of the matter, regardless of my obnoxious house-guest faux pas, is that L herself is a LIAR. In fact, she has been for quite some time now, although I'm not sure when exactly I first realized it. I do know for a fact, however, that she enjoys making up stories from thin, thin air just for the sake of avoiding silence because her own stories have actually just become dull and she lacks the imagination or mental fortitude to conjure up entertainment with material that may have some basis in reality.

Take, for instance, an idiotic encounter that happened with my 'bestest' about 8 months or so ago. I had not seen her in a while, but that's not the point. (L makes a point of never taking one step in my direction unless there's a damn good-and self-serving- reason for her doing so. Hence, she has not so much as asked about--let alone seen for herself-- the last 5 or 6 places where I've lived over the course of 2+ years in new york, and over the span of 2 or 3 boroughs of this great city.) the point is that we were obviously, in her own room- inconveniently located on 10th avenue, which is 3 long avenues from any sort of train which has really never been an easy stop to make for me… yet, I continued to make the trek knowing full-well that had I just refused to take the mountain to her, my Muhammad would be forever-lost as a friend. If I never made the effort, in fact, she might have seen me more in college when she schlepped out to Austin that time freshman year. (of course, those were the days pre-cocaine. Ahh, those WERE the days indeed.)

But I digress. On this particularly un-interesting afternoon, L and I found ourselves aimlessly chatting in her room… (sidenote: I was clean; if only for 5 minutes, but as the story unfolds I'm sure you'll agree that she could not have been.) She had this eye-catching pink neon-ish/plaid scarf-like fabric thing hanging on a hook in her room. I fingered it, knowing full-well I'd just seen it in my travels- and my travels being me, all fueled up and incessantly prowling urban outfitters in the west village earlier that week… over, and over again circling like a hawk with short-term memory loss or a vulture on loop maybe. (don't fuck with me and urban outfitters when I have plenty of drugs. I know my shit like it's the night before the SAT's and we are doing flashcards with vocab.) and that's why I mentioned the scarf.

So I opened my mouth to say I liked it, but before I could make a reference to the fact that I just had seen it in urban and also noticed it there… (read: complimenting her 'good' taste for picking an item that had already caught my own eye, yet I could not afford to pay 38 bucks for a goddamn spring scarf… ), she launched into her own glassy-eyed account of how she had come to be the scarf's new owner.

Apparently, I was mistaken in my thinking that this was any ordinary piece of merchandise that I, too, given the right mindset and bank account, could have acquired for a set price and used to adorn my own hooks in my plebian room in god-forsaken Brooklyn... (Which, as far as L was concerned, may as well have actually been an outer ring of Limbo, had she ever a clue what Dante was driving at when she picked up the Cliffs Notes years earlier. Which, ironically for someone who references her own life in the context of HELL as often as she does, was a work of literature clearly lost on her and over her platinum head. Way over.)

But again, I have now de-railed my own train of thought. Back to the very exciting conclusion of the scarf's origin:

No ordinary scarf indeed… I was told from my blonde authority that this scarf was from AFRICA, given to her as a GIFT from her very exotic and (unlikely) royal friend- who just happens to have been visiting his motherland last month, on hiatus from new york city and cocaine and ill-fitting pleather pants it seems; and thoughtfully obtained the tribal rights or whatever was necessary in his culture to do, in order to bring the scarf back with him as a token of his friendship with none other than L herself.

Imagine that. A royal African headdress… you can fill in the rest of these blanks, I'm sure… but needless to say, this week's sparring might have left me with a quiet phone and a headache, but truly it had been a long time coming between two longtime friends who just stopped 'getting each other' years ago. A long time coming… and going.