Monday, May 05, 2008

ONE MORE WEEKEND...


This was a bad weekend.

And I should have known: it was another one of those "your turn in the barrel" weekends, where the teachers who don't ride herd on the dorms all the time get plugged in to let one or more of the usual suspects avoid a nervous breakdown. A good idea in theory, but tough on the Significant Others of the replacement team, especially if they only see each other on weekends, as there is essentially no weekend there to see anyone on.

I drove out, by way of El Paso [or I might as well have, as I spent Friday in my old hometown, visiting various medicos], getting there Saturday afternoon with time to spare. Lucky me! I got to see the Goat greet his erstwhile lover, the Last Real Love of His Life, the one who dumped him, broke his heart, and now periodically shows up to remind everyone how important he is to Everybody. Of course he chose this weekend to drive up from Wherever, as I was headed down from the Olde Stomping Grounds, and overlap with my visit; I got to watch how happy the Goat was to see him, and see how clearly the Goat was still in love with him. All over a "really good hamburger" and a beer. Gosh, but we're all so grown up, sitting here having dinner together... except that some of us were just a leetle less grown up about it than others.

You'll never guess who. Tableau.

And then it was Saturday night. A Saturday night, really close to graduation -- only a couple more weeks of classes -- great concerts, performances, and exhibits being put on by the graduating seniors who had done independent studies. I was blown away by what some of these kids had done. They had worked like a dog all semester for this weekend... and then, quite understandably, felt the need to relax. Except that the need to relax seemed to involve breaking a law or two, and the Goat's favorite student -- one of the few openly gay kids, a sort of embryonic version of the Goat himself, whom he has been quietly screening from trouble of that kind for something like a year -- was one of the group that got busted, lied, was shown to have lied, and so got kicked out within a month of graduation.

Of course the Goat had every right to be upset. And he had to unload somewhere. I just can't help thinking that I had some right not to be the dock where all the upset of the weekend got unloaded. I was, though.

It's hard to say what was worse, really: the euphoria on the Goat's face when Lost Love and his current Boy Wonder tramped into the room, or the aftermath of the Saturday Night Massacre. It was all rather painful, and then the Goat insisted that I spend the night in another room [of which there is not a vast array to choose from] because he really needed to sleep Sunday night, and he knew he couldn't handle my snoring in the state he was in. OK, OK. Nothing major there, I know, it just seemed like the last straw, the adding of insult to injury. When I arrive and he's horny, I'm the sun, the moon and the stars, and then by the end of the weekend, I'm chopped liver.

As Mr. Vonnegut said: so it goes.

On my return to Nowheresville, I had to field a lot of not-so-pertinent [OK, impertinent] questions from well-meaning family members, in the course of which it became clear that things I had told my mother with some idea that they were not for general consumption, had been generally consumed. By my brother with the mania about lesbian real estate investment, no less. Where does concern leave off, and mere gossip start? In my neck of the woods, that is an unanswerable question, no matter how frequently one has to ask it. Sheesh.

In the final analysis, I don't blame anybody. We're all stumbling through this together, and I am sure I have put my fingers in other people's wounds with just the same unthinking vigor, myself.

I just don't enjoy it when it's my turn. That's all.

Oh, well. It's a short life, but a merry one, down here in the Southland.
At least spring's here.
Hang in there, all. C

2 comments:

  1. Hang on a sec... This wunderkind gets himself KICKED OUT??? Totally out on his ass? No redemption possible? Well $h!t. That's a hard pill to swallow, for the kid and the Goat. And you seem to be stuck somewhere in the middle. Sucky position, and not in a good way.

    Sad with you that you had a bad weekend :(

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  2. And, "so it goes." You can't argue with that.

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