Recently, I've been thinking about the men in my life-- the ones that have gone, the few that remain. The bridges I've burned recently, and the bridges I've burned very recently, in a self-inflicted drunken stupor designed to break through my inhibitions and loosen the stranglehold that my insecurity has gained over my true feelings.

Linda's life lessons learned the hard way number 467: You never appreciate a stranglehold until you're crying at a moniter at three in the morning, typing violently to two seperate people that they never cared about you, those bastards.

Clearly, things have been rocky between me and certain people-- particularly, with the guy I've felt the closest too as of late, Elorza. Our conversations lately, drunken and sober alike, have alerted me to the fact that I've become too focused on him, missing him like crazy, calling him in desperation whenever something goes wrong, giving a level of caring I simply can't ask to have reciprocated, not anymore, not at this distance.

Tonight, after my workout, I started working on the song I intend to perform at two of my coworker's Karaoke birthday, and somewhere in the midst of it, I slipped into a fantasy involving my performing a duet with my hypothetical perfect best friend. An imaginary man that I who's attributes I will now discuss at length. First of all, I should qualify the male thing: I value my friendships with females just as much as I do those with males, but it's very simply two different roles-- the male best friend, the female best friend. These two people have never had very much overlap. But before we spend all our time apologizing for that, we'll move on to the meat of this entry, which is piecing together my favorite things about the other men in my life to create him, perfect platonic partner-in-crime extraordinaire. This theoretical Karaoke partner would have to have the following:

• Casey's intelligence and quick-thinking wit. And his surprising, if seldom witnessed, capacity for empathy.
• Chad's superb listening skills and incredible kindness.
• Dan's enthusiasm, for his music and my writing, and, occasionally, for crazy silly bullshit questions like "Who would win? A Ninja, or a pirate?"
• Jeff's willingness to make an ass of himself, and his appreciation for private jokes.
• Jeremey's singular knowledge of the inner-workings of crippling insecurity, and his sense of humor, and his ability to leave fucking wonderful answering machine messages.
• Mike's dependability.
• Sam's sense of adventure-- his genuine willingness to get in a car in the middle of the night and drive to New York, or whever, while others just talk about it. The side of himself he shows when we sit together and listen to "Hallelujah", that soft quality of his voice when we both know how much we mean to each other.
• Elorza's egotistical humility-- the effort he puts into crazy arguments about insanely idealistic principles. The fact that he has, so recently that I cannot yet let go of the dizzying gratitude of it, saved me from myself. The way he never lets me feel like a burden on him.

It's important for me to be clear that my mind reels, even as a I write this, with a list of the things about these people that my ideal best friend could not have, but that's not really the spirit of this post. Each and everyone of those people has faults that I am glaringly aware of: some I have accepted, some, I continue to forge useless battles against. Still, it's undeniable that I love them all, though that probably comes as news to a few of them. (It should be said that there are qualities of people I've met and come to respect or care about more recently that belong on the list, that had to be left off so that I could make that blanket "love" statement, which I feel needed to be said. However, without having lifted the following people to an L-word status, and with no intention to, I find myself more and more drawn to Scott's good-hearted personability, (s) Bill M's confident but unobtrusive charm, and (m) Bill M's endless patience and uncanny knowledge of the Gilmore Girls.)

While I'm able to point out the very seperate things I love about each of these people, any one of them can tell you that the amount of overlap for the things I feel for them is nauseatingly large. I got into putting in terms of music, earlier: My residual feelings for Casey can best be summed up in Fiona Apple's "Shadowboxer", a song I first fell in love with while I was going through a rocky patch with Chad. Last summer, I made a mix CD for Sam, which included Matchbox Twenty's "Disease", a song I have, in the past, associated heavily with Jeremey, "Name" by the Goo Goo Dolls, which I used to listen to every time a conversation between Elorza and I got deep, and "The Weakness in Me", another one that conjures memories of Chad. "Caramel", by Suzanne Vega, and also on the CD, was completely about Sam until a conversation between Elorza and I the other night had me playing it on repeat. And Sondre Lerche's "Things you Call Fate", well, that's a little bit of all of them.

A lot of overlap with each other-- suprisingly little overlap with the conspicuously unmentioned man in my life, the man in my life, really. Zack is the only person in my life with a balance of all the desirable characteristics that condusive to being able to spend my whole life with him, on a full-time basis. So, what if this hypothetical man did exist, this collaboration of all the other loves of my life? What would be there, then, to elevate Zack to the soul-strung status at which he now resides? The easiest answer is simply this his Zackness, the ineffable quality that makes him him, and makes me in love with him. Put more eloquently, by Justin Huntly McCarthy:

"If you were to die to-morrow, I might tell you this much to-night. A woman may love a man because he is brave, or because he is comely,or because he is wise, or gentle-- for a thousand thousand reasons. But the best of all reasons for a woman loving a man is just because she loves him, without rhyme and without reason, because heaven wills it, because earth fulfils it, because his hand is of the right size to hold her heart in its hollow."
~Excerpt from If I Were King

Zack has his own music, too. Our song, "Moon River", and, as mentioned a few posts ago, Death Cab's "I Will Follow You into the Dark". But in this same vein, of love for love's sake, I'd say "It Had To Be You" is also quite appropriate.


Zack can't be my best friend, though, except in that saccharin "giving lip service to your husband at in an award-acceptance speech" sort of way. He can't fake quick-witted intellect, doesn't have that drive for adventure, and his listening skills are sub-part. And, worst of all, he'd never do Karaoke with me. And that's what this is really all about.

FieryGwenivere: if we were going to do a duet for karaoke, what would it be?
xKxOx: hah, that's a good question
xKxOx: i'm a huge fan of ain't no mountain high enough, but that's way too cliche for me
xKxOx: i dunno tho, i've never been vury good at picking karaoke songs
FieryGwenivere: I was so thinking about that earlier, Ain't No Mountain High Enough
FieryGwenivere: Like, that was the one I would have chosen
FieryGwenivere: That or "Something Stupid"
FieryGwenivere: but you wrote me that e-mail all those years ago about how you were listening to "Ain't No Mountain High Enough", and suddenly you couldn't bear to leave me as upset as I was when I ended our conversation. It was the first e-mail you ever wrote me, actually
xKxOx: oh yea?
xKxOx: i don't remember much, but that's always been a pretty prominent song for me, despite it's popularity
xKxOx: i dunno what somethign stupid is tho
FieryGwenivere: Heh.
FieryGwenivere: The title line just fucking fits us, that's all
xKxOx: hahaha. I can run wit dat
FieryGwenivere: "Then I go and spoil it all by saying something stupid like 'I love you'."
xKxOx: that is pretty perfect
xKxOx: kind of
FieryGwenivere: Plus, in the episode of the Simpsons where Sideshow Bob marries Selma (Patty?), they totally do a duet of it at Karaoke
xKxOx: haha, hehehe, i like that
FieryGwenivere: :-) I do, too.
FieryGwenivere: But here's the critical question
FieryGwenivere: Would you ever actually sing a Karaoke duet with me?
xKxOx: I'm selma, no question. hah!
xKxOx: you kidding, i do anything like that
xKxOx: dance in front of a crowd alone
.xKxOx: sing at the top of my lungs despite my horrible voice
FieryGwenivere: :-) Ah, dip
xKxOx: i'm all about that



Then again, maybe I've just misjudged the situation.

On with it.