"Right right. Jackie. Christ. You were a fucking wreck."

Chad smiled, giving James the raised eyebrow. "And now look at you."

Abashed, James asked, "So how did you get over her?"

Chad looked at James honestly. Between men, there are very few authentic moments. Interpersonal relationships between men lie in a fuzzy realm of half-truths, exaggerations, and false bravado. On rare occasions, usually brought on by severe external stressors, two men will reveal their actual selves to each other, and will converse as two adult human beings. Until things regress back to dick jokes and homophobia. "James, I never really did get over her. I still miss her. Despite all her flaws and all her fucked up insecurities. I still miss her."

There was a pause, and James let it go.

"But what I do now is look for someone to replace her. Someone I'll love as completely as I did Jackie, or even more so."

"So. Kundera's lyrical womanizer."

"That's what I thought. But it's not anymore. I've become the epic womanizer. The blonde girls simply because they're blonde. The Model simply because she was a model. I'd forgotten what the point of this all was."

"Right."

They sat silent for a moment, collecting their thoughts, thinking about what had been said, what would be said, and the impossibility of love. There really is something to be said about beer, men and misery. It's just so bittersweet. The beer, that is. Men saddened by the injustice of failed love is just sad.

"I'm sorry about Julia, by the way."

"I suppose I am too."

"You can do better, though."

"I don't think I can."

"Really." The two of them thought about their memories of Julia. For Chad, she was suburban and domestic, a girl whose dream and sole aspiration was to be a wife with children, supported by a loving, doting husband. Just so pathetically Middle American to the core. Really. Julia, the light of whose life?

"She was making breakfast one morning. Her Meyer lemon and ricotta pancakes. I had just stumbled out of bed, and she smiled at me from the counter, standing in front of the mixer. The light was pouring in through the kitchen window, and the way it illuminated her...." He stopped and gave pause, as the evoked image brought on a surge of emotion that he wrestled down. As any decent gentleman would.

"She looked ethereal. An angel. Her smile. The light catching her blonde hair made it glow like gold, and her pale skin shone. I can't explain it. It was almost a pregnant glow, as if to say to me that she was ready to be my wife. And I have to say. I loved her. Then and there. There was no question. I loved her. Absolutely loved her then with all my heart. And so I had to run out of my apartment. I just had to. I burst out running from the apartment. I was just so overwhelmed. I loved her so much at that moment it scared the shit out of me. I was actively afraid of how much I loved her. I didn't know what to do."

The gravity of what he admitted stunned Chad. "Fuck."

The two nursed their beers. The jukebox played something wildly inappropriate for the moment, but what can you do. Chad thought about saying something, but then thought better of it. He would leave the silence be.

The crowd at the bar milled about, ignoring the two men who sat, rather stunned, staring into their beers, hoping for some unknowable truth to be revealed through the Brownian motion of the carbonation.

Chad knitted his brows for a moment. "Wait. So that was the day of the awkward third wheel pancakes."

James thought for a second, then laughed sheepishly. "Yeah..... Sorry I dragged you into that."

On my wall, I've a poster of Muhammed Ali. Before him was Michael Jordan. Michael Jordan acknowledging every failure that allowed every victory. Before Jordan was Cal Ripken. Ripken recalling the tedium and pain of getting up 2876 times and putting in a solid game. I got this new one out of my ESPN magazine.

Black and white, it's a stark shot of the man in glory. He's built like an ox, huge shouldered. No, more a thoroughbred. Look at his arm, the massive hulk of his deltoid cut and chiseled. The thick cord of bicep he flexes, the clench of his gloved fist obvious in his tensed forearm. Every muscle stands out.

He's looking down on his fallen opponent. He's shouting something. screaming. It's a curse in his mouth. He's dropping the f-bomb. No other phoneme makes a man's mouth contort like that. He's taunting his victim. Ali's old. It's not Sonny Liston below him. Ali doesn't have the pure gleam in his eyes. This fight wasn't about "me and you". This fight was about a lot more. This Ali's got the pain of a hundred fights on him. He's a tired man, an angrier man. the world's not been too good to him. America hasn't been too good to him. The wear on his face makes me think of the Thrilla in Manila. Makes me believe it's Frazier he's looking down on. No, I just wish that.

Because on his face is a vicious expression. It's "I AM the greatest". But it's also "I am greater than you." It's not the playful twinkle that America loved as Ali ripped off Howard Cosell's toupee on national TV. It's the dark bully who called Smokin' Joe an Uncle Yom, the asshole who created a hatred in another man, a pure anger that reverberates within anyone who's ever watched Frazier fight Ali. Watch the gruesome abuse that was the Thrilla in Manila. Watch their bodies as punches land - look at how the recipient shakes so subtly, watch their heads snap back and realize that everything inside is shaking. and sit slack-jawed as they get up from a knockdown, again. And again. And again. Fourteen rounds. Look at their knees wobble as their fists land again and again, they're held up by only will and hate. Nearly an hour they fought, they warred. Ali would say later that the feeling he felt when Frazier's corner threw in the towel, when it was obvious Frazier wasn't coming back for the fifteenth round, when Ali's knees buckled in the center of the ring, he said it was the closest thing he could imagine to dying.

Boxing is a brutal sport. But in their fights, they took it too far.

The tag line that runs through the middle of my poster reads, "Impossible is nothing."

Chiat/Day missed the point completely. This picture isn't about the struggle of man against another man. This is about man against himself.

Maybe Chiat/Day did understand.

---

Jeremy, why do you love me?

Katherine asked with glazed eyes, purring content, her head nested on his chest, his breathing rocking her gently into unconsciousness.

Jeremy’s mind spun. “I don’t really know. I just do.” He realized instantly that would not do. Katherine awoke with an alertness evident in her tense neck. Now Jeremy’s chest rose and fell to meet and abandon her head which stayed in place, stilled with blunt fear. “I love everything about you, Kath. Everything.”

“You’ll have to be more specific.”

“This is love, Kath.” He was lying. He loved Katherine specifically and with weighted reason. He loved that she used Hegel properly in an argument about proper governance in a capitalist state, while fairly inebriated, that first night he had spent time with her. He loved the nape of her neck, the clean lines of flesh and hair and bone, the rich mahoganies and cherrywood and oak of her brunette cast against the eggshell offset of her white skin. She was there at the end of the day with a smile, no matter what the hour, happy to see him. That smile, her joy, her mouth half-open, expecting their nightly kiss, lips to be pressed as palms in prayer. These were reasons he loved her. But it would not be said that he loved her for these reasons. “I just do. Very much.”

Logic fails emotion. She wasn’t completely content with the answer, but her head once again rose and fell. “So there’s no reason?"

---

"There was a time I'm going to have to admit, early on in this relationship, when I thought that you were 'the One'."

Ali lays a roundhouse on Frazier. Frazier is shaken. Yes sir, Frazier is shaken.

---

Violence begins in one’s head. In cold, callous anger. Irrational thoughts seeded by pain. Unconscionable actions salve a blind need to lash out at the world. At the world that has failed in its role as parent, protector, guardian. My failures are yours, as yours are mine. Every act of violence is retributive, in the end. Therefore, every act of violence is emotion, self-directed.

Jeremy and Katherine fought bitterly on a bimonthly schedule that failed to be interrupted by news of her pregnancy. Arguments ranged from his impolite failure to explain his every action to her, to the correct pronunciation of ‘Himalaya’, to her inability to simply let things slide. With their massive intellects, Kant and Freud and Hesse were unwillingly brought to bear for either side, philosophical giants ponderously pushed about in acts of domestic violence, psychic assault and battery.

They would fight viciously, tooth to the nail. She unearthed ancient relics of past grievances, he swung freely at every mar and imperfection of her soul.

“Why am I expected to change overnight?” he raged. A silly question, asked by every man since the dawn of marriage. “The human personality shifts gradually, if at all. Staudinger, et al 1993. You have to learn to accept that I am trying, but I will fail on the occasion. And I believe I had sufficiently mitigating circumstances.”

“Overnight?” she railed back, with considerable vehemence. “Six months is not overnight. The fact that your behavior persists is evidence that you don’t care enough about me to want to change.”

“How did you jump over several boundaries of common logic to reach that conclusion?”

“It’s the truth.”

Paul Pierce? “How is that the Truth? I promised I would change, and I am, gradually. It doesn’t happen simply because I wish it. And what about you?” The war would be fought on her ground, to scorch her soul, not his.

“No, this is not about me. This is about you. Why are you bringing this back on me?” Russian history is all about fools, and she was no fool. She had long since learned stand her ground.

Every argument was an emotionally exhaustive rehashing of a previously held debate, evolving glacially over time. Every argument was a State of the Union on their relationship, which, though solid when analyzed third-party, was delicate and terrifyingly unstable for the two parties to the marriage. Their love was deep, with a mutual respect and an understanding that they were similar human beings, but they were also fully aware to the fragility of their egos, and their bonds. They would fight savagely, fearless in their egotistical assaults on the world that owed them so much, but they loved delicately, tentatively. And in their fear they lived life and loved.

---

"But you know, between you and me, I was happier this week without you."

Frazier is down, ladies and gentlemen! Frazier is down!

---

When one human says to another, "I love you", what precisely is being conveyed? Love, for all its primordial, biochemical roots, seems to imply an acknowledgement of need, an understanding of addiction. Stories about love around the world contain the words "despite", "even though", "through it all", and that mother of all conjunctives, "still."

Boy A loved Girl B despite X. Girl J loved Boy K even though Y. Boy M loved Boy N through it all Z.


Jeremy loved Katherine, still.