the worn paraphenelia of existence

So it's been nearly a week since my last post. Sorry to all you avid readers (Fremton and Reardon really, since I have a feeling my friends haven't been keeping up on my petty cogitations). But, now that I mention it to myself, and for some reason I haven't really done so up until now, where are my friends? I've been back from FL for almost three months now and they've been elusive as penitent arsonists in a town built on match factories. Granted, I'm a reticent motherfucker w/o the drop of whiskey or insult swimming through me, but I've made overtures that at least a syphillitic Beethoven wouldn't be disgusted by (Bigs sometimes brings headphones plugged into Bach sonatas or Dvorak concertos, not as easy to share as his flask, which is like Santa in an ice age, but it still makes its rounds as we ride and jostle along to Lugsy's minute swerves [he's got a soft spot for varmints and vermin big as a cesspool in a paper mill's ribcage]). I got a few responses, lame as bipartisanship, but overall Dave and Jimmy don't seem to want to reestablish contact, as if I were some errant satellite just off the orbital vector of Roanoke social scenery and the computational adjustments don't warrant the input of labor. I could say bitterness is the stem of this - the root being the inevitable dissolution high school won't allow and college barely stanches - since my ineffectual sojourn in sun-drenched locales, living near bombshells so active you need three inches of kevlar just to talk to them, was equivalent to me meeting Mao and persuading him to drop the Red façade while they stayed home and fulminated w/ McCarthy's cabal. In this simile history would bear me out, but in reality it will expose the skeleton of these snubs, since the flesh of my time in FL amounts to little more than a motheaten shroud.
And I think I might have an idea, actually. Before I left for FL, around late-July, I was seeing Maggie Nquyen off and on; she was like an oscillating fan and I was the sweating body too lazy to get up and change the setting, sweating profusely in an armchair, waiting vehemently for the gradual breeze to come sweeping over, all so I wouldn't have to move. She was the best friend of Jimmy's ex-girlfriend, Melanie Schwartz, or so it still seemed, though I'm about as astute as an autistic kid in Key Club when it comes to these. Jimmy and Mel left w/e they'd had in the gutter of Campbell St., outside of Awful Arthur's, after a dispute about his billiard's etiquette, which was really a dispute about her eyes' wandering tendencies, which was really a dispute about whether or not they had any motions to keep going through b/c theirs was a decoy relationship in the pond where all those other fish swim. Or some such metaphor, but either way, Jimmy, after three days of Jim Beam freedom, found the motions he'd stashed away somewhere, and went through them alone enough to think that they weren't motions anymore but actually self-inspired actions. He yearned and mooned and went lycanthropic on us when a skirt was short enough to remind him of Mel's knees (never those odd knobbled deals, he said) and we wouldn't follow the skirt through its tracks in conversation. He even went Cusackian, holding Dierks Bentley over his head hung into the lulls of his drawl, but to a closed curtain.
So when I hung out w/ Maggie in a social environment (Campbell and its general area) the proximity of her to Mel and the general tininess of Roanoke conspired to raise memories and possibilities in Jim-o's head. There was a specific instance where this went wrong, over Texas Toast and thin pints at Texas Tavern, but I don't remember what brought it on. Maggie was sitting next to me, wearing something pastel-y that kinda ate up the hardness in your eyes, and I was next to Jimmy who was next to Dave who was next to Katie Luger (no idea what she was doing there; a random Dave conquest if I ever saw one, and I have, and have had to 'clean up' after them, which, if you know Dave, involves finding her her intimates and consoling her enough to get her out of the house b/c Dave's already left six hours earlier to wander his endorphins away like unwanted puppies) who was next to Penny Drake; it was a circular table kinda deal, and we'd all gotten beer and some nibble-shit and Jim-o had his head on a swivel all evening, looking at each barstool like it was salivating, or at each window like it threatened him and Penny said something about expecting something and Jimmy didn't answer b/c he was staring down Deco lamp shade hanging over a trio of high school teachers (they had the aura like cowboys or Marines do) and Maggie said something snidely, cutely (I'm still waiting for a breeze but I don't know how to ask for it in winter) cutting and Jim-o snapped back like the lube on his ball-bearings drained out and snarled, said something out of Gran Torino and I put my hand real quick on his chest and he held my eyes like Christ's testicles and I held his like 6 year old IOUs and he got up and left.
We resolved it, him staring at the ground like a choirboy w/ fundraiser chocolate in his mouth, the next day, and I saw him sporadically the last week before I left, and he gave a fervent toast, fermented by nostalgia and strong gin, at my going away party, but w/ the near six months in between that and now I think he's convinced himself and Dave and Paul and Steve that the reason I put my hand over his heart wasn't for some sort of chivalric respect thing, but some deeper seated thing, or maybe that I never took them seriously and that's why I dipped to FL to try my hand in junk writing and fruit picking. I dunno, but it's something I'm just beginning to think about.
But either way, work is good, Phoebe's softened a bit (she's been smoking 3 instead of 2 and a half packs a day) and Gerry still runs the show like a dwarf in a two ring two bit circus touring Iowa in harvest season. Maybe Bigs can give me some insight. Maybe we could hang out, though we don't really do that, garbagemen that is; we don't really have time to hang out w/ anyone. Maybe I'm thinking way too much about this b/c all I've been thinking about is how to sort out the worn paraphanelia of daily existence.