(no subject)

[xinjinmeng]

:
A young dragon once told herself, "I only have myself to blame if I let myself get upset."  There is an old dragon now, listening to the words of the younger one. Last month, I had spent some time abroad touring with the Hypodulian Revival.  When I returned, I found among my messages an offer of directorship for my old company. This was not altogether unexpected.  I could sense the young dragon's apprehension and excitement; I could feel the throbbing aches of the old dragon's wartime injuries.

I wish I had not seen all this before.  It was more than a decade ago when B___ called upon me.  He had inherited stewardship of the Dunsward Repetoire Society, which is where I performed for the first time. (Of that period, the only detail I will volunteer is that intoxication is an excellent substitute for skill for the young, but not the old.)  He had come to offer me the position of director.  I had always had a low opinion of B___, ever since his three girlfriends each confided in me, in tears, that B___ had been unfaithful to them and slept with a fourth.  I suspect B___ could sense my distaste, which made me consider this offer to be one of desperation.  I felt no pride, only wrath; I took insult at being the last on a list, and I saw little joy in attempting to bring life to the dying. I respectfully declined with a hundred apologies.

A mature dragon has one-hundred seventeen scales. Of these, thirty-six are the yin scales, running along the back. They rise when one is enraged, to touch them is to risk biting jaws and catching claws.  When I feel them rise, when I feel them tingle with id-born desire, it takes all my strength to restrain myself, and I come away weaker from the effort. Dragons, they want to bite through.  No, in this case, I did ask for more time to review my decision -- I declined the position. I could already feel myself bleeding.

When one has wounds, one should seek out others who have scars.  My first impulse would have been to seek the Reverend, but his tour had moved on, and I dislike conversing by telephone.  Having spent so much time skirting the cities, I cultivated my desire to go inside them, within the canyons of stone and steel, the air so intoxicating with its monoxides.

I was somewhat surprised to discover that the night-club called the Gemini Dream was not only still extant but open for business; I had not visited since I wore the face of a much younger dragon.  The airbrushed aluminum on the walls is scuffed.  Not all of the lights still blink, and some neon buzzes at odd angles.  Many moons ago, throngs of plastic-clad thrill-seekers assembled on the dance floor to the thundering chorus of hedonistic disco.  Today, the floor blinks away, but the music is at a lesser volume.  Rooms once received for private cocaine-fueled orgies now have comfortable couches and trays of tranquilizer pills.

My timing was well-starred, for T___ was also there, by whimsy, as he was in the city while producing some albums of music for recording acts that neither he nor I had ever heard of, nor cared to. He has gone quite gray ... but such appearances only bring forth my Elektra.  And he was as passionate as ever; he has such delightfully storng opinions on such trivia that I only barely understand. Heaven above, if I had not been so angry and so sober I might have attempted an enormity or two.  Of course, he did not recognize me -- I am no longer the doe-eyed waif who had once crashed upon his private party so many years ago.  However, at the time he had been pursuing his "Lifehouse" project, a Bauhaus-esque exercise where he would assign frequencies and modulations to music based on age, sex, and other qualifiers.  With a bit of searching of his computer archives, he replayed the song he had made for me, in all its imperfection. All those years, and he still had it saved, one of the few artifacts of my past.  It was all I could do to keep from weeping openly.

Some drinks later, and we were talking about the various successes and failures of our careers. He had many, many more stories to tell, on a much grander scale. Where I have known break-ups, he has known divorces; where I have known lackadaisicals, he has known addicts; where I have known reprobates, he has known murderers.  T___ cautioned me that he is well aware that he himself is a fool -- that even though he has been burned by the fire two-hundred and ninety-nine times. he will still return for the three-hundredth.  "Only you dream the dreams that you dream," he said, and then he expounded on the theme that art is only art if someone else is there to appreciate it, in the form of an anecdote where he dropped a dozen names I did not recognize, but I smiled politely and laughed during his appropriate pausing. (A veteran entertainer is always on.) 

By the end of the evening, I was weakened from my constant repressing of my emotion, but this time it was not of anger, but of turgid desire.  (Even if I thought I might have won T___'s favors, I am not a gentle beast and he is not a young man.)  I have had both low valleys and high mountains; then was the time for level horizons.

I write these words some days removed from the incidents, and I would hope to capture the honest emotion that I had felt.  While I may not step twice into the same river, I may at least have a still image from when I wet my feet.

Comments

[ff00ff.livejournal.com]

Your stories are always so complicated and melancholy, and I'm embarrassed to admit that I don't understand something on the order of a quarter of your vocabulary.