A Day of Reckoning

Okay:

Sometimes things come together like an impressionistic painting. You've got to stand back and squint to see it all. Scotch may help with the squinting.

Eight months ago, almost to the day, I broke up with my girlfriend of five years. It was an ugly, traumatic experience from which I was able to draw inspiration for three songs on my most recent album, Magnificent Bastard (shameless plug!). The breakup itself lasted eight hours and involved a fifth of Hennessy, a pack of Newports, a lot of crying, and a broken wicker chair. When life gives you shit, make music.

One of the more likable ditties, "Because", is a diatribe against the love-starved, and subsequently impossible, women I seem to attract for some unknown reason (read: sarcasm). The dozen or so people who visit my MySpace page every week seem to like the song okay, so Gill (my oldest friend and business partner) and I decided to shoot a music video for it to keep up with the e-Joneses and the new ubiquitous YouTube craze.

We went to shoot at a night club on U Street called Bar Nun that hosts a weekly Monday night open mic. Gill brought his gorgeous, extremely nice, cool and intelligent girlfriend of 11 years with him to operate a second camera.

Sidebar: Before I could get my first drink order in, a bald woman in full African garb did libations on the stage with a bottle of Dasani. I usually like to have a good buzz going when I see stuff like that. Helps me keep a straight face. These poetry reading types take this kind of thing seriously.

After the host, Jabari (another old friend), informed us that we could not shoot because it would infringe upon intellectual property issues with the live band, we went upstairs to see if we could steal a few shots at the One Luv discussion on The Art of Kissing.

I ended up sitting next to this little vibrant cutie, and with a glass of scotch in one hand, I turned into Blair Underwood on Ecstasy. You all don't know me that well but I'm quite the charmer when I'm dead sober to tipsy. Any point past tipsy is a crap shoot. Things could get ugly. Gill saw me siding up to honey and did some guerrilla shooting from across the room (sans release).

I was laying it down flat if I may say so. Come to find out, shorty is a writer and wants to be a teacher. I thought I had me a good one and, totally engulfed in conversation, kind of forgot about the whole video thing. Two scotches later I'm splitting my attention between her and the group discussion on kissing. At one point I grabbed the microphone and said, "Kissing gives me a chubby!" Sometime later I announced, "Making out is for punks, you sucka-for-love ass trick!"

Then, for some reason, when I finally redirected my attention back to honey, she told me she had a boyfriend. Why would she waste my time like that? (read: extended sarcasm). There were plenty of women in there I could have been working on all night. The bald woman in the full-length orange dashiki was giving me the eye.

We left some time later. While walking back to the car I started wondering why Gill, who is perhaps more reserved than I am but philosophically no different, has been able to make it work and I ended up single, playing the dating game in a city with the AIDS rate of a Brazilian shanty. The pitifulness of it all was evidenced by my fifty dollar bar tab and the lack of new contacts in my cell phone.

Do Gill and his girl have problems? Yes. Do they work them out and keep moving? Yes.

Did this all make me miss my ex? Yes. Am I going to call her? Hell no. Why? Because I don't have that kind of patience or energy. I'm just not up for it.

But standing back, and squinting, mostly because I was drunk, it seemed like somebody somewhere was trying to tell me something yesterday. I don't know what that thing is yet, but I'm listening intently for something that will help me make sense of all this.