It started out with a girl as most things do.
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The inward historical weight of Linklater's pending sequal and why I can't stop mentally drooling over it.
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The first time I saw Before Sunrise I was an eighteen year old verbally-effete high school senior who had just returned home from his third eurpoean sojourn in as many years. (A blessing I had slaved for financially, which I would later culturally-contort to promote my own self-worth.) I sported a shock of short-slightly gelled nutmeg hair replete with pennisula sideburns flanking a sly-raffish grin; an innocuous white flag hoisted in the center of my youthful visage. In an effort to salvage culture in in a town, that, I was far too keen to point out to the random pedestrian, obviously wasn't "european", I wore charcoal flavor turtlenecks matched with thickly trussed Velvet Doc Martens. I sometimes sloped a beret over my head in tandem with my heavy Berlin-chic trench coat. I smoked cloves and cigars without knowing how to inhale, I swished boxed burgundy fluid around the inside of my cheeks while prematurely chatting about vintages and years. I supercilously felt like I was already an ordained authority on 'modern' poetry and recited T.S. Eliots "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" incessantly to anyone unfotunate enough to possess an earlobe. "Let us go then you and I/ When the evening is spread out agaisnt the sky/ Like a patient etherized upon a table."
Highschool was one endless elongated blue hallway shepherded by shrilling alarms and social clicks that failed to buckle emotional sanity. My junior year I started scribbling sloppy-inked feeble free-verse in notebooks and by senior year I was obsessed. I scribed only droopy first drafts, penning somewhere between sixty and 100 insufferable angst-laden poems a month. I was arrogant beyond all borders of the definition, all too certain of my destined literary stardom and, rather akin to Eliot's Tarrot identified "fool" in the previously mentioned poem, I remained pompously baffled why my peers had failed to recognize my pending literary sainthood.
It's interesting to note that most writers tend to go through this ugly indulgent ego-nourishing period at some point in their careers. Random readers are of course 'priveldged' to read their purportedly 'deep' yet shallow cannonical metaphores that will inevitably be archived in the British Museum someday b/c (obviously) everything this so--called self-ordained scribe has in print is obvioulsy the greatest thing in scripted ink since the King James edition. Many writers (such as local pretentious fop's conducting college comp. courses) never seem to slough this superior ego-cloak.
(Male writers, I think, are MUCH, MUCH worse at this 'feigned' pretension than female writers...in my experience that is....perhaps innately, females are better dancers, better movers and tend to be more highly literate early in life)
Joseph Campbell calls this ego-gourged individual a dragon. "Dragon's horde things," Notes Campbell. "They horde heaps of gold (unread books that pile up their offices) and beautiful virgins (their students)...and they don't know what to do with either of them.
I feel fortunate that I gradually flaked off these dragon scales over an eight year time span of simply ugly and bad writing where of course, I cared extremely little about the actual labor of the craft and paid scrupulous amounts of attention to my own Jack Kerouac bad-boy literary lifestyle.
Looking back over my early "poe-whims" (always a snooty dual-syllables)all I can say is that they were plastic lingusitic lego's that I would employ only later to snap the shape of my aesthetic identity.
Okay, no more tangeants. Back to pangs of high school.
Friday nights were spent at my best friends David Hale's abode in Bartonville. His mother would retire early and then the stash of semi-tepid malt liquer would avail itself from hidden panels in the basement. In those days a forty of Ice House or Mickey's circulated a long way being bartered between teenage boys who vociferously boasted in locker-rooms about the longevity of their livers. White-Trash Pat, Hale, Randall and Goth Dan would drop ten-sided dice and verbally illustrate the next move of their level two dwarf while I, of course the seemingly well-read narcissistic "cultured" one would swig shots in the corner while transpiring meaningless thoughts as they dripped out of my fountain pen.
There was always, of course videos. White-Trash Pat and Hale already possesed a formative heap of permy-haired adult sophisticated visual gumdrops by the age of fifteen. The first "porn" we ever watched together was titled something like Artic Orgy and it was about a group of rather voluptuous polar-nuclear physicits who find themselves stranded in Antartica without any heat and all of a sudden contract a great idea on how to conduct warmth.
I went through a lengthy phase where, much to the chagrin of Hale and White-Trash Pat, everything I viewed was endorsed by Merchant-Ivory. On the night I was trying to explain to them the cultual significane of Remains of the Day the group of sozzled gamers retired early. White Trash Pat and I stayed up and I flipped in Before Sunrise. Though the movie is 100 percent dialougue the flicker of the screen hushed a normally petulant-opinionated Patrick. By the end of the movie, we went outside and hugged each other. It was two in the morning. It was a senior year. When your in high school you advance a decade in knowledge each year. Patrick and I shared a cigartte and then Patrick opened his woodchip lips and paused slightly before commenting:
"Dude, man. That's us."
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Of course there's more. Of course its about a girl. The girls name is Megan Kristin (I'll omit her last name here in deference towards her own privacy, but for privvy-fingered and omnisicent-eyed Mara-Arya's her maiden name is inserted into the title of this entry and has nothing to do with "osculation")Megan was from the tiny norwegian cheesehead hamlet of Appleton, Wisconsin, of all crazy places to fall in love.
I met Megan about a week after I first saw Linklater's verbal feast and even employed lines from the actual movie on her (smooth-Mistah' V; yeah). The first time we kissed her body squinted like a butterfly in mid-flap before her entire flesh transitioned into spring. Megan could be classified as cuddley and petite (5 ft.2). Her birthday is the first day of spring (Naw Ruz) and with a comfortable six-hours between us we started writing letters. The internet was just starting to wedge it's costipated modemic groan into universal conciousness (e-mail was foreign lexicon and waiting for the damn computer to usher its way into cyberspace seemed to take light-years back then). So Megan and I wrote letters. Huge, inky inky sounvabitches undressed from metered envelopes by itchy fingertips. NOthing beats finding your heart in a mail slot. Her letters were fraught with stickers and hearts; mine were verbose illustrations about everything stuffed with off-metered poems. She'd always smile when she told me that it used to take her forever to read them (smiles).
On October 18th, 1996 (I can still tell you the exact translucent denim sleek autumnnal-blue of the morning sky) I dropped out of my freshman year of college (mainly becasue it was a community college and my parents deemed that there son wasn't worth more than that intellectually) and bought a one way ticket to Appleton, WI of all places, arriving with notebooks and dreams and ambitions. Needless to say my sojourn was terse and our rapport didn't last long. Megan was still in high school her parents seemed rightfully nonplussed by their daughters suitor (although to this day I swear her dad loved it when I referred to him as "Master of the House"). I had written literally symphonies of poems for Megan and read them to her, feeling shunned by the silence of her face afterwards. She was young. I was young. Golden and kalidieoscopic autumn greets the sways and dips of northern Wisconsin in thick strokes of wind gulping down heavily from Canada. I remember seeing Megan through the airplane tint as I arrived on thew runway and I remember her standing next to me in the terminal as I caught my flight home with tear stained chin and cheeks arriving on the runway to an all too dubious future.
I also remember watching Before Sunrise with Megan in her parents basement. It was the only time during my trip we kissed, however tersely.
When I arrived back home to P-town both my heart and my bank account were empty. I locked myself in my bedroom and plugged-in my father's moribund Macintosh. I spent a week, incessantly, pelting out all the poems I had written for Megan into the computer screen. I revised, I chain smoked like a locomotive, I edited. At the end of a week my tears appeared in front of me and I had a tight fifty pages of verse for my elusive beloved who obviously wanted nothing to do with me. I printed the book up, engendered a calligraphic title POEMS OF LOVE AND ARDOR FOR MEGAN KRISTIN, took the book to Kinko's to have it bound and trussed and then, stuffed the manuscript into a Doc Marten shoe box and burried it into the back of my closet. Where it remained, unopend, for the next 16 months when Megan would re-enter my life at the most inopportune time possible, but I was eternally grateful that she re-entered at all.
I also bought a video edition of Before Sunrise and kept it unopened and stashed in my closet in the bushel of her letters. I finally watched it drunk, on Valentines Day 1997, dialing up Megan's digits, listening to her answer machine, confessinally still too apprensive to plant a message of my own merit.
I didn't watch the video again for a long-time.
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But this is perhaps what has always allured me to the film. The fact that it was so much like life. The fact that, if ony for a moment, you're embracing this person, your holding that person, this moment in and of itself is an eternity. YOu don't need to ammend a nuptial contract, to procreate, to budget, to age, to grow infertile together. All you need to do is to have that moment. To hold that person and to know that, for as long as we are here, we are immortal.
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It was late February 1998. I had dropped out of college once again. I was working full time as a supervisor at Barnes & Nobles, my paycheck was monoploized on discounted books and on Jana Solomon, my girlfriend. Jana was a feminine orchard of intelligence and beauty. We had just gone out of town together to Chicago and had rented a hotel room. I loved Jana but never wrote a solitary poem for her.
It was around 11pm and I was sitting in the living room of my parents old house re-reading Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist of a Young Man when the phone warbled its way into social cognizance.
"Is David there?"
Suddenly late winter had transitioned into spring.
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I was dating Jana and I was in love with Megan. I worked all day, made love to Jana, went home and talked with Megan until 4am. I told her from the outset about my situation. Told her that I was already in love with someone. Told her about taking Jana to the Opera. About taking Jana out of town every weekend. About reading Thomas Pynchon and William Gaddis and David Foster Wallace. I told Megan all about sexual discovery and finding yourself above and below sweating in the pupil of the person inside of you. I told her all of this and then I told her that I never stopped loving her; that I never stopped loving Megan.
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Earlier that morning, after one of our six-hour conversations, I opened up my closet and sifted through attire and manuscripts until I found the Doc Marten shoebox with the manuscript inside.
I went to the Post office and paid an extra ten bucks to have it federally expressed. When Megan opened the manusript two days later she told me that it was opening up her heart and finding her new born, only to realize that the father was out, caressing someone else becasue he had pledged his love to her first while the mother was out finding herself.
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There was about six months of exorbitant four-hundred dollar phone bills. Jana and I would fight and hurtle furniture and end up going at it afterwards. Megan and I would discuss harvesting a family together. I saw Megan just once during those crazy months (another blog indelible details) and still cringe out a cry of nostalgia when I think about Megan's blue skirt and white shawl and the Chicago corner we concecrated with kisses.
There were lies and duplicitous emotions. Megan would tell me that she possibly couldn't consider dating me long term becasue of how I treated Jana, even though Megan herself was the catalyst for most of Jana's anger. The whole situation was just a mess.
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It ended with Before Sunrise. It was late May and Megan and I were once again talking. I had wrapt up my copy of Before Sunrise to offically sned to Megan as a gift. The casette was tightly wrapt in Renoir Country Dance/City Dance wrapping paper. Jana found and told me that I would never hear fom her again if I continued to my liason.
She then pointed out that she dated a poet who never wrote her a poem.
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For two years the video remained gift-wrapt, waiting for me to give it to Megan. eventually, I watched it with a girl named Jasna who had, for a while, been to Vienna. I gave it to Jasna after we watched it. She sprinkled smiles across the room.
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That's the Before Sunrise antcis. In a weird way Megan was there when my dad died and the last time I saw Megan it was in Madison Wisconin, with uncle Mike. I sipped Knob's Creek and she told me about her pending engagement. I walked her out to the mini-van she bought from her dad "for a dollar". We embraced and in my typical fashion I hoisted her in the air and spun her around like a carousel.
"You're always so romantic David." She said to me. "When are you going to learn how just to say goodbye."
The next day I went to Greenlake and saw you-know-who presenting a formidable lecture on mysticism.
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Even more so ironic was that the date, October 18th, the date I initially abandoned the port in search of my cheesehead bleoved, on that same date, six years later, I officially declared.
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Life is good. Even if we don't have the girl of our dreams, we still have our dreams and that fifty percent is simply worth dying for.
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