Sometimes Alone Sounds Pretty Good

My ex-boyfriend was an electrician, and sometimes I was his helper.

In the beginning I wasn't any good, and he was a very bad teacher. During our first job he jabbered on about "runs," pointing up the walls and all across the ceiling, then he spent the rest of the day drilling holes through studs, obsessing about the precise size of those holes, and swearing. At the end of the day, when he finally looked up from those worrisome holes, he saw the evidence that I hadn't understood him, not even close, because I had romex running outside of the studs, in places where there was supposed to be sheetrock.

Years later, when I'd become a great helper, he reminded me of that first job when I had no skills, when I wrote "pee" on the ends of the P wires, when the guys who finished the job bitched about my handiwork and seemed to think my being young and female had something to do with it. My ex-boyfriend told me he'd known all along it'd been his own fault. I was the best helper he'd ever had, he said. He was the coolest guy I'd ever met.

I miss learning something new, the challenge of it. By which I mean, I guess I'm ready to be alone for a while. In fact, I'm downright excited. But I'm also deeply scared.

* * *

Oh, and I'm reading this new title by David Lynch, the filmmaker I admire most. It's called Catching The Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, And Creativity, and it's about where ideas come from. His tone is what I would call blandly fascinating. Lynch isn't a great prose stylist, but these little prose fragments do guide the reader to a place that invites us to dream, and to dream deeply, and this invitation is hard to turn down. I've started meditating, and so far I find the practice a big relief.



Here's a factoid: Lynch is adamant about disliking director's commentary tracks on DVDs because he says that the thing is the film: "You should try to see the whole film through, and try to see it in a quiet place, on as big a screen as you can with as good a sound system as you can. Then you can go into that world and have that experience."

I think I love him. But I don't plan on dating anyone for a while, so his loss.