The Caveman Journals (A Beautiful Girl and History Class Add-On)

[Izulde]

Since I was stupid enough to leave my CK CD back at home and it wasn't where I thought it was, I've decided to create this mini-AAR thread as an expansion to The Beautiful Girl and the History Class.

I don't know how closely it'll tie in to CK, but I didn't want to keep it in the original thread, because it disrupts the first person Nick-narrated POV.

Not sure how this is going to work out, but I'll give it a crack.

Obviously they'll be entries from Bobby "Caveman" Schwarzwald's journal(s). I'm not sure yet what date the first one will start at, or even if they'll be in chronological order. (This is Caveman we're talking about here, after all!).

But we'll see how it goes.

[Izulde]

To say I love you in the written word is one of the most cowardly acts possible.

And yet it is an act that private, dreaming men are often wont to engage in, for it is the safest form of declaration.

To say I love you in ink, graphite, text is to gather up our brimming, soul-consuming affection up into a bag and toss over the edge of a vast, yawning cliff.

Into the void of nothingness.

No response needed, no acknowledgement required. We pine, we yearn, we suffer, our hearts rattle and race in our chests as we pray for an answer, yet hope no confrontation comes, no forced interaction of us and our heart's greatest wish, for there can only be two results from the collision.

Either we are shattered by our disappointment or downcast by our disillusion as the slender, sylph-like, gossamer-winged seraphim we have created turns into tubby, ordinary, wingless toadess in the span of ten hours, ten days, or, in the luckiest cases, ten years.

Even if the fantasy should match the reality, the success as delicious as the dreaming, it is still a cruel course to write those three small words.

Nick is a perfect example of what I mean.

Dumped by Melody, he has only the text, the scrawled out letters. Only his eyes are permitted to cherish and summon her affections. The other senses are shut out forevermore.

His only recollection of her affirmed love will be the impersonal white paper, the cooled ashes of the words she wrote. No sound, no touch, no movement, no context accompanies these dead letters.

All conjuration and all speculation he could come up with, the desk she may have written at, the pen she chose to scribe her doomsday message, what she wore in that hour, the furrows and shifts of her lips, eyes, hands, feet... all of these would be no more than mastubatory projections, mirages built upon the sands of the deserted relationship, with no actuality, no truth, and no connection to them.

It is he and he alone who has these imaginings, for she has robbed him of the colors, the sights, the music, the dance, and the scenery of love's confession in the spatial-temporal-material world. All his mind, all his senses would be engaged, enflamed, if she only had been a little kinder.

Love by text is one of life's great paradoxes: Removed from time and place in which it is written, the feeling it induces is emphemeral, alive for only its too-brief spot of relativity before it becomes and dead. Not so a physical, multi-faceted confession, for -that- is able to be re-animated, to live again and again on memory's silver screen.

Those who know my own past will accuse me of hypocrisy in this matter and they would be right to do so, but then, I am what I am:

A trembling, shadowy fool who knows his own folly, cursed with the inability to act against his original nature.

[Izulde]

I woke up this morning to the pleasant drum of rain on my window.

It was the sort of chilly, misty autumn morning that makes curling up in bed with a cup of hot cocoa a sweet pleasure. Or even just laying beneath the heavy blankets, quietly musing on the dreams delivered in serene sleep beneath a down comforter.

But no cocoa awaited me and I was so fully awake that the last fragments of the dreaming were already so faded that I could not even catch their last wisps before they disappeared into the realm of the forgotten.

Still, it was the kind of morning that, were I female and with any musical aptitude, I would write a song by the window, the rain my percussion. But I am no Amy Lee, no Jewel, not even crass Liz Phair.

People often ask me why I hate women.

It's because I know them too well. Know them for their flaws, their mundane nature, their very humanity. And I despise them for it.

Nick wonders why I don't pursue things with Becky. I wonder the same of him, for he and Becky are two of a kind. Homebodies, content with an ordinary life and who will never amount to anything because of it. The reason everybody loves them, everyone likes them, is because they are so safe. Friendly, talkative, they pose no threat to anyone's ambition and so everyone can afford to make them popular.

Becky is too sweet, too paradoxically plain. Her beauty is the sort that de Sade called too commonplace and so a deathknell to the desiring drive. Just thinking of her makes my skin shudder with disgust.

Melody, on the other hand, is the sort of girl I was meant for, for she is a phoenix, wide-winged, brilliant, worldly, and soars those rarefied heights that only the most elect, the most priveleged of wealth, intellect and creativity can reach.

Why should I, a fellow phoenix, tether myself to a gilded parrot like Becky? Her chatter is noxious and it is one of my great failings that I can not simply tell her to go away, to never disturb me again.

But it matters not. I am as Lucius Sulla, born to the highest sort of nobility, but without the means to access my birthright. To stand among the giants of my generation, my world as I properly should.

Instead, I am forced to my silence, my brooding... pacings on the back porch, manly man's Lucky Strikes lit and smoked in ceaseless succession, now one, now two, now five as I chase the flames of insight flaring in my mind, my body trembling in those precious moments with inspiration that I will never realize.

For that perfect state, that zone where I swim in the dark grottos of my submerged revelations, is shattered in a second.

Other voices, the wrong kind of music, the presence of people who dare to speak to me as I trek back inside the house, they transport me out of my pristine fantasy lands, where I've at last, at long last grasped onto something, and back into the real world, with all of its banality and its tedium.

And then those epiphanies drown back into the dark waters, going away with the swiftness of escaped dream's gleamings.

And I am left staring at the opaque bleakness, everything I imagined barred to me until the next time I tromp to and fro on the porch, smoke and tobacco my guides back down.

My life has ever been thus, the pursuit of nocturnal phantoms at the glowing, orange point of a cigarette, when all the world is dark and silent.

Sunlight and noise belong to the Beckys and the Nicks of this world.

[DaddyTorgo]

so when will the regularly-scheduled "TBG&THC" story resume? When you are out of Spain?

[Izulde]

Originally Posted by DaddyTorgo

so when will the regularly-scheduled "TBG&THC" story resume? When you are out of Spain?

No, when I have my CK CD back.

[Izulde]

I knew a windy, rainy evening last night. An onslaught, a downpour, a torrid flood of water and breeze that assailed me as I walked, lonely through the slick streets, drunkies weaving to and fro on the immobile sidewalks, shouting their guppy's greetings and mating calls to equally addle-brained baboons, beer reeking, reeking everywhere, in the road, in the clothes, in the doorways, in the nostrils...

It was as if it were raining not clear, clean water, but a tawny, gold urine, odious to the smell, nastier still to the taste. God pisses on us. Good title for a counterculture novel. Opposing what, I don't know. University life murdered meaningful social insurrection in the '60s and it never has been recalled to life.

Not that the good Doctor Manette should be lucky enough to win the Get of Jail free card, mind you. Many consider me a manette, man in the body, -ette in the mind. But what of my spirit? Ah, my own concern, I suppose, if you ignore the book-clutching Mormons with their giant flip cards and discount store suits that infest and warm about every decent-sized campus.

I haven't yet been able to figure out just what exactly is going on between Nick and Melody. Nick's normally so full of himself, bragging of the disgusting barflies and slutty freshwomen drunks, refuses to talk about her. Has he finally failed?

Is there at last a woman who wouldn't give it up to him?

I do hope so. I get sick of it sometimes, the way everyone is Nick this and Nick that. Nick Nick Nick! What about me?

Don't I mean something?

Or I am just the guy for answers?

Mid-terms and finals times are the seasons in which they line the hallways and approach my door.

Every other day and every other hour?

Silence. Not even a nearby whorl of air can be convinced to stir by my door.

And that reminds me of another season.... and the only girl who has ever shown me something close to love.

The only one I could feel something for in return, that is.

But the sun is zenithed and I have things I must do before night falls.