Standing Joke of the Year-

There's a song by my old love David Gray that has at various times over the past several years reminded me of the ill advised marriage I bound myself in and the ridiculous human being that occupied the other half of that bondage for nearly a decade.  I love that welshman, the soft wail in his voice, and the sad way he can't seem to find a real love, at least according to his songs.

As I drove away from the Duval County Courthouse I heard the song quietly singing behind the loud cries of Jacksonville's new Black Panthers admonishing black men to stop rapping in a disrespectful manner about black women and treating them instead like the queens that they are, which was all oddly tangential of a completely necessary demonstration regarding the absolutely unconscionable murder of a black teen by a middle aged white man: because the boy's music was too loud.  The topic of that trial is so much more salient than what I actually am writing about, but I can't see past my own rage at my situation to give it more careful thought.  I too am a completely egotistical human, it's an inescapable sentence of these 46 chromosomes in collusion with a bent nature.

There it was, playing underneath the TV news tents as they set up to bring you whatever glimpses of the lawyers who would emerge in two or so hours when the courthouse closed down, no doubt both proclaiming a victory on the day:

It was a kind of so-so love and I'm gonna make sure it doesn't happen again,
You and I had to be the standing joke of the year,
You were a run around, a lost and found, and not for me I feel

Take your hands off me, hey,
I don't belong to you, you see,
And take a look in my face, for the last time,
I never knew you, you never knew me,
Say hello goodbye,
Say hello and wave goodbye


As I cursed my ex husband in my heart for his lack of employment, his current decision to devote his every waking moment to graduate school (how very nice for him, wouldn't we all love to have that particular luxury) for the next two years and the court's assent that this was somehow NOT CRIMINAL, I sang along, remarking to myself that the lyrics were oh so comically on point. It was at best a kind of so-so love, no real fire-he was short and not my type, which could best be described as uber alpha and ultra ripped and pretty darn handsome. There wasn't much of an intellectual equality either, but I allowed myself to believe his kitschy ability with music somehow brought him to a near rival to my own genius status-a non truth to which our marriage counselor once subtly tried to alert me. And he NEVER laughed at me, and as Taylor Swift knows I am seriously hilarious.


And I'm gonna make sure it doesn't happen again. In so many ways. So many ways. Every interaction with that (man?) reminds me that I will never marry again. Taunts me that I am incapable of love. Wards me off of any potential emotions I would ever dream of allowing myself to have at all. Ever...again.


The line in this song, that has for much of my marriage, and certainly post-marriage, gotten me where it hurts is, "You and I had to be the standing joke of the year." I look back on the early days of our relationship and there were those who knew better. "They won't last, she won't put up with that." "If I wanted to I could break them up today." "Don't get involved with someone crazier than yourself." Just juxtaposed to the men that I had always been attracted to, one had to wonder, why is she being so ironic. It wasn't irony i was going for. I just thought the opposite of my sinful, carnal, vile ways had to be the right way to go. I didn't know that there was a possibility that I was who I was on purpose. That there could have been constraints under which the satisfaction of my wants and needs were part of God's will for me. I could feel it when we went out, the quizzical stares as yin and yang went out to dinner and he would seem totally disinterested in me. But I buried it. I turned away from my perception of reality to try to be someone I wasn't. I knew my friends must secretly be saying that this relationship has to be a joke, but I told myself that if that was true it was simply because they could not possibly understand. I could hear the thoughts of strangers who were frantically trying to do the math, and it never added up, it never did for me either.


Nothing would give me any greater pleasure in life that for him to have taken a look in my face for the last time in that time at the courthouse, I never knew him, he NEVER knew me. Oh the ways in which he never knew, never understood me.


Say hello, wave goodbye. He couldn't' even muster the cajones to say hello to me. He couldn't even find the Richard to answer my questions in court. I cannot imagine that I was married to him. I cannot contemplate that I made four children with him. The insanity of it all makes me question myself at my core.


I hear him even now singing this line, "We tried to make it work, you in a cocktail skirt and me in a suit but it just wasn't me." Can't you? I mean honestly, I dressed up, I was as nice as any woman. I threw parties. I cultivated relationships, for myself and for him. I tried to make it work. He wore a suit, he tried working. That just was not him. Now he is who he wanted to be. The unemployed 38 year old psychology student. Physician heal thy FU(#!N% self.



You're used to wearing less, and now your life's a mess, so insecure you see


How does a graduate of the United States Air Force Academy justify not working AT ALL, and not SUPPORTING his FOUR children (who were his PLEASURE to bring into this world) at all? His life is most certainly a mess.


I had decided earlier in this evening not to be "that girl." I have gone back on that, and I am that girl. I hate him. And I don't care who knows it. I apologize for being this petty girl. There are secrets that I keep, so many of them, and this is not one. I want to scream, and shout, and let it all out (yes this is a quote from bit bit). I want to curse at the top of my lungs, but there are four young children present, and there are employees of the providence school who may read this. I can visualize cutting tendons and sawing through ligaments to flay his arms off his body and then beat the ever loving tar out of him with his own limbs. But I won't, because it is illegal, and because the release would only be temporary and I would then feel guilty.


Say hello. And wave Goodbye.


If only this was actually goodbye.