Neverland

There are things that we talk about but we never talk of them. We make a joke or two and during the laughter, hint at something and test the other person's waters. If the expression is stormy, we wait it out and sometimes, like George Clooney in a movie about storms, "it" dies. Sometimes a calm expression is expected and received with a furthering of conversation that gradually ends in something coming up and that something is talked about. It's essentially called beating around the bush. I would call it that too if it wasn't for the other person knowing exactly where the conversation is heading, so technically it's not really beating but more like "prologuing" the bush. It's a diplomatic verbal build up before a bomb of any size is dropped. One should not expect the bomb after small talk (for the sake of being civil and polite) but the truth is that the bomb almost always comes. The idea of the prologuer/bomber is to warm up the conversation before the payload is dropped on the now more vulnerable other. This should not be confused with the build up of a story that is hardly a bomb. And if I didn't mention before, prologuing a woman of your dream is understandable. Totally. A base example would be when a person you often dream about is standing in front of you and you can't help smiling. You don't want to be too forward, so you talk about the excellent time in the toilet you just had and how it makes you smile ever so. To contrast, it would be unwise to freak her out by mentioning how you keep seeing her in a surreal symbolic fashion and how you always wake up smiling when you do. Besides you have nothing to form a plausible picture to give weight to the vivid imagery floating in your head. Or even words that won't make a total ass out of you.
Now I understand the mechanism but it doesn't make it any less strange, even though I'm no stranger to prologuing. I think my brain development stagnated when I hit 18 so I don't, read: can't, appreciate these tools, among many others, that give us that refined mature sheen...that veneer of tact. When there's a favour needed, that two minutes of small talk just seem kinda fake and lifeless especially when at that moment you couldn't give a rat's ass about how the family and pet dog are doing. And when the person you're talking to is smart enough to recognize the prologue, then it's fake times two. I guess the other is then also smart enough to realize that prologuing's a standard protocol. But then again, I take the shotgun rule way too seriously.
My friends think I'm stuck in the '90s. Not that the shotgun rule was invented in the '90s, maybe because we used to adhere to such rules then. Then I happen to love bands from the '90s. Not all of them! It's not my fault Tool was formed in 1990. And according to wiki, Third Eye Blind in the early 1990s. Nirvana, I find out from the same source, was formed in 1987. Maybe they're right about the music. Apparently I dress '90s too, if there is such a thing. Did it really change so much for men? And then there are the stories and girls which and who only sometimes manage to date back to the '90s. But the whole idea gives weight to my original theory of being stuck at 18. That's supposed to either make me enjoy life like there is no tomorrow and full of youth and its follies or present me as a rather sad individual, stuck in the past, who shuns responsibility, to family I guess. Wow, the latter really brings out the duality of my Neverland. Who knows, even Peter Pan sometimes might have wished he would just grow up.


There are those times in my life when headlights are peering into and piercing right through me and the deer in me doesn't have a clue as what to do or say next. That's the Moment of Truth. And I go back to the mitti I came of.