Everclear

Sometimes you don't end up with your soul mate. 
                                          - Madonna (oh wise sage once said upon her divorce from Sean Penn)

15. Make a batch of limoncello

It’s a new year, the Sunday after, and my to-do list is clearly too long. But first things first: after a day of luxuriating with my house guest, Q-Tip Kitteh, I nap a bit and listen to the same music that has been on repeat on my 5-disc CD player since early 2010. Yes, it's the day of rest, and after perusing the interwebs, and stopping into Gordo’s for a quesadilla, I make a trip to BevMo and buy some Everclear.

This is my third Everclear purchase in as many years and I think it’s fair to say that I feel a little odd a) buying Everclear and b) shopping at BevMo. I went to the store on Geary and Stanyan since the plan was to go see a screening of Never Let Me Go at the Red Vic afterwards. It was cold outside, surprisingly so, and I’d found myself driving around with the seat warmers on before scurrying into the warmth of the BevMo. Once inside, as usual, I found I was one of the few customers. Also, though I had one quick purchase, I couldn’t help wandering every aisle, fascinated by the variety of scotch, bourbon, tequila and gin, and getting lost while eavesdropping on other shoppers’ conversations.

But when it comes to finding the Everclear, I can’t figure out where they store the stuff—would it be near the vodka, another grain alcohol, or in the “liqueurs” section? Or would it be near the “mixes”? Hmm. I also see cheap bottles of limoncello and anrancini mocking me and making me wonder WHY I was going to the trouble to make my own brew to begin with. Okay, so there’s no way it could be in the beer or wine section, but—hell!—look at all those French wines from the Rhone Valley! And then I'm suddenly lost among the martini olives, the party nuts, and the chocolates.

At one point I can hear two guys a row over talking on the phone while looking over bottles of cheap whiskey. They seem comfortingly familiar—sort of the suburban sort of dudes I grew up with who listen to heavy metal and spend a lot of time working on their cars. They’re very excited by the variety at BevMo and one shouts all the beverage options into the mouthpiece on his cell…until our eyes meet through the rows of clear vodka bottles that divide us, and he looks guiltily away.

After flagging down a BevMo employee who sends me in the right direction, I grab four bottles of booze and stand in one line with four other very quiet shoppers, waiting patiently to make my purchase. I feel alcoholic and like I'm hiding something, and though we're supposed to be happy shoppers, buying spirits, no one looks very happy. 

When I'm up, I actually get carded by the cashier and only momentarily feel a flush of misplaced pride that I would actually be carded at this point in my life. And then I read over a big sign that provides extensive information about carding customers, and realize that the friendly folks at BevMo clearly card everyone. My cashier has a large blemish on her cheek and she wears a slouchy polo shirt that’s wrinkled and untucked. I wonder what she thinks of my ID, my blurry photo that makes me looks slightly inebriated, and my purchase of this fine beverage, and I smile widely and check my desire to explain that I really wasn’t going to drink a bunch of Everclear alone. No. Really. I was making something. There's a recipe involved. Honestly.

After BevMo, I drive over to the Haight and take multiple turns around the neighborhood before landing a parking space on Page. I see Jennifer has texted to say she can’t make the movie and though I’m momentarily thoughtful at going to see a movie alone, I remember that, hell, it's been far too long since I’d enjoyed a late Sunday afternoon movie by myself. It feels like a luxury, an indulgence, a chance to spoil myself silly. So I hide the Everclear bottles under a jacket on my passenger’s seat, wondering if the local street kids can actually sniff this stuff out, and I make my way to the theater.

Inside, I gingerly test out a few seats, finding a few lumpy and broken, and I seat myself in the middle of the Red Vic with the smell of popcorn dressed in that weird hippy yeast completely enveloping me. There’s this odd sense that the guy to the left of me, also alone, is looking over at me very subtly, wondering what I too am doing at the movie alone. Yes, he's very subtle. Actually, if I'm honest with myself, he's staring at me. And it’s so cold in the theater, I put my gloves on. I’m a weirdo, too, clutching my purse on my lap and wearing gloves, but I feel that I’m amid many other similarly weird folks, which is a comfort of sorts.

For a few moments, I’m quiet, realizing today is the first time I’ve actually had the chance in a long time to quietly think about the year and things that were happening and changing before me. There’s my upcoming trip to Mexico and my new job to look forward to. There’s also new friends and people sort of entering and leaving my life. And then the day before had been so busy, with New Year’s afternoon-ish party, and then black-eyed peas and a movie, and people around me pretty much every step of the way...and the chance to avoid being by myself and really just thinking. I'm actually pretty good at this sort of avoidance.

There were also those conversations I’d had with Alec and Amanda over black-eyed peas and during the many movie intermissions where we talked about San Francisco, relationships, and looking for a relationship, or the value in maybe waiting for love to come to you. Yes, do you look for love or do you wait for it to find you? And just talking about this sort of makes me queasy—I’m not used to being quite so open about what we actually pursue in life. Do we admit that we want love, or do we pretend we don't need it, or do some people really not care? It seems dorky to live in this sort of fantasy and even talk about love to begin with—it's sort of one of those embarrassingly girly things to do. And I realize there’s this weird double-standard for me: if a woman talks about love, she’s totally delusional, but if a guy talks about it, he’s sort of sweet and sensitive.

While watching the movie, we actually end up recounting our most important relationships. Alec and Amanda told their stories, and I talked about my first love and sort of glossed over how screwy that whole thing got. Yeah, I'll finally admit, I’m getting sick of that story, but the idea about what these things are in our lives—these big relationships? Yes, our soul mates have an impact. I’d thought about this, and how somehow it seemed like a soul mate can only happen when you’re open and fearless and you think there are other possibilities to choose from—maybe you need to think there are other soul mates on the horizon? Either way, it seems you can’t be desperate for any kind of love. You have to believe there are other options, but you’d like just this one thing. All this leaves potential for a soul mate, I think.

And the night before there was also the talk amongst us about friends and loose hook-ups, and being open and not so open, and it made me think of what I was capable of—how sex complicates things. This also made me think about how men seem capable of separating things—simply having sex, and not having intimacy, or having both, or having intimacy without sex. I realize I’m good at the intimacy part, but I’m not good at sex and intimacy simultaneously. I realize that for me, I can’t separate sex and love and like or anything, so I vote myself off that island. The sex makes everything blurry for me, and I start making all sorts of compromises, or my ego gets wounded. And at the heart of the idea of having a casual hook-up with a friend would be that sense that I really don’t like them enough to see any sort of future with them to begin with, which is sort of a downer and a pretty sad place to start anything, and likewise that the person I was supposedly “friends” with didn’t see much that was lovable in me. 

Confusing, and such an effort to keep this distance in a casual relationship—I wonder if anyone can really do this well. On the other hand, I know that in my own experience, it’s been hard for me to know which guys will have the ability to hurt me—it’s not always the worthy ones, or the ones I am with for a considerable period of time. I think about guys I’ve dated, some for a few months who actually treated me well and who I admired, but who somehow never hurt me, and others who I’ve been with for years who didn’t really hurt me, and others who I don’t hardly even know, who lied to me, or who seem completely inappropriate, who can hurt me. It's hard to know which one will hurt more and it sometimes seems sort of arbitrary.

But there are also those memories of potential soul mates out there. Yes, if there is such a thing, I think I've got a slight inkling. Maybe it’s distance, but I remember being twenty years old and almost paralyzed around a boy, not knowing what to do or say, but just feeling so close to someone that I shook. I didn’t know I should’ve said something and opened myself up. Instead, I just acted really tough, and like I didn’t feel anything. It wasn’t until a year and a half later—when it was really too late—that me and that rare boy talked and he confessed how he felt and that he was feeling all those things that I was feeling. It seemed impossible, and I didn’t trust him. I didn’t know that this talking part and telling someone what you were feeling was rare, too.

Fittingly, Never Let Me Go is all about love, soul mates, and gobbling up life before it’s taken away. It’s also about art, and there’s this whole underlying story between a character played by Carey Mulligan and a sweet looking guy with sensitive, hurt looking eyes who I'd never heard of or seen before. It’s about these two and art revealing your soul—even bad art that can be sort of beautiful, too. The idea is, if there’s true love, it can be read through someone’s art—if there’s a soul mate, this can be seen within the art they create. And then there’s the idea that the art shows that someone has a soul to begin with. Sort of a sad and scary tale, and I’m not sure it was a movie for the times or anything, but this whole idea was haunting. And there’s a moment when the two main characters hold each other and seem so close; it reminds me of that feeling I had when I was twenty—of being so close to someone that you don’t have to say a word. That feeling that you're so close that you're breathing together.

I end up getting a tad weepy thinking about that feeling and wondering if I’ll ever feel that way again. I sort of felt sorry for myself long enough to see that it’s sort of the story of my life—I feel like I make these bad life choices out of this sort of fear. I’ve always believed that what you really have to fear is what you fear. If you’re afraid you will be alone, you will be alone. Hell, it’s all an effort in self-sabotage, and I know the real thing I have to fear is my own impatience. I’m afraid of waiting—that it will all end too soon and that it won't come quick enough, but I need to wait. I may wait forever.

Yes, happy thoughts to start the new year, but then I do look back on the last year and see there was some subtle change there. Things do change. Slowly. And I leave the Red Vic with this fantasy that when I get home I’m going to start washing lemons and making simple syrup. I’m going to make something! But once home, I turn on the heater, kick off my boots, and shuffle my way through the house to the kitchen. Instead of heading to the sink and toward the bucket of Meyer lemons, I carefully line up the bottles of Everclear on my kitchen table. They look good there—sort of scary and foreboding as they suggest future mishaps and evenings of revelry. And I quickly find myself lying around on the couch and flipping through the channels on TV. I sink my teeth into another movie starring Carey Mulligan. An Education. It’s so easy to get lost in another story, another diversion...Peter Sarsgaard. And so I start writing this so I don't get completely lost, and I save the limoncello brewing for another day.