Confronting Our Past, Through Yard Sales & MySpace

Today is the city-wide garage sale, where dozens of families decide that it is somehow worthwhile to wake up early to set up tables in their yards and impede traffic for nine hours just to sell gifts from their in-laws for a quarter. My tiny little No-Parking street is full of minivans and El Caminos and fat women in tank tops walking straight down the middle of the road. I realize that when your hips measure 58 inches the roadway becomes, relative to body-width, a sidewalk, but some of us want to actually drive down this stretch of asphalt. On a happier note, or maybe just a strange one, I have found my first boyfriend on Myspace.

Now for years I ignored Myspace and refused to set up an account. I'm not a pedophile so why would I need one anyway? But then through some bizarre Gary Busey angle I found an old friend and the only contact info I could find was through the dreaded "social networking" site, so I had to set up an account. Once I had done that, I started going to other people's pages and clicking "add friends" and the whole stupid Myspace thing snowballed. And I found my ex. Not just an ex, but the ex.

You know the guy. Any girl out there who didn't marry her high school sweetheart knows the guy. He's the one you're referring to when you say "my high school boyfriend", the one who corrupted you and then broke your heart. Sure I dated more than one guy in high school but this is the guy who sticks out. He was my Lord Henry, my Joey Buttafuoco if you will.

Lord Henry really is a good description for him now that I think of it. All the talking of logic and rational thought and atheism and sexual freedom. And get this, less than a year after he dumped me he found Jesus. The same guy who at nineteen taught a fifteen year old to question everything and to face the world with cynicism found Jesus. I resent that. He should not be allowed to walk around with faith after that.

I guess every girl meets a guy like him. Every girl has to learn somehow that boys really do only want one thing, that a broken heart will heal, and that "We can still hang out and stuff" just means they want to continue to have sex while dating other women. But we will still resent them for it, and we should. If we didn't then what would keep us from making those mistakes again?

I suppose I resent him in that "It was a hard lesson to learn" sort of way, but to be honest there are other less personal ways to resent him as well. I resent that he and his Myspace page are a reminder of my youth, when long-gone friends were near or even just still alive. I resent that he hasn't seemed to age at all in the last fifteen years (which is reason enough to bump that resentment up to hatred). And I resent that I know I have been "the ex" before and I feel guilt over it, guilt his conveniently located god absolves him of. But I thank him too. I thank him for lights-out glowstick fights in God's apartment, for exposing me to Henry Rollins' box set, for sewer-gasket bungee jumping in Eagle Point Park, and for showing me the Hall Mall, absolutely the coolest place to buy a vintage Ramones t-shirt ever.

Oh look, fat women in short shorts wandering up my driveway. And I'm not even having a yard sale. Time to go chase them off with a pitchfork. And time to let you go google Lord Henry :)