I knew I couldn’t sleep if I didn’t blog about it, which is why I’m sitting here contemplating the conversations I’ve had tonight. In reverse, the night seemed to make sense.
The introspection came on strong in the wee hours of the morning, after the guests had left and the host had finished his duties. We were sitting around a flimsy table with a maroon tablecloth draped over its plywood and formica surface. Stains scribed across its surface were like fingerprints of former parties and dinners, and it was littered with the remnants of cracked peanut shells and a sea of empty beer cans.
We were past our 2nd crate when the whiskey was brought out; by that time, the night had become preoccupied with the quiet of neighbours fast asleep, disrupted by the sound system of my friend’s car. It was cold, but the whiskey warmed us up. A heady mix of alcohol, great people and shared jokes left those of us who remained with a quiet sort of afterglow, a happy weariness characteristic of a night well spent.
War stories were swapped, some metaphorical, some literal but the general malaise that had afflicted me over the past few weeks began evaporating in the haze of the realities laid out by my colleagues. It will sound cheesy to imagine our little coterie characterized as a band of brothers, but at the time we were bonded by our common existential questions.
We talked about life, of course, but I had the feeling that we were talking like men who were weary boys. Boys grown up but wishing to remain boys; none of us would admit it, being men, since all of us were fully aware of the realities of our present conditions. But you could hear the yearning, and instead of making me wonder at our familiar but foolish nostalgia, it made me feel that we were all admitting, on one level or another, our own human foibles.
For one amongst our group, it was particularly poignant because he had scaled up to the pinnacle of our industry, only to suffer a fall from grace. At close to fifty, he now works for our company with the same determination and discipline that cost him, 2 years ago, his job. How fortune favours blindly.
The jokes the hours before came fast and furious, spurred by the glow of alcohol pumping in our veins. The blare of music, the press of people at the dinner gathering under that tarpaulin and steel frame structure, the aroma of good food going cold assaulted us all, as we traded joke after joke after joke. On one level, it was completely mindless (except when an IQ question or two were tossed in) while on another level, there was a sense of complete and utter ignorance of the schedules and deadlines that lay ahead.
My earlier misgivings at seeing his ‘mistress’ attend the function were ignored and put aside; all thoughts of messianic emphathy were bracketed out and for that few hours, I cared little who saw us or who wished they didn’t see us. We were a rowdy bunch, and I was the loudest of course. For the nth time, I had decided not to bother about his elaborate architecture of reasons, justifications and lies; it just wasn’t worth the time, anymore.
And time froze, a temporal void on a Saturday night and Sunday morning. It was something worth remembering.
