Well Bottom Blues

I was a dateless and frustrated kid, only getting a little lucky if we both
were drunk, which started so damn young when I was a teenager as if at once to ease and to drown adolescence. I was spectrally bashful like a ghost around young women and spending adolescence in an all boy’s school didn’t help one bit.
I think things might have gone differently if I’d learned to flirt by text message long ago.  Tricky without face and body language but I was poor at reading that back then anyway. I’m better at that now but still freeze up when the friendship and othership wires get frayed by rubbing too close together and start to spark. Just texting I have time to form my thoughts and step more carefully to avoid the stumbles that troubled my youth. The trick is mixing it with IRL time, close enough to remember how it started, because practice makes perfect.

I’m just glad with all the drinking and drugs in the ’70s and all the behavior that enabled that we didn’t all have cell phone cameras, with video which would be even worse. I prefer to tell the story of how I got the nickname Dancing Bear as a story. We were high and drinking and had music on and when the Beatles “When I’m 64” came on with its old music hall ambiance I started faking a soft shoe tap number with an imaginary cane. And that became sometimes when we were high and drinking a command performance. And ever after I was Dancing Bear– after the character on Captain Kangaroo– and some friends still call me by that name.
Was that unconsciously a desperate bid for attention? Maybe, but when it first happened it was a joyful dance. I was entirely present  in the moment, the spotlighted center of attention and entirely enjoying myself. There are worse nicknames and memories to carry out of adolescence.

Sometimes I’m just a dancing bear, aping the human emotions  I didn’t fully understand when I was that ghostly boy, but I’m getting closer to full comprehension.