Clive versus Nothing In Particular

“Stop telling me” he said “Stop telling me, because I don’t want to know”

“Look” Devon replied “I just think that as we get older, our lives will seem blander and blander no matter what we do. The more we experience, the less that surprises or thrills us. With less of those high points to make us stop and stare, we’ll perceive our lives as progressing faster and faster until entire years roar by as we used to experience a fleeting half hour.” Sensing no desire from Clive to respond, Devon pressed on after a sip from her glass of wine. “That’s why High School, with all its first times and the rawest beginnings of adult hood, seems like a more exciting and story-filled time than now. I think it’s the real reason why so many people idolize those years…not because they were quantifiably better, but because they just seemed more remarkable”.

Clive took a deep sip from his thermos, standing out on the edge of the lake in silent mortification. Turning around to face Devon, he couldn’t help but feel like an army general, talking to a scientist out of an old B-film, as he blurted out “So what on Earth are we supposed to do?”. Devon shrugged her narrow shoulders, causing her to have to re-adjust a shoulder strap that slid down. Putting her now empty glass down on the dock made the left strap fall again and this time she left it there, indifferent. “Well I suppose we could desperately cling to the trappings of our youth?”.

Clive glared and said nothing. He knew this was a dig at a large group of society in general, but also at Charlotte – who had recently purchased a collection of Strawberry Shortcake dolls identical to those she’d had as a little girl. Luckily she was with Devon’s new boyfriend Tony, about a quarter-mile inland at the cottage they were all sharing for the weekend. Probably rolling her eyes at all the shark hunting anecdotes Tony liked to repeat ad nauseum.

“You never have been able to totally accept my girlfriends” Clive said over the rim of the Thermos. Devon thrust her arms out wildly before bursting into the truly Californian exasperation which had made her stand out from all the other intelligent women Clive could have befriended during those “story-filled” years of High School. “Jesus Christ Clive, could you ever be more boring? Speaking of running gags between us, I always love it when you ignore my big points about mortality”.

Standing at 6’3, Devon wasn’t built like an Amazon but she sure could carry herself like one. Striding towards Clive with an overdone swagger, she mixed humour with her anger so Clive knew he hadn’t hit that raw a nerve. Besides, they both knew he was just trying to redirect the conversation because Devon’s lectures on the brief nature of life terrified him – her calm acceptance of her fatalistic theories being the most frightening component of all.

Gesturing grandly with every other word, her voice boomed as she continued from less than a foot in front of Clive. “Do you want us to be those kinds of people, Clive? Do you want us to be the bored intellectual do-nothings who just obsess over minutia with their inter-personal relationships to avoid the really big thoughts? The really big problems? What are we, Woody Allen characters?”. Grinning, Clive made as to reel back under her volume and then snapped himself upright – throwing the thermos up and over into the woods. Now it was his turn in this little game they’d played so many times before.

“Well Dev-onnnn, maybe we should be characters from an Ingmar Bergman film? Maybe we should sink all of our rapidly fleeting time and energy and life and love into the unanswerable? What! Do you think of that?!” Clive had been mimicking her body language all the while until, punctuating the end of his sentence, he made an absurd crotch thrust as if to say “See what I have and you don’t?”. Calculated nonsense, meant to try and make Devon lose the tight grip she had on her point.

But he quickly pulled his hips away as she made to backhand his crotch. Chasing after him, she yelled “Maybe we don’t have to be characters from some other asshole’s film? Maybe we could be our own people, whatever those may be? Like, maybe you could stop being the worlds biggest cock while having the worlds tiniest?”

Between giggles, Clive kept backing away from Devon until he was at the edge of the dock. Then both of them really started to grin as it became obvious that the new objective of the game was to see if Clive would fall back into the water while fully dressed. Stopping in her tracks, his old friend began to move her eyes rapidly over his body as if trying to find a pressure point.

“Maybe” Devon said “We could live our lives in such a manner as to encourage the kind of high drama that makes for interesting stories? We could go out of our way to set up cathartic moments, climactic arguments and pseudo-ironic happenstances. It’s not like we haven’t watched enough tv and film to know all the right things to say!”.

"Haha, I'll be the promiscuous gay guy who is more stereotype than man and you can be the woman who eats chocolate instead of having sex, because apparently it's empowering to gain weight instead of meaningful human interaction" Clive lost a bit of his own focus while blurting this out and Devon, deciding that she had found a weak point in his defences, lunged forward with the cry of "Sooo tiny!". Clive leapt back off the dock and as he went towards the water exclaimed "It is so tiny!".

Much later that evening Clive found himself sharing a beer with Tony during a moment where the latter had, oddly, fallen quiet. But it wasn’t to last and Tony surprised him by asking “Hey Clive, you know I keep going on and on about what I do – but what do you do, buddy?”. Thinking about it for a moment, Clive then replied “I argue, mostly with women it seems, resolving little or nothing at all...”.