Friday, July 15, 2022

Favorite Color


Is my favorite color this color here?  Yes, it is.

Had you asked me before 1992 what my favorite color was, I might have said something distinctly bleak like "black" or "grey." I used to paraphrase that famous Morrissey line as "I wear grey on the outside because grey is how I feel on the inside." Although I really never wore grey. I probably had a tee shirt on while saying that, thinking I was clever & not even considering that the person I was talking to might not know the Smiths reference. & the tee shirt was probably from a concert I went to in 1987 & not a Smiths shirt at all.

That all changed when I had my heart broken in early 1992. Suffice to say, saying it was "broken" is being coy. If there were actual damage to a heart when it is "broken" in the romantical sense, I would have had the equivalent of a massive heart attack requiring emergency bypass surgery & maybe even a transplant. Some pig might have to die for me & thankfully that didn't happen because I would feel even more heartbroken for a worthy pig to have died for my dumb self to survive.

Of course, heartbreak doesn't really affect the heart (although it can do indirectly, as ones suffering severe emotional trauma tends to not take care of themselves, for example not eating, or drinking too much alcohol, which may lead to complications for the organ called the heart) but the brain, & the human brain can be frustratingly sturdy. Though I truly did at the time feel black on the inside, I did not want to live in blackness. The night, which I had previously quite enjoyed, became a place for terror & loneliness. You wear out even the closest of friendships, of which I had few, by calling at three a.m. to ask, "What's up?"

Daytime was preferable, & as the half-assed Austin winter turned to spring, I saw that color above, & it somehow helped me heal. Spring only stays in Austin for a short time before it's beaten senseless by the always-early-arriving summer, so that color is quite transitory, but I found myself gravitating to it more & more. As I sort-of-recovered from the heartbreak (maybe we never recover from any heartbreak), I still needed to see that color when it returned in the spring, & later, when I moved to Kentucky, twenty years after that heartbreak, I was delighted to find that springs lasted longer & the color stayed longer.  Here's another picture:


Do you find it as delightful as I do?

Maybe not, liking a color is subjective. That's why I call it "my favorite color" & "not the best color." Thinking one color is better than another might be a symptom of some kind of sociopathy. I don't know, I'm not someone who knows anything about psychology.  Which is perhaps a good a way to end this utterly meaningless piece of scribbling:

"I may not a psychologist, but I know what I like!"

That's a reference to something else & if you don't know it, it's fine. It isn't nearly as funny as the thing referenced & probably also not quite exact in its construction, so pointing out the reference might reflect poorly on me.

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