Evening with Ajmal at the Ritz Carlton

I woke up wondering what it was that I found confounding -- what chink in the armour I thought mismatched. Mystery is a large part of enigma-charisma, and I suppose it is that result we share from somehow similarly conflicted backgrounds. "I can't quite figure you out. I can't quite get how you can be so many different things at once. That's what makes you so ... interesting. That's what makes you so fascinating. But will I ever fully know you?" I think I've heard that before, indirectly in dreamy, aside looks and lop-sided smiles sitting opposite me in intimate conversation ... I've answered with the usual droopy-browed universalist "I love you as a person" and the resigned self-acceptance: oh Mel, by what you say and how you say it you want to draw them closer but you only send them away -- a pleasant trip, but away ...

He:
A total lack of disenchantment. No space for it. No tolerance for it. But not even a space for disenchantment with disenchantment. No reflexivity.

Boyish glee. Mischieviousness. Contrasted with: something noble, although that is not the right word. Something "blessed"? (bless-ed, two syllables, in the uniquely post-Elizabethan sense of the word and not in its pan-religious potentiality) What in a white man would be pooh-poohed as "entitlement," but in the post-colonial tickingly relished as "self-respecting." Still not the right word.

Together, charming. Again contrasted with a quiet hint of inner conflict. "People like us are screwed up," he proposes, and I welcome the commiseration as authoritative, brotherly yet commandeering. But in the taxi later he surprises me with a quick but certain joke at his being "pathetic", or "you find me pathetic", or something like that. This was the intriguing chink. For someone so monstrously confident, where did this moment of effacement come from? There is no god for him, there is no sense of lurking retribution requiring penance for his women, his entourage, his success, his power, his gigglish enjoyment of it all -- but is there still that glance in the mirror at a well-established, deserved, hard-earned ego, that yet sees itself as a mask? Is there still that? "At least I'm not as bad as you," he jokes, and I agree laughingly, seeing myself still sometimes in my disembodied, self-voyeurisitic way as the lowest of the low. But my intrigue ensues because perhaps I am not so far off the mark in musing that people need more than lovers -- that they need love, and that love is so often the chance to ask someone you trust, "Am I worthy?" and for them to reply with, "Actually, you're a creep!"?

...MISERY LOVES COMPANY (does company love misery?)