4/11/2004

Passionate verbiaged curmudgeonism

(to be read out loud, if at all)

It started at Edwards Gardens on Good Friday afternoon, where I couldn’t make it to the park for—and this is ironic—lack of empty space to park, so resigned and laughing quietly, “won’t this make for interesting opening,” I head south, to meet my unexpected meaning. Now I’ve told you the beginning, I’m the fat boy in the skinny, maybe words can explain the rest:

Cherry Beach with its shimmering renovations, how bout that, circulating cars pass alongside wild-goose waterfront escape-chasers, a warm cloudless day for l'esploratorio, amid masses of useless industrial residuals, bundled up apologetically behind predictably suicidal springtime pedestrians whose overblown exhilaration expressions have seen the shining sun. Broken glass collects in a roadside ditch, but roughly rides a tall blonde biker chick undaunted, all spandexed lower half with killer artificial calves, sipping a sport drink for two bucks, and her better half, sexy boy ‘Rich Mitch’ Goderich and his slick-trick ‘twinkle-toes’ cutting-edge calisthenics--they’re all bang-bang, clang-clang, diggety-dang, superman goggles, water bottle in hand, while I’m laughing abstractly; how irresistibly her dimpled nine-to-five butt cheeks sag despite Goodlife subscriptions and protein-pill grab-bags, I’m thinking.

I’m just as helpless and stubborn though; I’m a caterpillar crawling across someone else’s interstate; I won’t make it to my butterfly days—my fate is squashing by rubber tires, I expire in my furry red-black coat of ire. But mellowing by afternoon moonlight, I groom thoughts for the later-on scripting session, my signed confession of a wasted day’s inactivity, the stenographic justification for my lifetime of pleasure, this verbal leisure unceasing on the horizon, I hope. But I missed the last bus leaving the landfill spit, so in my Nissan it’s an Andretti fit of amphetamine creativity; the bike path can’t contain me, it’s off to shoreline, searching for bloated and bobbing puppies, hiding from prepsters, yuppies conspicuous in Prada leathers, bellweather gentry friars claiming the city’s last pristine beach site for their god—it’s a postmodern nonsense conquest for cold and cruel carbon-copy meritocracy leech logic; it’s madness I tell you, it’s going to the dogs, and they’re frothing free from leashes.

But I’m not really ‘woe is society’ and ‘curse the infidel’—that’s not my style, I swear. On Front Street at least there’s a sigh of relief, afternoon respite from the Hogtown diesel and ‘dodge-me’ blight, and where in this dad-blast pink-car nation can I find a decent peameal bacon sandwich? The old market’s closed and it’s a meat-free Friday anyhow, so my upper lip stiffens on a donut-shop compromise—it’s not fast-breaking if it’s decaf and fat-free cherry cheese danishes, I tell my guilty catholic conscience unconvincingly. I sit, read a bit about spacious vacuums in our stillborn modern cities; I scan curious among downtown red lights for blue innuendos, expecting ‘suck suck suck’ but it’s all these tough-luck losers just rolling up rims to win, wiping sour milk moustaches with nasty-cuticle fingernails, scraping out livings and scratching at lotto tickets; it’s sad sad so sad so I’m gonna please try again next time—I am definitely not a winner.



(ps happy easter)

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