Parade

Originally Posted Saturday, December 14, 2013

You've had those days, the ones where everything goes right as rain when you should feel victorious but in the end you are simply exhausted from moving and doing and rather than feeling one way you feel the other as if your life is really not your own.  You know what I mean, right?  "Who's doing for me?" you wonder not for the first time and you think of all the compromises you make for other, all the accommodations of being where they want you to be and when and you know that they feel as if everything is equal, it is just what people do but you know it is not what people do but what you do and you are too easy and you overcompensate because deep down in your heart there is a darkness that if you let bubble up will tell everyone to fuck off. 

O.K.  Maybe you don't know those days.  But surely, on a much lesser scale, you've all felt the inequality of relationships.  I say that because if you are reading here, I know you are a giver rather than a taker.  Right?  We are People That Love. 

But I know, too, that you are all rougher in most cases than am I.  I am a weepy one. 

The factory visit went well and I accorded myself with honor, and then I came home and took my mother to lunch and gave her a new iPad for her birthday (that is the way I am), then dashed to my beauty appointment to get beautified stopping to get a bottle of expensive Malbec to take with me, and then hours later, after darkness had fallen, I went back to my mother's to set up the iPad with magazines and newspapers and books and HBOGo and games.  Password after password after password, no two companies now allowing you the same sequence of numbers and letters so that you must keep an entire log of things.  And then it was late and I realized I had not been home since 8:30 in the morning and it was Friday night and I was just exhausted.  I felt no victory in it all. 

There is a Christmas Parade down the Boulevard this morning.  I used to go obsessively when the town was smaller and more intimate.  You would see everyone you knew there standing with a cup of coffee or eating breakfast at a sidewalk table.  I often brought my mother with me for breakfast.  There was Betsy who you'd seen the night before at that most fabulous bar in the world standing like something out of the pages of Vogue though you know what she'd been through the night before, and there further down were the Boulevard Lizards, those three beautiful blondes that every fellow with a company credit card had been buying drinks trying to peel one from the pack.  And there were the twins, two boyos who still lived together like perpetual fraternity brothers.  And there were the people on the margins of your life who you recognized because you saw them around town at other tables or passing on the sidewalk, and everyone was someone in the great, seemingly endless novel that was your life in this town. 

I will not be going this morning.  The GPS has ruined everything  It is as if the tourist buses and Carnival Cruise ships have dropped off the hoi-poloi for any and everything the town once held dear.  They stay because of their mass where once they would havefelt their non-belonging with deep and abiding inferiority.  It was a town where not having savoir-faire was a Cardinal crime.  Now, as everywhere else, it is a badge of honor. 

Yes, I am being an asshole.  But one must achieve something in life.  If you are not born beautiful, then read and try to become interesting.  If you are not interesting, then travel well and have something to say that is not mundane.  And if you don't have the wherewithal to travel, then develop some modicum of individual style that will mark you.  But if you just want to read People Magazine and eat at Bennigans and and watch Jersey Shore and shop at Twenty-One-Forever. . . . But it is probably best to be born beautiful, to read and to travel, and to develop an individual style. . . .

Oh, and one more thing.  Never grow old.  You will get tired from a day's obligations.  You will get nostalgic and cranky and angry at change and call others you don't like inferior and stay at home rather than going out and experiencing the world as it is now.  And that would be the bigger crime. 

I'd better hurry.  The parade will be starting soon.