Big Prick in Uptown

 

The "Art" Festival starts this morning in my own hometown.  Three days of crowds wandering through booths of ceramic ashtrays and bland watercolors of exotic locales, everyone with a fried dough or corn dog. . . . 

I'll be there.  

Travis texted me wondering if I got my credentials for sitting with the city's elite, eating and drinking away from the hoi-poloi like a civilized citizen.  Not his words.  My buddy runs the affair and has asked me to stop by the tent where that happens, but I've never gone.  I'm sure I'd see my ex-wife and others from my onetime social past.  Probably a lot of the people from the Club Y, too.  

I don't know.  I've just become a bitter asshole, I guess.  That's what Q tells me, anyway.  He called me the other night just to tell me so.  Oh, he soft-soaped it with telling me I was a good son, but I always take the insults more to heart than any sort of praise.  

Maybe that is why I stay away from people.  Surely, for instance, I'd hear whispers and feel the sneers if I went to the Credentialed tent.  

"Do you know that guy? Yea, he used to be married to her. He lived with Daddy Warbucks daughter for years. I don't get it. He's gotten strange. . . but he was always an odd duck."

Did I mention my paranoia?  

I should take my camera to the Crap Fest so that I can have something "new" to post here, but I'm parnoid about that, too. 

"Look, there's that guy. What's he doing, you think?"

It's hard to believe that I ever had a wife of a girlfriend.  

But it is spring, and the saps starts to rise and the creeks start to flow, and the bombs are dropping like crazy.  I live in Paradise, so I might as well enjoy myself today.  None of what I plan to do could I do if I were taking care of mom.  Yes, I should consider myself lucky for a minute.  I ate corned beef and cabbage, so I should have "the luck of the Irish."

That sounds funny, though, the luck of a  people who suffered through a potato famine.  What kind of luck is that?

Q is Irish.  He's been lucky.  

But there will be no topless women selling beer here in my own hometown.  All the weirdness takes place behind closed doors.  In public, there is a stodgy conservatism in the streets.  

That was an unplanned rant, obviously.  It's like the automatic writing of the mystics.  Spontaneous, written not by the writer but some spirit beyond.  Indecipherable.  

Maybe I should just treat myself to a facial and a massage.  That might be just the thing.  It's a simple exchange of values.  You give them money and they do things to your body.  It is obvious what each of you values.  It's like everything else, really.  

You know, I think I'll take a Holga toy film camera to the festival and a whole bunch of film.  Oh, yea.  There's an idea.  Yup.  That's just what I'll do.  Who gets mad at someone with a toy camera?  

I think I'll get the fried dough, too.