Of Hours at the Wheel.... (23:15)

The radio kicks on, begins playing a song chosen at random amidst two thousand other possibilities, and gives the interior of his car a feeling of immutable charisma, an environment imminently sustained by his ironic silence...

"If the presentation speaks for itself, it speaks enough for both of us," he thinks absently.

He checks the road behind him and catches a glimpse of his own tired eyes in the rear-view mirror... they don't even look like his: patches of Distance, Aloofness, Coldness, and perhaps even a shade of Antagonism - they remind him of the looks he'd get from guard dogs as a kid when he would pass by just out of their range, a worthless target, but one that's fun to intimidate anyway...

As he drives on, the street lights glide over the thin corneal layer of each eye, reflected with an aqueous sheen into a sapphire-blue streak of momentary brilliance... unblinkingly driven forward, an insouciance between beams connected by threads of a celestial silk worm, effortless in their design; breaking conscious thought into a glittering web of light, just before the next passing bolt of electric azure...

The world exists as a pastiche, a parody of itself; these people living in it blithely enhancing the already comical display: awkwardness, forced amiability, a pretense rivaled only by the belief that it's genuine...

"And I'm supposed to talk to them?"

Jaded at age 19... just watch them turn up their noses like that... but this isn't jade, this is obsidian, volcanic glass, sharp enough to sever flesh and nerve, and with a reflective hide polished enough to show you your face as it happens... what happened in their lives to make them treat other people that way? What happened in the lives of their suitors to make them find that trait acceptable... even desirable? With each successive generation, the farce that is their superiority continues its profligate expansion into the norm, making the decency of the remnant few ever the exception...

The car crawls by this surfeit adolescence, barely making a sound and ignoring all attempts made to flag it down... he can't help but stare at their faces... desperate for the confirmation of privy counsel with the person who's going to take them on a jaunt to the ubiquitous - the experience of a lifetime that's to be had pretty much anywhere with a door. But not tonight. Tonight is his night to taunt them, prospecting a future to be had if only they had waited a little longer to so proudly display their... defining qualities... which are all he needs to validate his disappearance; a saccade from here to nowhere, matching his eyes as they flick back to the road, flashing in the lights once again as a resilient, auditory blue...

And thus, the children are left crestfallen in a current of traffic, their disappointment ringing with the sound of dying cells yet blissfully ignorant of it, concerned with one thing, and one thing only...

"Me."

Mae West in Foam

Of a fluid disclosure of self-contained rhetoric, borne from spaced out intervals yet likened to a flowing tap: write in phrases of indiscriminate intellectualism, forgo the bounds of audience and perceived retention, indulge in transient objectivism; shamelessly selfish; a fiend for the abstruse; markedly uninhibited by anything less than insulting.

Understand that you may not; yet know that its meaning finds you anyway: a sea of clarifying prose interrupted by the few flashes of reason, yet soon washed over by the next wave in a long series of tumultuous pretense. If the argosy ends in despair, look not far for the eventual rescue, an ellipsis that fills its void with words closely akin to those we hear so much more frequently.

"It's okay. I'm here to help you, you'll be fine..."

When a Mirror Says Hello

Haven't shaved in days. It's a nice layer of stubble though - looks good. I feel like Clooney on a bad day, which is still pretty awesome. The salt and pepper would be nice too... as would the charm.

I've got it. I just need a haircut.

Actually, maybe just a hat, at least until it gets cut. That works. But now there's that annoying little flip that makes it look like a mullet. That doesn't work.

Well shit.

There are a couple options here. I could a.) throw a cursing tirade over something that's really a very small problem, b.) suck it up and look like a crudely afro-headed white kid, c.) drink a beer and commiserate with anybody desperate for a conversation, d.) write some pointless entry in my sparse, pretentious blog that nobody reads, e.) all of the above.

I'll write in on this ballot:

f.) Fuck

That's a good answer. Perfect. Lovely. Exact. Forthright.

If I could be half as honest with myself as the word "fuck" is with itself, I'd be pretty well off.

Living the high life as a bona fide renaissance man.

Because that's what I am and strive to be: a renaissance man with a chip on his shoulder that happens at this point to be a Pringle.

Let's all gather round now and laud. Yes, lots and lots of lauding. Here, I'll make it easy and move to the center... just a second... ah! yes! a grandiose effluvia of sputtering praise; let it rain down upon me for glorifying the utter reproach with which I approach the current bout with myself.

Is anyone keeping score?

No?

f.) Fuck

That's who's winning. Because he's still philandering around making everybody who uses him happy in some way.

What a piss ant.