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Blogs

No one must know my terrible secret...

House of Noh!

Saturday, June 04, 2005

I know I haven’t been writing much lately. It’s this terrible office-worker lifestyle I’ve been living of late. And BTW, if you ever have hurt feelings because it always seems (and during my unemployed phase (sabbatical) this seemed the case more often than not) that people don’t want to sit next to you on the El, then try carrying one of those cardboard, accordion-sided, “redweld” folders crammed with documents bristling with post-it notes. Any dude carrying one of those is immediately deemed harmless in El riders’ minds – precious, even – and when there are a lot of open seats all sorts of different kinds of people will always choose the one next to you to sit in, even though you’re hardly a courteous double seat-mate with your bag and all your documents and shit taking up just a little more room than you are due.

So back to this terrible office worker lifestyle I’ve been living of late – the lifestyle that I’ve been living so much that last night, after I had run some errands after work and was on my way home, I was TERRIFIED when I saw a leather-clad roving youth gang moving along the sidewalk toward me. I was on Clark, just a little North of Belmont by the Punkin’ Donuts there. Of course at first I just experienced the general, natural reaction to a leather-clad youth gang of this kind. I was like, “holy shit!” what a lot of fucking punk-rock accessories on this approaching youth gang. Seriously, it must have taken them like three hours to get dressed and accessorized. I was sort of hoping that they’d sneer or something at me as they passed, then I could have used the line I always want to use when some hip teens or early twenty-something hipsters give me that pejorative sneer they use on all monkey-suited, tired looking squares who have succumbed to the call of working for the Man. “I was once like you!” I would shout at them. And then they would know their destiny.

Imagining this whole scenario got me to taking stock of myself. Here I was, not just a monkey-suited square to be sneered at, but the perfect guy for a roving, leather-clad youth gang to terrorize. I know the type from movies. I was shuffling along all shoulder-weary in a suit I probably should have taken to the cleaners about twenty hours of wear previously. I was carrying a bag from the stank-ass shoe basement. And, what’s worse, my shoulder bag was crammed full of soybean husk / wheat gluten sandwich patties.

I prepared to be terrorized. It would have been hilarious. I figured they could have opened up my shoe box and dumped out my shoes in the street (after making fun of my shoe selection, of course). And they could have grabbed handfuls of my suit lapels and pushed me up against a wall and snapped a switch-blade open in my face and made me take out my post-it-note-stuffed wallet and give them each dollar bills. Or they could have put cigarettes out on my face. Or make fun of my comb-over. I don’t know. I shouldn’t have to come up with ideas for them to terrorize me. That’s their job.

But the leather-clad youth gang and I passed on the sidewalk without incident.

I was sort of watching them as they passed, you know, waiting to be terrorized, and they were probably a little too young to be a serious leather-clad youth gang. One kid toward the back of the gang even gave me sort of a tender, half-smile as they passed – like the kid wanted me to know that the roving youth gang was really just a group of good kids who are into the aesthetic of leather-punks or something.

Sub-par! I was VERY disappointed in them.

But don’t worry, leather-clad youth gang. You’ll get the hang of this yet. There’s plenty of time to become disenfranchised and feel like you’ve got nothing to lose. You’ll have the opportunity when you’re older to feel so cornered by life that you lose the ability to find escape in any of your youthful joys or explorations or your sea of home-spun recreational drugs and the only way to escape, albeit temporarily, the crushing pressure of a life that’s got you gasping for breath at every turn is the roller-coaster, adrenalinized release that accompanies engendering terrible life-consequences through horrible acts of violence. Don’t grow up too quick, leather-clad youth gang. There’s no rush. There’s plenty of time.