This is a plot about a 29 year old manchild who wants to be so beautiful he can spend his time getting dankdirty.
He used to have a pretty-face; slight vestiges remain. But cigarettes, fast food, little exercise, alcoholism & sleep deprivation have all taken their bell-curved toll. He didn't even start in the middle majority of physical beauty, but on a slightly narrower fault-rung level. Even narrower, at that beginning, were his family's finances. Having renounced family and marketable skills, this young man's financial straits were as tight as young Korean girl-boy seducing Mark Knopfler between a ghetto Scylla & Charybdis populated by cannibalistic shrink-wrap-headed NFL tightends experimented on by Rick Moranis in the early 90s.
In short, if beauty & money at their median balance can be visually represented as a sideways supine vagina on the dry erase-board of life's ECON 101, this young man was nearest American capital's blackscaled butthole, while Warren Buffett, Bill Gates, & the Koch brothers were up in that other dull, sharky narrow of the Liberty-bell-curve, tickling the capital-clitoris with their stubble-mustaches, NBA finals tickets, & PAC variegated enlightened oligarch politico-philanthropies. So that's where this young man stood on the financial vagina of bell-curved brotherly-love, all lobbying power inert, more good as an movable-type exemplum for the type of political rhetoric native to the Koch brothers' waiting lobby.
As for the lobbying power of his beauty, most of the most attractive senators were immune, but a few whose beauty was greater than his, but whose time on earth exceeded his, could be filibustered into accepting his sexual-petitions, feeling, as many do, that youth's wealth of vigor & vim, even if he be not trim, was a wealth at least slightly greater than a cache of experience--which is such a heavy treasure-chest-inconvenience in these days of weightless, mobile & zippy banking.
This young man, one day, met such an aged senator of the local republic, a most beautiful senator, whose youth, though she possessed it believed it long gone, as if it had been a stick of underarm deodorant only good for one application nearly a decade ago.
It is an axiom in the differential calculus of social distinction that another's hygienic theories can never be understood, not even by close observation of their practical symptoms, and even less by keeping current with the purportedly nutritive, esteeming contemporary scientific "studies" exhortatively advocated in Freud-savvy, liberal-dietary, populist navvy-advertisable "women's magazines" and liberal populist fetish-masculinity-gizmo-health-geek-dad-empiricist-propaganda "men's magazines."
The weakness of this aged senator, who only had a diet left besides money's upper-middle-class university-gymnast power of elasticity-potential for travel, not going hungry, reliable transportation, and potential for procreating a provided-for-nuclear-familial-nucleus of wailing, shitting, hungry atomic-infant-units, was quite apparent, even at the beginning. Such are beginnings however, easily ignored except as a whetting, a fanning for the dully cherubic sword of enflaming desire. Such are beginnings, best forgotten!
The story of love is the story of an ape holding a tuna like a home. It is a pink, clumsy story. A story like a rabbit held kicking over a sewage-treatment plant bescummed with fetid carrots and moist, darkening lettuces. His nose quivers, like a balyk left on the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier during the greatest earthquake that influentially affluent region has yet, most assuredly, known. The story of human-like love is not an easy allegory, but if one were more or less than human-like, perhaps it would be an easy allegory, even with no ape thrown in the equation, an ape, alas, even beyond the pail of pale Poe's ratiocitational, quotable conception.
This young man's name was Steve, much like the name Steve of many named Steve you've no doubt known in those all-too-fragile, bubble-wrapped days--with their daily suns like quail-eggs and their nightly darklings like coffee for sleepless day-abortions--in which your body has, so far, felt cozily, warmly distant from need at home.
Perhaps you can picture Steve in your head. He is vaguely heavy, like a powertool that you ordered online but which has arrived in a box as large as your front door. You feel it is safe to know Steve, to converse him out of the box of his expressionless eyes, to share your enthusiasms with him in the hope that your hopes will shake the Etch-a-Sketched politely political expression of his broad, beard-hid face and reveal a truer hopeful face full of green-lit Gatsby-filmic American-slice-cheese-yearnings which you & he, over a beer, over a cigarette, over a coffee, will bond over, accruing interest by buying into the mutual-trust-credit-union of each other's friendship, a friendship which will join forces, like the Planeteers, like the elements combined, to weather a weather for two so safe, so good, that when storms come when floods come you shall have any insurance for any whether of weather imaginable. Yet Steve's green eyes don't fall out of his face and fly across any known river to light the night with any visible distant fate. His face is stuck like that, the sand behind it too wet or too absent to move by any force your lonely enthusiasm, your tentacled-love is capable of exerting--you, a low tide, more Pacific than Atlantic, you, a seismic occasion, more tennis-shoed footstep than aftershock. From out of the express-shipped, cliche-wrapped box of his words, the cardboard-stiff geometry of Steve's demeanor permits, despite all your best-effort fingers, no single packing peanut seen, no glimpse of the sealed some-assembly-required baggy of his innermost person. You are grown abashed, too soon flushing, like the first time you ever did any of those vices or virtues for the first time, as if you had just shat in the white public toilet of live but forgotten your own chronic dysentery, which noisily, immediately, made again its presence reknown, renouned, like a legal change of name to escape the infamy of a father's crime or the memory of a mother who abused your time--O!, our chosen names, the metonymies of our hopes and dreams, for which still yet we'd pay courts and bureaucrats to recognize, those metaphors we scream into the municipality as if our identities were an imminent rape or mugging, an emergency demanding an institutional response, as if a poem is not a poem until someone else known for publishing poems publishes it for you, as if we are not who we could one day be until we are free from all pain of the past and of the past of the pain, until we are passed beyond pain into a perpetual peace, a touchdown received from a quarterback's broken throwing arm numbed functional with pills and salves, and our old self, our old given name just a worn-out lemma of a quarter-back-fort/da proving himself by passing a touchdown to his own self, a touchdown which ends all games, like the POTUS' nuclear-football! Ha! O life! O self! Everything is so -ish! Selfish speaking English in the Similacral babyish-formulaism here in the, optimistically speaking, noonish o'clock of my waking life. Elvish leaking Engrish in the simul-lachrymal baby-forms nearing now hobbled tears, sore on the evil heights of one-eyed Panoptico-Mythical, one-ringed towers, of Jupiter-sized Egos conceptualizing continuous self-identity via private property, memoirs, feedback loops, existential teleologisms perforated with typo-traumas porously membraned with viral-fogging contagious affect-clouds yet still glittering like fresh-paved mosquito-highways to understanding others as if simultaneously that car you driver where I-is-not-another would pass the correct emissions test.
Such was one way you pictured Steve or didn't.
No comments:
Post a Comment