American Fez

Summer Sales

Waiting in a boutique while women browse the blouses or choose between very similar looking shoes, I am slumped on a purple ottoman, conspicuously bored, listening to the scrape and clatter of clothes hangars on the sale rack as last season's dresses and skirts are summarily dismissed. So much for the life's work of hunchbacked child laborers.

We have been here for hours without end but there is always another corner of the store to explore. It's like traipsing around C. S. Lewis' wardrobe with price tags attached to the contents. When the last piece of fabric has been examined we will suddenly stumble out into snowy Narnia where the White Witch is modeling the latest in puffer jackets.

Casting a cold eye around this boutique, I see so many unwanted clothes. Nothing fits correctly anymore; there is too much branding; polyester is back; the pattern is irregular; the stitching is poor and the seams are not straight. The hymn sheet of the cheap and disposable is an anti-Hallelujah chorus of complaints. 

As with everything else in the world, it seems the center also cannot hold when it comes to fashion. A little black dress costs either a thousand dollars or sixty bucks, available in satin or polyester, designed for either Mata Hari or a nun. There is nothing in between so take your pick. Even a simple pair of sandals can be over-complicated nowadays: your choice of a single strap or some sort of Roman legionnaire's lattice-work legging thing that buckles around the thigh. 

Eventually, we leave the store having bought, typically, a new bag. The bag makers can always be counted upon to provide just enough of a difference from a bag already owned that the bag becomes a must-have. But I'm not bothered about that. I'm just happy to escape the purple ottoman and the automaton shop assistants with their FBI head-sets.

Casting of the Prunes

The frequent casting of condemnatory stones is my great failing. Not just the first sinner to cast such stones, I'm usually the last also, and I'll be searching for yet more stones to cast when all the other Pharisees have long gone home. Jesus would be disappointed but he must know my targets don't feel the pain of cast stones anymore. They don't notice the persistent hail of judgmental missiles bouncing harmlessly off their bodies. Their thick-skinned foreheads are impervious to being bloodied by rocks of criticism thrown by the likes of me.

Years ago, I remember a prominent politician's vociferous response to my impertinent application of a Mark Twain quotation to himself. Nowadays I doubt any congressperson would acknowledge my existence, never mind reply in kind. And I don't blame them. No sane person would voluntarily enter the maelstrom of brickbats being tossed back and forth by anonymous maniacs on Twitter, Facebook, or whatever cranky, frazzled area of the Internet they inhabit. I live on this blog, which is obviously the lowest form of opinion, the most decrepit corner of the web from which electronic stones are cast, so my pronouncements are the least noteworthy.

But I'm not bothered about that. What concerns me is losing all sense of whimsicality and just being bad-tempered. Scrolling down this page to previous posts from ye olde blog entries from bygone times, I detect traces of whimsy and inspired humor when my herd of brain cells grazed in left field. God forbid that picturesque meadow has become barren and brown, a blasted heath where only ineffectual stones are scattered, where the Mount of Olives, Ozymandias' antique land, and my personal Waterloo all merge into one unreadable map reference. Meanwhile, I'm casting this stone at myself, a large prune pit, and "ouch" that hurts.

A Brief Rant

No matter how incontrovertible the fact or indisputable the evidence, no matter how indivisible the number or how finite the sum, and especially no matter how plain the nose on the front of his face, that implacable, pigheaded egoist who thinks he knows better than consensus reality will always be with us. 

In conversation, he refers to himself as a contrarian and everyone else as "the sheeple." At our office, declaring his methods are superior to standard practice, he browbeats management into rerouting tried and tested workflows into his own convoluted and confusing system, which takes much longer to complete and creates extra tasks for all his colleagues.

What is the root cause of the stubborn egoist's self-perpetuating, misguided self-confidence? Time and time again he is proven wrong in everything he says and does. But the lesson is never learned. In fact, he dumps objective reality on its head once more and insists he was right all along, despite a Bible-size paper trail cataloging his errors and illustrating his ignorance. His is a profoundly illogical application of (black) magical thinking. He is Socrates in negative: the anti-Aristotle; Plato forever exiled to the darkest crevice of his inescapable cave.

If such an irritating person may be likened to a pain-in-the-ass, then he is a particularly persistent ache that has made its camp at the base of your spine and is striking out to all parts of the body. He will become a human migraine; the personification of chronic constipation; every agonizing affliction that manifests itself as a spasm or a twinge in your flesh and bones. And there is no remedy for the torment his presence brings.

Vive La Revolution

Today is July 4th in the post-Julian calendar that we hang from our office walls, usually illustrated with photographs of places we'd much rather be. It's a public holiday, obviously, but the grim ghost of work still haunts your BBQ, manifesting as a cold, damp spot near the grill, then clanking its chains around the punch bowl and walking clean through the volleyball net. Sometimes it appears as a screaming skull in the sky during the fireworks, or the headless horseman with his head under one arm and a spectral manila folder under the other, galloping alongside the holiday traffic. No matter how much beer you drink, we can't escape this revenant of business-requiring-urgent attention, arising from the clammy tomb of last week's conference call. Jacob Marley in a pin-stripe suit materializing as a text on your phone instead of on a doorknocker. The restless spirit of job insecurity doomed to walk the Earth forever in search of the life it lost in life.

Which is why I like to think of July 4th in terms of the Revolutionary French calendar, where today happens to be quintidi 15 Messidor in the year of the Republic CCXXVII, celebrating the chamois, by which I assume they mean the shaggy goat and not the car cleaning cloth. Such a datebook trick doesn't entirely exorcise the ghost of work, of course, but it does help a little to think of tomorrow as sextidi 16 Messidor, celebrating tobacco, rather than just another crappy work day. My technique is not unpatriotic, either, because where would we be without the revolutionary French? Probably still hosting tea parties to honor the Queen's birthday on June 8th, with scones instead of hot dogs and hamburgers.