Tuesday, November 29, 2005

So 1990 And It’s 1994

That’s the thing about getting old.
It’s your life narrowing to a tiny bright pinprick, set in the vast empty blackness of what might have been. But in a way I guess it’s better that way.

It used to be fun, being the devilish cherub, or the cherubic devil. But then you outgrow your diapers and horns and it’s just pathetic and stupid. And boring, don’t forget boring.

Kind of like Miami: humid organics decomposing, life, in the tropical heat and humidity with its hurricane-damaged treeline, moves sluggishly. Thinking is interrupted with the ugly business of surviving.

And I flip between radio stations as I drive down US1 with the Dadeland buildings permanent as ever, imprinted on my brain since I was four months old.
Push pre-programmed button number 3 and it’s 93.1 FM Miami’s NEW rock station, all they play is Mudvayne. Slipknot. Korn. Don’t get me wrong, Korn is great, but only because I was like, fourteen, when I first heard them. I do not need to hear them once every 52 minute long block of programming.
Push pre-programmed button number 1 and it’s NPR and I can stand to listen to the radio again. Venezuela is buying military patrol boats, Columbian journalists are (still) receiving death threats and being killed, there is a UN climate change conference in Montreal. The rickety, jury-rigged, structures erected by humanity are beautiful and grounding, a breath of fresh, perfectly temperate, air.

But it has to end, I have to leave the safety of my car and the radio and allow the putrid stench to assault my olfactory senses. I turn away in disgusted boredom at the petty contrivances that have flung sticky tentacles tangential to me.

I am sick. I am tired.
My stomach cramps up and my heart sinks yet again. And yet again assault on my senses.
There is no reprieve, nothing to satiate my lust for the orderly and immaculate, just the ugly business of survival. Asses wiped with those products of higher functions.

Disappointment, always.

In the end.

Amen.

1 comment:

figleaf said...

Oh yeah, old at 20. My son would agree you're old, but he's only nine. :-)

figleaf