Cheap Bastards

To say I’m a movie buff is an understatement. Yet for however many hours and how much cash I spend for the privilege of celluloid bread & circus, I never stop at the snack stand on the way in – something about spending $10 for stale popcorn just doesn’t compute. However, the other day, as I was waiting in the lobby of Gallery Place for a couple of friends to show up, I noticed that the smallest popcorn size was labeled ‘child.’

I can just picture the meeting where whatever marketing guru (doubtlessly smelling faintly of brimstone) told the head of the theatre chain that, if he wanted to draw in money from more concessions, to just label the smallest possible size something that would make an adult hesitate in shame to order. It’s so brilliant that I’m surprised other industries haven’t picked up a variation of it. I mean, hell, instead of ‘economy’ class, we can just label that whole section of the plane ‘cheap bastard seating.’ Instead of a ‘value meal,’ we can call it ‘poorhouse special.’ I mean, if you can’t sell it through sex, just use the almighty power of shame. It’s a very powerful thing indeed, the need to preserve one’s status in the eyes of your fellow man.

Big things happening - by the end of July, either lots of balls will be rolling in beneficial directions, or I'll be crushed. In the meantime, a Noah-scale deluge has sunk our fair city (or at least its subway and most of its federal core) under a couple inches of water. Everyone's roof has leaked; everyone's commute ruined by 3-4 feet of water on the subway tracks. And because of the low-pressure system hanging off the coast, the weather will be general for the rest of the week. That's okay with me, since my place has stayed watertight; I spent yesterday night (between bouts of writing) sitting on my stoop and getting joyfully soaked as the heavens roared and flashed with the Earth's artillery, and sheets of rain soaked my skin.

Axial

So H. and I are drinking in Bar Pilar, whose relatively cheap beers (at least compared to Saint Ex next door) and excellent location vis-à-vis my apartment (around the corner) are being rapidly outweighed by the flood of carefully disheveled hipsters who storm it every night. I’m extrapolating, to maybe the one person who hasn’t heard it yet, my current rant about a particular philosophical age as it applies, however narcissistically, to my own existence:

“But there was also the Axial Age, when Grecian philosophical inquiry,
Middle Eastern monotheism, Buddhism and Confucianism all developed simultaneously,” I say, the top of the bar cool on my forehead. “That might have been when people started tackling the Heavy Questions as opposed to relying on superstition and rituals with vaguely obsessive-compulsive overtones. All those Axial Age lines of inquiry, of course, came to the same conclusion that one's ego was the harbinger of destruction and that, to survive as a people, you had to aspire to selflessness and self-control. Which is an argument that religion is a sort of societal-genetic meme allowing the perpetuation of entire groups of individuals, much as certain fish have a pack mentality that makes a few sacrifice themselves so the group as a whole can survive when a large predator approaches; but that's outside the scope of this discussion. More to the point, maybe I get depressed and upset because I'm too ambitious and ego-driven. Maybe the Axial Age is telling me to sit on the couch and smoke more pot.”

H. has heard about this. “Are you still on that ‘Axial Age’ poop?”

“Yeah, I’m just another solipsistic asshole.”

“What does that even mean?”

“That I’m having a quarter-life crisis.”

“Shut up. Don’t use that term ever again.”

It’s true, though. I am one week like this one away from finding a Buddhist monastery somewhere and sitting in the lotus position for the next forty years exploring the non-nature of the metaphysical singularity. Whatever brain chemical governs one’s sense of self-worth is at an all-time low; it becomes a near-physical battle not to condemn my own life as total mission failure on a regular basis. Then I find myself detesting the impulse towards self-pity and head outside to run a few miles. I can’t win. But I can apply for new jobs. Getting out of town this weekend will help, too.

Slice

So Kate brings me back a wicked machete of a knife from the Arctic Circle, the kind of sharp instrument you use to carve unyielding whale blubber or an ice-clogged rope, and the next thing you know I’m walking around the apartment looking for something to cut; realizing that, thanks to the steady progress of civilization as it applies to the packaging and processing of food, there really isn’t anything in my abode that would need cutting with the Mother of All Chopping Tools. Unfortunate.

It’s been the week of Family Events, thanks to a confluence of cousins graduating high school, grandparents in town, and other cousins about to leave for Africa. Which has left yours truly desperately seeking any sort of Me Time, big blocks of which are increasingly going towards the 35k-words-and-counting Book…

Plus Family Events are always filled with queries from relatives that I feel the need to respond to with either taciturn monosyllables or else extended philosophical treatises that don’t do much other than make me come off as more pretentious than usual. It’s like,

Grandma: “Do you think this hunger in Africa is part of God’s divine plan?”

Response Option A (taciturn): “No.” *grunt*

Response Option B (pretentious): “During the Axial Age, the simultaneous developments of Buddhism, Confucianism, monotheism in what is now the modern-day Middle East and philosophical inquiry in ancient Greece all arrived at the common conclusion that the ultimate path of man’s salvation lay in forsaking the ego. Therefore the evolution of the singularity commonly known as ‘God’ from destroyer to…blah, blah, ba-blah…”

I’m always a hit at those things, let me tell you. Not helping my mood on Sunday was the three hours of sleep I’d gotten, courtesy of the singing Rastas planting an extensive garden in my back alley, until another neighbor started yelling at them; prompting one of said Rastas, at 6:45am, to cause me to leap nearly five vertical feet from bed by booming right underneath my window: “ENJOY YOUR DAY, MON. ENJOY IT OR I WILL DESTROY IT. THAT IS MY JOB, TO DESTROY WHAT IS NOT ENJOYED.”

The neighbor, whose pleadings for silence I’d previously slept through, mumbled something largely unheard through glass.

Rasta: “RELAX, WHITE BOY. EVERY DAY ABOVE GROUND IS A GOOD DAY.”

Right-O; truer words never spoken. We landed the Big Project at work, but I’m waiting to see what the nature of my role could be. Battling through the press office of the mayor of Los Angeles for another article.