Digression | Actual Facts

19Mar/101

Menlo Park Mall 5/17/08

This pretty little place is dead for a Friday, not quite vacuous but unseasonably emptied of the groomed loathing droves grumbling all by their loan sums. Reader I ask you: where does a buttressed institution fall on a scale from irreproachable to retro-ironically permissible? Let's all agree that the coastal Chattering Classes anoint soothsayers to finesse the zeitgeist-est, most frequently updated hive mind in history. This clandestine straight-legged electoral college is my most sacred scapegoat. I live right and exact in a composed, beatific shade apart from their harrowing gaze, fresh for less than $99.95. You might catch me perusing middlebrow boutiques without so much as a viable wish list, then I'm sinking into a jingo-jangle popcorn shoot 'em up film festival at the tacky-floored cineplex odeon.

Tagged as: digression, jerseyana, materialism, memory, middle to lower middle class Continue reading

3Mar/104

Country Buffet and the Rebirth Of Cool

Me and Paola have been cool for a minute now. But it's a different cool than you're thinking. No, not that fawned-over mestizaje of rained-in Luso-enlightenment and picked-a-part delta-Chi-town detachment that conceived the bossa nova on a tastefully upholstered snooker table. That's a wondrous theory and all, but you will seldom catch me touting a postcolonial fantasy after it reveals itself to be inconveniently untrue. We're cool like something else altogether. After a few weeks of unbroken routinized boredom, my mind is stuck on a frosty glass, cold harbor, segue stirred memory of the seventeenth time our Tuesday evening plans dissolved into something too temperate, too janky, and I'm good again. You cannot accuse us of not knowing each other.