It was the pesky blaring of the ambulance that broke my concentration.
While reading Balzac's In Search of Lost Time again, since this morning's Times was
rather unimpressive and I never read any of the modern works because they desperately lack
imagination. I turned to survey the social landscape that appeared immediately before me.
Like their modern works, the dearth of imagination.
Looks like this guy to my right. Don't let the hip frames double make
her attitude or the ostensibly urban garb fluly. It's all one cleverly synchronized cliche,
a ruse to fit in. And he does another first thing about care, Mark.
I only wonder, when does the masquerade end? Or does it go on forever?
Just like this pantomime of a romance by that couple that just walked in.
Notice how he's holding her hand. It isn't love. It isn't affection. It's a cover,
desperately clinging to each other's cold hands for the purpose of salvaging an
impossible plastic identity. To ignominiously participate in that theatrical scan of misdirection
called young in love. Just be what everybody wants you to be.
Check back on them in five years. And the coffee today is their usual variety,
two-damn bowl with a genuine flavor and a frighteningly indiscernible smell.
This place is loadsen, filled to its fraudulent brim with people willing to play a role in this
insipid superficial script, only to forever prolong a more empty and artificial reality.
Kind of like this character, this rakish, self-important and self-deluded dandy strutting
in his double-breasted jacket with denim jeans, a California type. Repeating mostly to himself
everything in the world that he can best use to falsely describe himself.
He's so laughably filled with pretence, just like all the others. Perpetuating this orbit of shallow
existence, utterly unaware, the folly there forever sustaining. Damn fools. Every last one.
And here she comes, on time, as usual. I have always known from the very first time I saw her
that she was not my type. Stampeding through the door with her facile glamour, designer shades,
and a selfish gorgeousness she arrested from the gods who created her. With a face that
has probably launched a thousand suicides at a foolish heart. She makes it quite certain tall
that when she's around, they don't exist. Of course, her black suit warns don't even think about it
as she waits impatiently, and unapologetically erasing completely the significance of anyone
around her. And there she goes, at her phone, pecking away, peck, peck, peck, peck, peck, peck.
Her allegiance to the boardroom is required of her, an allegiance which I can almost guarantee she
gladly offered in exchange for the warmth of the letter's touch. What a fooling you must have been.
What a poor soul who must be now. Just one more meaningless soul stands in the way of her coffee
and the rest of her far more important day. And this one is a pitiful sight.
He's your middle management type decked out in the usual suspects of superior banality.
Absurd tie, an off-white button-up, incredibly predictable black penny loafers,
and he is just hopeless enough to match it all with a brown belt. Nice.
Now, this should be entertaining.
With her usual straight coffee in hand, she makes her routine first stop.
Two sugars, quick splash of soy milk and two napkins.
Peck, peck, peck, peck. Like I said, totally not my type.
I only wonder, when does the masquerade end? Why does it go on forever?
To see someone like you.
So, so, so, so.
