Faith Restoration

No, not in that guy who lives in the sky throwing lightening bolts.

My work often takes me to public schools in the area. Yesterday, I traveled to a local high school for a meeting. On my way to the room I planned to visit, I was walking behind a tall, teen-aged boy. He was slumped over, his pants sagging in accordance with current teen fashion rules. He looked like a television stereotype of a juvenile delinquent. He carried with him a case for some sort of large instrument. Could have been a machine gun.

As we approached the door, it became obvious to me that we were going into the same room. He swung the door open, stepped halfway in, then noticed me approaching. He immediately exited the room and stood back to hold the door open for me. He smiled politely as I thanked him and entered the room.

Aw! Some people's mama's are still raising them right. In a line of work that often proves to me the opposite, it was a beautiful way to start my day.

Misfits and Me

Perhaps I am alone on this, but I find the fashion industry to be a very strange one, indeed. Today, I was on Haight Street, a veritable mecca for edgy, youthful fashion. My mission was to find some jeans to fit my rather prominent hindquarters, while also not breaking my bank. My limit was $20. Ambitious? Oh yes, but I am the Queen of the Sale Rack. However, this is not the point of my story.

At one of the many used clothing stores located on Haight, I perused a sale rack full of jeans. As a side note, eyeballing jeans is difficult for me. Invariably, I end up with a dressing room full of 15 pairs of pants, each of which is either too small to pull up past my knees or larger than the tent I take camping. But they all look exactly the same to me while I'm scanning the merchandise on the rack.

Miracle of miracles, I found a pair that fit. I handed my heap of rejects back to the girl working near the fitting rooms. She was a work of art in Youth Fashion World. With her alternating green and black hair cut short and swept up in a very Flock of Seagulls way toward the left of her head, she exuded punk rock sensibility. She also sported one of the largest nose rings I've ever seen, causing her appear as though she was about to take off into a corn field to pull some heavy farm equipment. Her jeans were ill fitting, making her belly and back squish out over the top of her worn-out belt. Without looking up at me as she took the stack of jeans from my hand, she said the obligatory, "How did these work out for you?" And I, of course, made a self-deprecating joke about the size of my heiny. Chilling silence. She turned her eyes to me disdainfully and smirked her response. It was quite clear that she was trying to be polite, all the while yearning to kill me with her bare hands.

And there I stood, in front of this early-twenty-something, feeling awkwardly uncool, as though I was back in high school, while simultaneously wondering how much it hurts to get a nose ring that large installed in one's face.

At the checkout, it was the same situation. There were three people working there, each one a virtual disaster in the real world... frizzy, badly dyed hair; jeans that were too tight around the ankles and saggy in the ass region; poorly done make-up all around, boys and girls alike; shoes that were too large or worn through. It was like an 80s punk concert and a heavy metal hair band had some bastard children and put them to work at a cash register in San Francisco. And yet, when they looked me over, I felt somehow inferior.

These are the same people that, if I were to come face to face with them on public transportation, I would make fun of relentlessly in my head. I would make up stories about how their parents screwed them up in such a horrific way that they would choose to present themselves to the world looking like vagabonds and misfits.

The power of fashion is, quite plainly, inexplicable.

(Or perhaps, I have come to the same conclusion as I did in one of my other recent blogs. I am too old to understand this silliness anymore. If that is the case, I have to say, hooray for my 30s.)

Perhaps This Makes Me a Dirty Hippie

...but I just had a moment of revelation as I walked to the laundromat. There on the sidewalk was an old futon mattress. Splayed out upon the old futon mattress was a homeless man dressed in mostly rags with a scruffy beard to match. He lay there smiling blissfully, eyes closed, as he soaked up the afternoon sun.

At the corner, several people shouted out of their car windows at one another, arguing about who cut off whom at the four-way stop. Traffic whizzed by, and people honked at the offending car-shouters for taking up too much road as they also hurried on their frantic trajectory homeward.

Most people probably think the homeless man has a crappy life, and likely he does... most of the time. I couldn't help but think that he had the right idea on this one, though.

Misplaced Poignant Moments

I've noticed, over the years, that I find I often need a somewhat unrelated and rather smallish trigger to feel the full wistfulness in the relentless passage of time. Fittingly enough, this fit of melancholy is being sponsored by the last episode of That 70s Show, which was broadcast this evening.

This was a brilliant show. Set in Wisconsin, near my ancestral midwestern homeland, it reminded me of my childhood and my people... the short, swarthy midwestern weirdos with whom I grew up.

The piece that really triggered the wistful remembrances of times gone by was the retrospective show that they did just before the final episode. They did the obligatory walk through of the set and the interviews with cast members about their favorite memories. Flashbacks. Montages. Whimsy.

These shows always seem like they're so much fun to be a part of. Everyone is laughing at outtakes, having inside jokes, and saying how the experience changed their lives. It always makes me wish I had been a movie star on that set, just so I could have been a part of that happy crew of incorrigible youths.

Which brings me to the real life melancholy. I am no longer a youth. In fact, many of my friends are married and have children and/or extremely satisfying careers. In fact, some of my best friends just moved to Chicago and took their delightful toddler, whom I have known since her birth, along with them. Others are moving on, too.

I don't dance as much as I used to. The scene has changed. Something that I enjoyed three or four evenings per week has gone the way of the dinosaur. Sure, there are still dances going on, but when I show up, people ask where I'm from. I'm not longer greeted with exuberant smiles and endless dance partners. Instead, I stand in the corner and watch, as people I've never seen before approach and dance with other people I've never seen before. These are not my peeps. This is no longer my scene.

So, where is my scene? Well, I do spend quite a bit of time climbing. That, however, isn't really social enough to count as a "scene" per se. Where else do I spend time? Work. Tons of time at work. I talk people out of trees, into support groups, out of suicide, into self-disclosure... all day long, five days a week. This is also not a social experience.

I am left wondering, have I become one of those late-night lonely grocery store wanderers? Have my peeps become Joe Nightshift and the drunks who stumble about searching for the tatertot section? Stock boys. Bored checkout clerks. Bags of Fritos.

I have got to get out more and shake my thang. Time to revisit salsa dancing! Ay mami!

Grand Canyon

Because of my recent birthday and my lack of Cool United States Travel Destinations in the past, I thought I'd kick off my 32nd year with a visit to the Grand Canyon.

More photos here.