Of Cream Cheese And The Aesthetics of Hopelessness

It's hard to imagine what she was thinking as she pushed past me without a glance. Did you see her? Gray sweatpants and a puffy blue winter coat, and boots with a tacky fur trim. And the black hair, wet from a very recent shower. If memory serves, she was holding a container of half & half.

While she was picking up her coffee whitener, I was 7 feet, 3 inches away, assessing the freshness of a little gray box of cream cheese. For reasons that are unclear to me, I'm big on bagels lately. They come in and out of fashion, competing with English muffins in my mind for the role (roll!) of favorite breakfast...bread.

Then I turned, and little miss sweat pants walked into me and kept right on going. Not only that, dear reader, she also managed to look annoyed, without looking at me. I sighed and turned my attention to a woman's bum, and then to various and sundry sundries. Shopping isn't fun.

Now in the possession of bagels, cream cheese and a pound of coffee (in my coat, under my arm...I like expensive coffee), I strode towards the cashier. My mind was on sweat pants, and that made me sad. Sweat pants just make me sad. They bring to mind gym class, hopelessness, poverty and self-loathing. All of them mixed together into a happy fun ball.

Sweat pants are also a popular choice at the food pantry, down at St. Somethingorother. Some even have horrible words written on the ass, like "sweet" or "booty." Those are two I've seen. It's not easy to offend human dignity in the eyes of an existential nihilist and borderline misanthrope. But that does it.

So now I have bagels and cream cheese. Tomorrow I'm going to venture out and attend my local Unitarian Universalist church in an effort to have some intercourse with the world. I'll put on my scientific pantheist hat and light a candle and all that.

One has to keep busy, lest the realization that life is a shit sandwich, with the only variable being that some people get more bread than others.

Now I'm going to fasten my dog to a rope, or "leash," and let her take me around the neighborhood. There's a streetlight outside my window that keeps blinking on and off.