Brows

I caught a glimpse of my life from the cor­ner of my eye the oth­er day & real­ized I appear to have become a care­ful­ly dressed, quar­ter­ly mag­a­zine-read­ing, Euro­pean wag­on-dri­ving, scotch-lov­ing, insuf­fer­able, tweedy, beard­ed cliche.

I hate that. Prob­lem is: I like all of those things. Even being insuf­fer­able. So yeah, I’ve got some cham­pagne tastes on a beer bud­get.

I’m try­ing to give myself sparse solace because while I appear to be the cliche, my tem­pera­ment is dif­fer­ent. (I hope). I don’t like cool jazz, NPR, The New York­er, or pret­ty much any oth­er safe, soft, accept­ed, lib­er­al com­fort-blan­kets. After I stopped being Active­ly Catholic®, I went to an Epis­co­pal church for a bit, the mes­sage was good but the peo­ple were aggra­vat­ing­ly mil­que­toast about every­thing. To para­phrase some­thing some­one said some­time: The meek will inher­it the earth because no one else will take it. That’s those peo­ple. God bless ’em. No one else will.

Any­way, but. If you catch me out of the oth­er eye-cor­ner, you’ll see a greasy-spoon eat­ing, dive bar plant­ed, unleashed dog walk­ing, win­dows open hol­lerin’ at my kid, shirt­less on the porch, filthy-jeaned, south­ern-drawl­ing met­al­head.

I love that. Prob­lem is: ain’t almost no one else does.

I some­times won­der what con­clu­sions peo­ple reach about me at work, but I’m too busy work­ing to care about it.

I like high brow. I like low brow. I pre­tend mid­dle­brow does­n’t exist.

I have no oth­er point.

If you need one then the point is that the world is messy & even when I reject stereo­types, I often use them in the same breath. I’m unre­pen­tant. I just try to improve.