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version seven. http://demongin.org |
Special Unspoken Radiations
Reflections on a dinner date.
Friday, 2008-11-21 | Family
| We part as co-defenders of the medico-legal and criminal-justice system. |
My step-father and I squared off tonight.
The confrontation was--as the best ones are--completely non-verbal. He had been tallying my Goose Island 312s and my mother's tree-tinis and was hurling the bottom line at me with every furtive glance in my direction. I wonder, in fully sauced retrospect, whether he could somehow have guessed that I was a flask and two beers into the bag before he had even parked his Pontiac Vibe at the meter in front of the Weinstein's Jewish funeral facility.
Maybe not "guessed." Maybe "assumed."
At any rate, the confrontation between he and I, though it never was verbalized, went something like this:
HIM: "I do not consume alcoholic beverages because I consider it immoral. I must therefore condescend to any person who chooses to do so. I must also, due to the fact that my emotional and moral growth has been severely retarded by having been born and raised in the Midwest, pay for this check not matter what rules of good taste or common sense contradict. And, believe you me, the idea of paying $45 for a woman to drink cocktails is offensive to me.
Additionally, I regard your Leftist hyperbole as offensive on account of the fact that I do not consider political events of international significance to have any bearing on my health, wealth or well-being: in my entire life--nearly 50 years!--not a single Leftist screed about criminality on Wall Street, malfeasance in the Oval Office or merchants in the Temple has ever amounted to much more than a sound-bite from a 60 Minutes interview or a History Channel truism about how "a war-time economy is a boom-time economy" or how "history will always remember John Kennedy as the man whose death symbolized America's loss of Innocence and Ronald Reagan as the man whose one-liners toppled Communism."
ME: "I do not watch television because I cannot afford to keep a television--I have neither the space nor the resources to tithe (i.e. forfeit 10% of my total income) annually to Big Media. Nor shall I ever subscribe to any service that does not provide content on demand beucase I am committed to a media that is not decided by corporate edict or restrained by any man's law. I therefore consider your entire life, the childish, coloring-book morality and the baroque mythology of connoisseurship which you pay to have affirmed (daily!) for you by Madison Avenue to be twice as immoral as the worst offense against your hapless Gen X consummerism than you could ever possibly imagine.
Oh, and speaking of that, E.T. fucking sucked worse than Achtung, Baby and Hysteria combined.
But as I was saying, and believe you me, the idea of purchasing a high definition television, arguing aggressively in favor of my right to remain too ignorant and incompetent to plug it into a computer and hanging it in my drawing room as if it were some sort of symbol of the social and economic progress that I personally hade made or, better yet, of the human experience at large, is offensive to me. Furthermore, I believe that the money that you annually spend on that Golden Calf would have been much better spent on cocktails. For, you see, cocktails, once they've been metabolized, are rendered inert: your subscription to Big Media, on the other hand, is a Strega Nona's Cauldron of the most actively debilitating and bilioius poison yet squeezed from Man's hypothalamus, or, as I like to call it, the Devil's scrotum.
The older guy and the younger slappy-fighthing it out over dinner in a trendy Northside cafe, each suddenly assuming the mantle of mouthpiece of his whole generation on a moment's notice.
Or, better yet, two belligerent males fighting over the right to decide the fate of a female. Shit-slinging, chest-thumping, etc., etc.
