Monday, May 1, 2017

Vignette City 35.

*** ‘Vignette City’ is an ongoing project of daily writing and urban photography ***


We got to the point in the date when we both knew it wasn't going to work out so we started testing out some new material on each other just to see how it would work. The weird part about all of this app-based dating I have been doing lately is that, since I have it all dialed in to what I’m looking for - tall, but not weirdly tall, driven, successful, but not a workaholic, you know doing okay for himself, not rich but can pay his bills and has a 401K and maybe a boat, not a crazy boat, but something to take out on the river in the summer - that they all kind of begin to blur together. So now I’m not really shooting these guys down on the basis of stuff that’s important to me - It is not my job to do your laundry, I am not your mother. I can wear whatever I want because it is my body so don’t tell me what I can’t do, but do tell me what you like on me - but instead on some pretty small stuff - it looks like he bites his nails, what’s that about? He clearly isn’t using moisturizer - because it makes me feel like all these guys are kind of just new iterations of the same guy and so if I keep shaping them and shaping them and shaping them on each successive date, then eventually the guy who shows up will be the guy I want. So I don’t usually hate any of them at this point. I just get bored waiting for the next version to show up. I know that each one of them will slink back to the Dude Factory on the edge of town or whatever, and he will get recycled back into his basic man building blocks and maybe the next one will be better. I like to imagine that basic-man-building-blocks look like LEGOs.

So I was trying to provide this one with more information to take back to his hive when I said, “I just don’t understand how the Mayor got elected. I mean, he’s not even qualified. Did you see the thing the other day about how he peed in a pool?”
And the guy - this one was not a bad upgrade, The Hive had clearly worked out a lot of the bugs since the last release - he said, “You know, that bugged me for a long time too, the Mayor getting elected, but I think I have figured it out, finally. See, I like movies. I enjoy them. I think about them a lot, but I could never make a movie or anything, don’t worry, I’m not the kind of guy who secretly thinks he’s auteur. I like my job. But here is what I have figured out: every person has within them a shitty screenwriter. Only most people don’t write, so they don’t know that they’re constantly writing a bad movie in their head. They just think they’re thinking and how did they learn to think about the really big things like terrorism, like espionage and international relations, or how to run a city or manage a municipality? What to do about the homeless problem? Do these people read any history? Do they go to school for this stuff? Do they look at the world? Do they read non-American media? No. They learned how to think about the world from shitty movies, based on shitty screenplays written by shitty screenwriters. I didn’t vote for the Mayor - I didn’t actually vote. I don’t. What’s the point? - but I understand why someone might have. People are all just trying to understand the world and sometimes the only way the world makes sense is to think about it like it’s a shitty movie and the Mayor is basically a real-life character in a shitty movie.”

He took a big swig from his drink - his third - and he looked at me like I should toss my hair and giggle about how smart he is. So I tossed my hair and giggled a little, not because he was so smart, but because he might actually have been right, so I wanted The Hive to know that they were on the right track and I appreciated it.


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