This Week In Not Surfing

1. A handful of days ago I met an old friend for a drink, awkwardly. I hadn't seen him in a few years and once he was maintained the locus of a good part of my social life, a role that benefitted his need for an entourage with whom to surround himself and mine a group within which to fit. It was an odd meeting. I went into it with the same sort of intellectual shrug of the shoulders I adopt when trying watermelon for the umpteenth time, a rite of summer passage that always ends in failure. Or I suppose success for the consistency of my tastes. At some point I fell out with this old friend in a quiet way, realizing, or deciding that his friendship wasn't quite worth what I'd thought it was (or had been attempting to convince myself it might be.) So I met up with him in this state. And I left not long after with a familiar, alkaline taste on my lips, wondering at the time I'd just wasted. I fumed at his inability to speak to me. I muttered at the dearth of his interest in me. My stomach turned at the blank look of expectancy on his face. And as I rode my bicycle home, something shifted inside me. I realized, not suddenly but with enough surprise, that I had nothing to say to him. His was not a diabolical disinterest, but mine was a stupefied displacement. This realization both comforts me and scares me to death.

 2. I am confused that the media refers to the process by which we vet our presidential candidates as "debates." These are not debates. They are cheap buckshot cartridges of emotional callowness. Open classes in insensitivity, stupidity and intellectual depravity. In the end I will vote for Hillary Clinton. Not because she has the ideas that closely hew to how I think the world should run, but simply because she would present a fundamental change that outstrips any other change on the table. Trump's monumental stupidity is surely interesting and somewhat different in its baldfaced admittance. Bernie Sanders' quasi-socialism certainly appealing in its quasi-socialism. But in the end, no one presents the dramatic shift to a status quo that is in such a broken state. Let's at least get a new gender in there. 

3. Dresses with zippers. Blech! Why not employ buttons. It is always a sore to my eyes to see a big silver zipper mundanely stretch up the back of an otherwise pretty dress form. Why not try buttons? I know they are harder to sort out in the assemblage, but in that lies at least some sexiness. Either that or go whole hog and flop a wetsuit style zip cord to the thing and let it dangle as ostentatiously tantalizing opportunity.

4. What makes one think one has the moral authority? Who died and made you god? Or me. Who died and made me the regulator? Yesterday I was surfing poopy fun little waves, struggling in a premature six mil, a sorry case of the month offs and a severe case of the one-year-old sleepless nights. Someone said something, or did something, or intimated at something that irked my precious sense of justice and I acted on it. Who said that was my right? No one. I took the right as given and did my best to implement proper etiquette. I'm not too sure about it all. Things confuse me in my middle years.

5. So here's to change. Blessed change.