i went out early today intending to do something: buy a newspaper other than my subscription, wolf down a big, greasy breakfast, hope big time on a single megalotto ticket.
anything, just to be out early. early on a tingly spring morning.
there are just times, like this morning, that i want to acquire things, accomplish stuff. and i want to obtain them, tick them off my list while there are hardly anybody around to see me achieve them.
for i don’'t relish a lot of fit, gym gaga people see me pigging on cholesterol crazy, crisp bacon and two runny whole eggs. nor do i want my fellow new york times book review readers see me poring over the dish page of a local tabloid.
i believe there is a word for this although i can’'t come up with it now. nor will i, voluntarily, if it dawns on me later. but it is something tangential perhaps (or is it?) to the incestuous concepts of pretense, façade, and snobbery.
and, somehow, there is no shame here.
you don'’t believe me, of course. you say, then why do it on the sly?
and you got me there.
somehow, all i know is i just want to savor my aloneness, my illusional singularity in privileging these appetites over what the rest canonizes in this city of sixteen million judgmental eyes.
somehow, i want my aloneness to register, albeit a faint voice, of protest against the world'’s rampaging, flattening opinions.
somehow, i want my detachment from what most of the world approves of to put me in contact with someone i can have the most pleasant of start-of-day chatter, someone, perhaps, like my self unfettered by the confining parameters of what’'s hip and cool.
somehow, i want to enjoy my solitude so I can fully grasp the measure of my so-called independence the rest of the day .
on my way to the diner, i saw and subsequently followed a stooped, old man, that morose, miserable man from the next building, doddering towards the little plot behind the communal parking lot in my neighborhood.
he was lugging what looked like a hoe, a no-nonsense garden tool. this in the concrete jungle of the bronx.
i had to stop by the newsstand while he continued walking. walking alone to his plot.
somehow, i want my aloneness to be like this big, but fine toothed rake, scratching the now unproductive topsoil of my self pelted with the constant acid rain of orthodoxy and mob mentality.
and somehow, i want my rake of solitude to turn me over like a parched land ready for the new planting.