Faux Pas

Bajillion Peregrinus started his day off right today–with a succulent cobb salad and a couple of margaritas. Slippery slope, margaritas, but as a denizen of the night, Baj has always managed to avoid that whole “too early in the day to imbibe” faux pas. However, considering the depth of his late-night cavorting, he often finds himself breaking that rule by pulling all-nighters and keeping the party rolling well past dawn.

This particular day wouldn’t normally prove to serve Baj’s personal agenda, seeing as how he needs to knock out some domestic drudgery and then immediately tuck into a full-blown work shift. Not very much time to himself at all. Just another one of those days. It’s not like he’s not used to this kind of treatment; he’s become quite accustomed to it at this point. Bills and impulsive expenditures (food delivery and designer headphones) necessitate his daily drudgery–for the most part. The remaining part of the pie chart (as far as he could figure): his intense, immense sense of self-loathing, which he quietly carries around on his shoulders like a hobo’s bindle–not too heavy, considering the unbearable lightness of being, but always noticeably uncomfortable.

As far as he sees it, he figures that the self-deception is a byproduct of his unfulfilled human potential. Well, not his own perception of failing, but the societal norm facilitating the “us vs. them” mentality that sends the vast majority of rat racers into skill corners, where they’ll proceed to bang their foreheads against brick walls for the rest of their lives, restricting whatever semblance of freedom to a 15-minute meditation session sometime between breakfast and work (otherwise known as their morning commute). The mental elasticity of previous generations is systematically eroding.

Baj is rather sensitive and internalizes most everything he comes across; most of the time he has no idea how it will surface, since the nature of the universe is that of uncertainty and chaos. In the case of human devolution, however, Baj knows for a fact that people are losing their sheen at a rapid clip.

Because of all this, Baj understands that, no matter what he does, he will always come up short in a financial sense. Just as his mother and father had, and their mothers and fathers before that, and so on and so forth. He’s recently begun to trace back his lineage on one of those newfangled ancestor websites, all the way back to a point in medieval Europe where some sort of town fool or drunk owed a debt to the local magistrate, and the interest is still accruing to this day.

Devilles – 07:11GMT

Boom. All right, let’s wrap it up. I’m tired of your hesitation here! Don’t you know a high roller when you see one?! Chop chop, kid. 6,000 silver Devilles. Come on, while we’re young! What’s your deal, kid? Don’t think I have the funds to pay for these death traps? 45 grand apiece, what’s that, two hundred and seventy five grand? Eh, close enough. Fine, I’ll carry the zero over by a couple decimal points, just to shut you up. You sure are mouthy, kid. JESUS, do you have those cars yet? I’m on a tight schedule here, college boy. I gotta get these cars to kids with cancer—all terminal. GET A MOVE ON. Does your grandmother know you work this slow? What do you mean you don’t have 6,000 Devilles?! That’s ridiculous! I came to you guys specifically because you’re the largest Cadillac dealer in the tri-state region. Don’t feed me bologna and tell me it’s peaches, kid. How about I I take my business to another dealer? Frankly, I’m shocked that you’d let me walk away from such a tidy commission—the sale of your LIFE. You know you don’t want to look like a loser in front of your buddies when you’re talking about your day at the ol’ watering hole. They all went and got their degrees and cushy little office jobs—the SELLOUTS—while you’ve been sputtering away in the retail sector, waiting for days just like this one. And now you’re just gonna piss it all away. Come on now, how long has we known each other? All right, regardless, I’m a business man who has the funds at hand. I pull the strings. I give people the products they want and deserve. That’s something completely foreign to you, isn’t it, egghead? I mean CHRIST, is there any place in this God-forsaken country where you can buy 6,000 cars in peace anymore?! This is absolutely ridiculous. Yeah yeah, get your manager. Screw you, kid. I’m outta here.

Yeah, Gloria? I’m gonna have to cancel that shipment of Devilles. The sick kids are gonna have to learn to drive in some shitty old driver’s ed cars before they die of CANCER. Oh wait a minute, Gloria, here comes the manager. All right, put a pin in this. Talk to you later. Yep. Okay, buh bye.

Oh, okay. So you’re calling me unreasonable for expecting the fourth-largest Cadillac dealer in the COUNTRY to give me PERMISSION to buy 6,000 cars? First of all, I don’t need anybody’s permission to do anything. We live in a little place called the USA, ever heard of it? Second of all, if I have the funds, how could you peabrains possibly deny me the right to buy as much substandard American merchandise as I so please?! Listen, I’m no dummy. I understand that you don’t have 6,000 Devilles in stock. But is it unreasonable to expect you to pool your resources and deliver them to me this week some time? Oh. Okay. I understand. Well, I’ll just take one then. How much was it again? 40 grand? 45, you say? I think it was 40, boss. Hey hey hey—do you really want to debate me on the price when you flat out refused to accommodate my request just a minute ago? Remember that?! You have some nerve, buddy. Okay, fine. 45 grand. Do you accept traveler’s checks?

That would have been more fun if I could have used my arms…