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.

Stu

Stu has an irreverent tone to him today. Was it the pineapple liqueur we plied him with before the road trip to Tijuana? I guess it could have started there, but the tequila probably sealed the deal. Whatever the cause, this man certainly doesn’t know the meaning of off-switch. He’s off, don’t get me wrong there. I suppose the main discrepancy lies in his knowledge of what it means to be “on.” He has his own notions, which all point toward an absence of critical thought and an inherent acceptance of the status quo, which definitely do not endear him to the youths of today. And after all, who pulls the strings around here? There are two answers:

The financial benefactor who supplies the dollars and necessitates prudence through their old-world viewpoint that relies on fear-based tactics

and

The youthful tastemaker who takes it upon him/herself to challenge whatever position may have formed over the past quarter-century and invent a hybrid form of expression that (over the subsequent quarter-century) pervades all social conventions and leads to the same cycle of adherence as with what had been previously-established–ironic, yes? This process will be repeated ad infinitum until either (A) the species evolves and outgrows such petty matters, or (B) we all die horrific, gruesome deaths at our own hands.

No matter what transpires, it’s important to remember that, to our tragic figure Stu, everything is relative, and there’s no point in making any more friends if it’ll just lead to pointless poisonings.