I'm sitting on a completely full train yesterday and this balding-blond, glasses-wearing, ruddy-waxy complected, late 30-something suited dude wearing a blue tooth (I'll call that an Ear Manacle) sits down across the aisle and one row back and crows unceasingly about a kind of chapstick he found in Milan. ("And the Milanese CALL it chapstick too! Can you BELIEVE it?") But its reality is simply too much for our ethused neighbor, this interloper of passenger train peace. He himself certainly can't BELIEVE it, that he's FOUND it, and how GREAT it is. His voice sounds like his lips were coated in frosting after swallowing a teaspoon of strong cough syrup. A tone that is at once chewy, masculine, and saccharine. He spells out the name of the brand for the trapped ear on the other end of the line, he discusses each flavor it comes in, while fondling the Milanese tube in his own hand. I know this because I look up from Tropic of Cancer in incredulousness, and I can only think "What Would Henry Miller Do?" (I'll call this "WWMD"?) I look back down to my book and read the very next sentence:
"You are the seive through which my anarchy strains,
resolves itself through words." (p.11)
WWMD gives me permission: I began fantasizing, vividly (I'll call this Mental Masturbation) at what, I've come to realize, I desperately want to do. My stop is next and I, calling forth my best amateur acting ability, rise from my seat a bit early and step back to him. Wearing my best disarming smile and tilting my head to the side in flirtatiousness, I say in polite, measured tones for everyone to hear "I would fucking kill you with my bare hands for what you've done to us on this train ride."
Oh, the thrill of effecting a surreal violation of social boundaries by clothing it in a traditional approach to a stranger!! Do I really want to kill him? Nope. I choose my words for their cache, for their novelty, much like he chose his Milanese chapstick. I want to violate the boundary, like he did with his Ear Manacle. I want to be Johnny Knoxville, with tits and green eyes.
But instead I do nothing, and in its stead begins an interior monologue that helplessly runs whenever a sense of ludicrousness overtakes me (I'll call this monologue "IfYouWearThis").
IfYouWearThis targets people who have put themselves together in an awful way -- but not out of a sense of personal style, or creativity, or their own personal brand of anarchy. No, not that, but instead they put themselves together as if they were so bored or uninterested that they negate themselves. That they'd rather barf on themselves than dress themselves. The dreariness of their existence or the laziness of their psyche are on display.
The woman next to me seems nice enough, and she too suffers the Milanese Chapstick Affair. But she's got a flimsy black cloth bag with little pills stuck all over it and stray threads trailing from the zipper. Uh oh, here it comes...
"SoIfYou get your raggy black cloth bag and you make sure it has these garishly painted glitter flowers all over it, SoIfYou carry that while wearing khakis fitted like a stiff paper bag and pressed with a center leg crease that could cut glass (why start now with the attention to detail? why now, at the crease!), SoIfYouWear that with a beloved, stretched red-white weaved polo shirt with Tigger embroidered on it and IfYouWear over it a long cotton navy jacket ripe with lint and plastic buttons and a string belt around the middle, which my 88 year old grandmother also owns, and SoIfYou walk around in this outfit adorned with a pair of black sneakers that look like they could withstand industrial waste and pearl earrings that dangle ...SoIfYouWearThis, where exactly did you go today? SoIfYouWearThis, what tasks did you fulfill, people did you meet? SoIfYouWearThis, did you look in a mirror and say, Yes, this is what I intend. This works for me. This is my message.
Sadly, certain things almost always PTSD-trigger IfYouWearThis:
- Quilted cloth backpacks or purses for women. I understand these are popular. Vera Bradley's made a killing. But you don't live in horse country. Nor did you have a Manhattan for breakfast. The print and cotton you love on your French Country placemats do not make for OK accessories.
- Christmas or Thanksgiving themed sweaters or sweatshirts with holiday icons on anyone past the age of 25. Why not just cut to the chase and wear a baby diaper?
colin firth as mark darcy in bridget jones' diary
- Men who unintentionally wear their pants too high under the age of 65. You're not a sausage.
- Wide belts on short waisted women. You're not a sausage, either.
- Mid-calf length loose-fit jean skirts with a slit up the back for women under the age of 50. Why do you hate on yourself so? A skirt this unflattering doesn't qualify as a skirt.
There's a saying that goes, "People don't think about you as much as you worry about what they think." Wear these, and all bets are off.
What's your most awful interior monologue?
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