I once sipped a then expensive $3 chai to watch a man pull up in an already five year old BMW. Oh the swagger he had and how I envied him. He unbuttoned his shirt just enough to show how proud his chest hair poked out to complete the advertised vision of an extra-ordinary man driving a BMW.
I’ll become that, I thought. It seemed visionary.
And now I am that but seemingly not transformed in any way. You thought I might go through that transformation but it’s not really that important.
The $6 chai is now too sweet, too syrupy and is actually $7 if you include customary tips for money that seems unusually free flowing. The false sense of wealth drained toward the end which one must trade it for goods.
That twenty year old BMW is now perhaps in a junkyard or in the hands of a 16 year old, the sides rusting out from the bottom up, salted and crinkled.
I have a much newer car sweetly off the factory line. It has a name brand, brand name to which I signal to others that I adore myself. It looks not so different from the old beamer actually, a sedan is simply four doors, a trunk, and a windshield. The snout of the new car in fact looks suspiciously like the older luxury sports sedan so I imagine all cars today are simply reinventions of the past.
Like art, reinvented time and again, nothing is new and yet treated as such because the paint is fresh.
Like myself, I am just a painting upon a painting, swirling acrylic colors that get splashed upon the older dried out crusty layers, the brush strokes through the crevices, breaking ill-defined expressions that presented once as good ideas but now we’ve forgotten what those regions mean anymore. That happy little tree in the landscape is no longer apparent but encased by other trees of various emotional states.
And so the coffee is pricey and I have become the bougie people.
They are of a lot of excess but secretly, like the little trees, I have stored a little gold nugget here in the bushes so everyone can only see how proudly of the trees I am, of a good person, of making it good in life, and so I get my little treasure without the judgment.
No sir you appear pretentious, it’s not good, and the car breaks down a lot anyway so you’re sort of wasting money right. I hear the leather peels over time. But the appearances live rent-free in my memory, so even the contradictions do not outweigh the signaling sears upon my engrams.
“Jamie’s Place”
He’s giving me a hard time
I’m not where I want to be
But here I could take
What I can see
I said maybe this isn’t all that I thought it was
Because
I’m scared and the action ‘s just too much
I crawl on my knees
To my door
And listen hard
To the floor
Jamie’s place
Beating in my head
So many things
I never said
He might have felt bad
And given me too much to swallow
When life is so short
Why stop when you’re denial
The people who came and gone were nothing
I should’ve ignored their influence
I rip off the blanket
And take a hit
My eyes are burning
For all this shit
Jamie’s place
Beating in my head
So many things
I never said
But now he’s gone
Why couldn’t the story go on?
His smile, his face, his spirit, his pace
and so we disconnect, it’s called the life effect
Jamie’s place
Beating in my head
So many things
I never said