Skid Row America (or The Immigrant Dream Not)

The last year has shown me an America that I never wanted to believe existed.

A cheaper version of its former Baywatch self with much lower standards.

The challenge facing my immediate future is a truly existential one.

I am thirty-five, over-married and unemployed.

My experience of a decade is worth nothing in this market, as is apparent from the feedback I get regarding potential concerns on cultural incompatibility from prospective employers.

The worst part is that the minimum wage, too, is below subsistence level in America.

Put simply, I spend a large part of my waking life feeling fucked.

It’s not that I’m getting fucked, and the feeling is not post-orgasmic.

The actual experience is more like walking around with a phallic object shoved up my anus.

When it gets too uncomfortable, I go drinking. Which gives me a hangover.

And then I wake up with a headache, still feeling fucked.

The only thing to look forward to is releasing the butt plug on the throne.

My current level of experience with toilet paper allows me to get by leaving no paper trails.

Cannot say the same about the skid marks, though.

The Tavern

The night grew on at the tavern. Yet, not weary as it might have seemed given the laggard week that it was to end, or begin whichever way you looked at it. The regulars always came in with no clock to predict their movements. A pattern formed of habit. Habit formed of years and possibly evolutionary in it's own form.

The deejay interrupts my musings with a call to share a smoke break. The evening is easy on him, in a way not unlike my own situation. The pressures of life are eased down. A deejay can walk away from his console on a night like this. We are brothers on autopilot tonight.

The kids speak loudly of being gay and what it means to look gay. I wonder what truly makes them gay in a happy way. Like what life was before popular convention prescribed urban lifestyles. Oh, to be under the stars with the float feeling.

A nudge at my elbow wakes me once again from my reverie. As always. One of the many loudspeakers asks me, albeit respectfully, if I might share a light with him. He is respectful in a way that his generation has not taught him to be.

This is the respect of men and between men. Borne through the times in the way of the animal instinct, more so in men. Men not clouded in judgment by the frivolity that often overtakes women on such nights. He sees the old school in me through my youthful persona.

I laugh and offer him match. When you grow up, we might share a whisky, Son. 
For now just smoke your cigarette.

So what are you doing after this? Sharing a match lights up a new avenue of friendship. I look at the eyes of youth, lit with the gaze and haze of the night. Her image shines through it all into the night of my reckoning. I smile quietly to myself.

Life is here to be enjoyed. And I will do just that.