Condescension in the Fiction
Section
No one would believe my story. And yet it would bore
pretty
much anyone to tears. My story, it ain’t no good.
A
story can come in many sizes and a good one will work on
multiple
levels, they say. The
same could be said of the icons of
today's
blockbuster cinema: Superman, Spiderman, Naruto, Wolverine,
Magneto, the
Avatar, Captain Underpants (he IS a cinematic superhero,
right?
I just ran into a 5 year old sporting an under-sized t-shirt with this
unlucky official moniker), Jack Black, Captain Jack Sparrow, Cap’n Crunch,
Peter Pan,
etc. “I was born in the Summer of
Love,” I say, just to throw
people off.
I mean, look at me,
do I look like the son
of hippies (I certainly am
not)?? And then I wear a grimace for the rest of the day.
What happened to
all
of the love, I mumble intermittently from, I dunno, 4:00 to 11:00 pm
(the
latter couple of hours I mumble somewhat drowsily until later:
I
wasburn in a Smermer of Loovthe!” I shout somewhere on Haight
Street,
knowing that most people confuse this summer (not my mumbles,
necessarily)
with 1969, the summer the twins were born (my little brothers),
and
the summer those men landed on the moon (or else the year that Stanley
Kubrick
was an unusually prolific, not to mention quite stealthy director).
Reality?
Most people don’t get 1969
confused with 1967. On any level. Um.
Perhaps
on some level, almost everyone (of
a certain age) gets 1969 confused
with 1967. But what of 1968, 1971,
1975, or even 1979....1973? Presently,
I’m
either depressingly or at least toyingly toodling with
the distance between
the
present and that grand demarcation: the Summer of Love. Now let’s all
poke
some fun at glaring half-centuries which ogle back at me like oversized
bobble-heads
(aren't they all?). And above those blurred bobs – in a precisely
delineated
neon yellow – flashes the appropriate word, one we’d take
on
decades
later: “D’uh.” So did folks living in the Summer of Love realize that
they
were participants in the Summer of Love? Or did that realization
arrive
years
later as a posthumously (so-to-speak) appellative? And how subsequent,
if
so? This I am pretty certain is a fact that I should know, but, my
memory.
And,
on a related note, as luck would have it, I’ve already lost all
interest.
Except in
how it might pertain to me, as usual. You know, that
particularly
easy-going plump babe was born the second Thursday
of
June; during what (in such towns, such as the one in which I
was
born), lovingly
(or laughingly) was called the morning rush
hour (actually
two
fantastical l-words of my own bias, because most citizens hereof had
never even been anywhere else in the
world (another fantasy/bias, if you'll
allow), when
it comes to the rush of an hour, to
even realize there can be
a difference.
I was such an easy birth, too, just ask my mother, (who
definitely knows from
worse). That'd be me, born
as I was in none other
than THE
summer of love, a summer which will never again be half a
century
in distance from anywhere else in the world (be that anywhere
Vesta,
Arkansas; Kyoto, Japan; Skopje, Macedonia; or either of the multi-
tudinous
but each unique canals of Venice,
Amsterdam or St. Petersburg.
