Page 79 - The Myth and the Moment

Evening

“Got any spare change?”
“Eh? No. No, I don’t.”
Damned bum. Can a kid literally be a bum? How could he totally
fail before the age of twenty? Drugs, no doubt; the stigma of
addiction. Booted out of the family, a proton yanked from the
nucleus by some greater attraction, then lost in space, a free radical.
Ripe for the cults to paper the blowtorched walls of his mind with
images of Baby Jesus and Pie in the Sky. Ah, don’t be so harsh,
Nathan: you’ve had your problems with the bottle and your bouts
with emotional excess. Jah, as Sigmund says, notting human iss alien
to me. Great theories, lousy therapies from that guy. Unconscious
mind: the last frontier. C. Wright Mills saw through the sham of
motivation, nailed the carpet of personality to the floorboards of
culture. Brilliant. End of the hall of mirrors waiting for the
introspective but unwary, no more infinite regression of who’s
watching the watcher; dovetails nicely with the death of God and the
final debunking of the Great Chain of Being. Yes, the twentieth
century has tied it all up in a nice tidy package: ultimate questions
begged by final solutions.
“Urp.”
Did I say to hold the onions? Wouldn’t have stopped the Burger
Machine. But all that stuff is geared to the digestive system of a
twelve-year-old: hard fats, compacted starches, explosive sugars,
additives cancelling subtractives, intestinal transit time clocked in
milliseconds or weeks, depending on age and hardiness of amoebic
parasites. But what the hell else is there to eat around here? Oh, yes,
the fake French cuisine served up in trendy eateries perched on the
edge of the Strip, down by the burlesque clubs. Strip joints and clip
joints. Ah, Man’s baser appetites: sex and food and rage. All to be
satisfied, right here in the big city—if you can pay the price.
Traditional cultures know how to regulate needs and desires: these
kids would be wrapped right into a tight web of responsibilities and
privileges, trained to see the natural world as a two-way street, not a
strip-mined source of instant gratification. Yes, the Sunset Strip
mind. Could turn that pun into a cute little epigram. Probably won’t
remember it in the morning. Ought to carry a pocket notebook, like
serious poets. Stick your face out into the wind, and the Muse will
blow bird droppings into it. Wipe them off at your peril. Maybe that’s

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