I had a weird but brief encounter with the how the more well to do part of the population lives and it is something I don't quite understand. It reaffirmed my status as a class warrior and made me more appreciative of who I am, the simplicity that I strive for and the people I consider to be friends.
I ended up at the funeral home because a friend of my parents had passed from the same rare cancer that my mother died of. This was one of the few times that I have been around people since the beginning of the endless plague and the first time I was in a funeral home since my mother died so every bit of social anxiety and depression that I normally have was suddenly cranked up to eleven like some sort of fucked up Spider Sense. While I was walking across the parking lot of the funeral home, I was already having chest pains and giving myself a nice layer of flop sweat. I should have just turned tail and gone back to the car.
Everything was going as expected. I said a few hellos, signed the book and was enduring small talk with a few of the older folks. And then it got weird. One of the nephews of the deceased had flown in from California and had decided that he wanted to talk to me for the first time in over twenty years since we used to play together as kids. For normal, well adjusted people this probably would not present itself as a problem but for me, at that moment, it was the last thing I needed.
It rapidly went from me being surprised and happy to see him to me being regaled with stories of competing in triathlons that were held in different parts of the world and purchasing property in multiple states. I don't even know what this person does for a living and I didn't bother to ask because he was talking to me like I already knew what he did for money. He was talking to me like it was a sales pitch and he was a Bass-O-Matic or a timeshare. None of what he was saying involved records, comic books or Star Wars so I was less than impressed and slowly started to tune out.
I almost laughed when he told me of his plans to quit working for a while to go volunteer in third world countries to “You know, try to give back a little.” If I stop working, I stop eating and start involuntarily camping. If I were able to get a word in edgewise, I would have let him know that poverty is never too far away from where we're standing and that the United States is also a third world country. We just do a better job of hiding it.
One of the biggest problems he said he was having was convincing his wife that they should buy a $200 to $300,000 house in both California and Florida instead of only buying a $600 to $700,000 house in California. He then went on to discuss the tax benefits of buying the two houses instead of the one. I was completely lost. I'd never consider myself to be the smartest person in any room that I happen be in but I'm also not the dumbest. I had heard and understood all of the words he was saying but not in the particular order that he was putting them in. He concluded with a “Well, you know how it is.”
No. No, I don't know how it is.
To me, it's March 277th, 2020. I am currently playing the role of teacher's aid, IT department and short order cook in addition to my usual duties at an office job that is slowly killing me physically, mentally and creatively while paying me just barely enough so I can almost survive. Struggling to pay a mortgage and maintain a house that I shouldn't have bought that's in a shitty but not too shitty neighborhood. So no, I don't know how it is to have luxury problems. And I'm not the least privileged person that I know. And why the fuck would anyone want two houses to maintain? Oh wait, he can probably afford to pay people to do that for him.
The guy wasn't saying all of these things in a bragging or flaunting manner to be an asshole. It was almost as if he experienced life as a thing to be put on a resume`. I get that he was just trying to make conversation but holy hell was it exhausting. It still felt like he was going to throw in a second Pocket Fisherman by the time he was done talking and it was really uncomfortable. There wasn't even a “So what have you been up to?” anywhere on the horizons of his speech pattern. It was all “What can I do to get you into this used car today?”
Is this what attending too many corporate retreats and seminars does to people? Is this how well adjusted people who can't (or refuse) to see through the bullshit veneer of every day life interact with each other? Is this how their weekend barbecues in Suburbia play out? Is that how people turn out when they have parents that encouraged them in their endeavors and actually liked them?
Luckily, he was interrupted by one of his family members so I was able to slowly back out of the room and then immediately head back to the car to disappear into the night.
I do wonder what his reaction would have been if I had the chance to tell him that I'm working on writing, taking pictures and helping out punk bands instead of mentioning my day job. I'm sure at some point he would have asked how much money I make by doing those things. And then he probably would have needed medical attention when I replied, “Nothing. I do it to do it.”
Not everything in life has to involve money or the lack thereof. Sometimes people do things for the sole purpose of doing things.
No comments:
Post a Comment