Or: The Blogbargobargo
I would like to take this moment to remind you of the two of us, mid-morning, puttering around the living room, trying not to spill the coffee in our mugs, while we look for a mouse we are positive has invaded the apartment. You poke though the boxes by the entertainment center, I peer behind the couch and say, "I know I saw it, I just know." We move in circles around the furniture, scrutinizing the baseboards, and we find many things: flecks of paint, the carapace of bugs, a lonesome Cheerio, long, tangled strands of our hair.
But there is no mouse, no sign of any mouse.
Our eyes meet to commiserate over this baffling turn of events, and surveying each other's stooped shoulders and sloshing coffee, we realize it: what graduate school and unemployment have reduced us to, what, at twenty-four, we've become.
Middle-aged men.
We are middle-aged men, stranded at home by a knee surgery when we ought to be at work. We don't know what to do with ourselves and we're always getting on the wife's last nerve. We stay in our pajamas all day long. One side of our face is permanently creased with the pattern of our couch cushions. We are deeply concerned with the fate of Erica Kane's kidnapped lover (who is really her twin brother, Dmitri, stolen at birth and raised by Russian art thieves).
We feel restless, obsolete, a little gassy. If you swing the imaginary webcam down the hall of our apartment, you’ll find that in your room, a job application flickers, unfinished, on your computer screen. In mine, the walls are plastered with the pages of a story I have no clue how to revise.
What we are doing is chasing after a mouse we'll never catch.
It suddenly makes sense that TS Eliot conjured up Prufrock when he was only twenty-three.
"Weekdays," you say, breaking our stalemate.
"Yeah," I sigh. "Weekdays."
And then, inexplicably, we crack up. Like that: the imaginary blog is born!
And therein lies what I came to realize, in writing this blog post, about my joke--it is surprisingly accurate to compare us to injured middle-aged men. Because injured middle-aged men are campy. They are nosy and meddlesome, doggedly so. They have too much time on their hands but they use wisely and come up with some crazy shit. Remember “The Puppy Channel” idea? Invented by a middle-aged man recovering from back surgery, who spent his sick leave watching the televised OJ Simpson trial and wishing he had something else he could flick to during the commercial breaks. In other words: injured middle-aged men are geniuses and we should be glad to feel like them!
So in conclusion, this blog post is intended to celebrate that moment in the living room and our restless pursuit of phantom mice.
Also, the post is intended to shame you into updating, you foolio! Remember your origins! Post in the blog! And save us from wandering into the mushy terrain of Hallmark cards, because I'm going to get sappier and sappier if you don't inject this thing with your trademark and much-loved humor and badassedness.
Weekdaring to eat a peach,
Ash
