Dear readers, please forgive my hiatus. My ladyfriend Catherine recently returned from tending to her ill mother. After the rather emotional weeks she spent as a doting nursemaid, she demanded my exclusive company for several days. Although it was, as always, a delight to entertain her and regale her with anecdotes and fictitious adventures, it kept my pen from my paper for a length of time.
While C. takes great pleasure in wandering the grounds on my estate, after a few days she suggested we travel to the city and enjoy some of the public parklands there. One of our great pastimes is sitting discretely on a bench and regarding the passersby and other various parkgoers, commenting on them mercilessly. We attempt, like children, to maintain our composure and dignity when others approach, switching our discourse to politics, the flux in the transportation market, and so on.
Unfortunately, this most recent trip was dispiriting, to say the least. Instead of the normal assortment of vaguely intoxicated lunchers and nude picnicking women, the scene was dominated by rough-looking drug abusers and business men shouting to themselves (though wearing those ridiculous mobile phone attachments as a cover for their obvious schizophrenia).
What visits to the parks used to entail
It is not only the businessmen who play the fool. The women, too, have lost their supposedly inherent sense of grace and style. Both genders can habitually be seen in agreeable-enough professional attire, but sporting athletic shoes. This is a travesty for all of civilization. C. suggested that there was no longer any joy taken in displaying one's good fashion tastes during one's meandering ambles around the paths. Instead it was the listless, brain-dead grazing pattern of drugged animals that we witnessed. It was disturbing.
Shamelessness.
Not only were appalled by the displays of clothing, but the noises! Good Heavens, the constant ringing of personal phones, the pointless chattering about meaningless minutiae, the disgraceful rumblings of freight trucks and motorcycles! This is not to say that pleasant or even jubilant discourse is to be frowned upon. To the contrary! But it was all without purposes here. It was merely noise to fill the void of these otherwise empty lives, lives spent drugged on sugar and white noise, lives spent soaking with lust, showered in drivel, drenched in rage.
No longer enjoying ourselves in the face of this absence of the Art of Being Human, C. and I left the area to dine with our dear friends Mr. and Mrs. T. After a few bottles of wine, all of these troubled thoughts had fled our minds and it is only now that they have returned to me.
I pray, dear readers, that the same melancholy does not infect your next visit to a city park. It was a dark day and I am glad to be back on my own estate!
I know how you feel about going to the park. I find you and your friend may solve your problems by tying twines from tree to tree across the paths at foot level. The activity at hand then is to comment on the different way that each one falls--it is a complete revelation of ones true character, the few split seconds that one falls to the pavement! I hope your friend and her mother are both in good health; physical and mental, to each's own respect.
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