I wrote the following on friday:

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"I'm sitting outside on a semi-circular stone dais, carved into the governmental bedrock around the capitol area. There's arguably been no better Friday night than this one. The air is minimally humid, warm, and everyone feels like Louisiana with two shots of burbon. Two small children, no more than 6, race down the oversized concrete steps, fresh like lightning. Beyond my writing endless dialogues for a project, editing photographs, or reworking graphs, I quite often read political articles. Call it a substitution for dessert, although I've been a naughty son of a bitch lately. I'm just in the middle of another one by Joe Bageant. It's a masturbatory but sober assessment of life in Belize. I don't even know where Belize is, but the 'islanders living ideally while slowly encroached upon by the white man' motif is a tad 20th century.

He does make a valid point, however: we live in the deadlands. Working, earning, paying bills, buying things that break or need replacing periodically, forming an interweaving web of warranties, repairs, occasional trips to Best Buy and the dietary coroner. I've never known and will never know rural America, but I believe we are governed by an urban mythos, and I live in a mostly urban city. The reign of the individual can be heard clacking across the street, in endless packs of 3's and 5's�high heels, ugly sneakers, obnoxious mouth twaddle. One can hardly call it a cohesive group. No doubt alcohol is the guide and host this evening, and tens of cars pass every minute to dock in some semi-distant parking bay. I am in the heart of downtown, which itself is curiously rather quiet.

In come the kids again, babbling in the ways I used to remember. A young couple decides to side on the opposite side of the walk in their own dais. I am immediately wary and wish for their imminent explosion. It's that gut reaction that convinces me I'm an American, that lurid disgust that someone disturbs me when I am indulging myself. I do like touch with the two-engine plane flying overhead, however.

There is a disengaged, gorgeous narcissism about it all. The old are shut away, the fat ostracized, the ugly made to eat its own, and a million more sub-groups are segmented, categorized, and properly stored in their proper place. And that is the way of things. Old Joe laments that we are not the people of an island nation, not sitting beneath moonlit trees and using dog stomachs to count the stars. While the concept is pleasant, I prefer to be in the company of these obnoxious flesh wastes, to be regarded as casually by them and dismissed with a ring of stereotypes.

I enjoy the fact that we have distilled and refined the art of anonymity to an art form. I enjoy the fact that I have unreasonable, mindless disdain for anything outside of my narrow range of acceptably interesting or cool or beautiful things. I enjoy the fact that unless you dig for it and close your blankets around your community niche of choice, you are completely alone and left to fend for yourself however you see fit. And I especially enjoy the fact that this all revolves around a series of libertine common denominators. I say cheers to thinking of little else but yourself. Given my age, martial status, and sex, I'm hardly an advocate for a majority, though in some secreted form or another even variations on each of those demographics want what I indulge in and embody.

So indeed, we are beholden to corporations, trends, the cake icing of circumstance that makes for lasting impressions. We judge quickly, live quickly, hate quickly, drug quickly, lose quickly, and best of all we are never, ever satisfied. There is no satisfaction. There is a constant want for more, and a thousand different buyable baubles or human tropes to indulge in. I've gotten into collecting acquaintances recently for no useful purpose, except to shore up my ego and feed me characters for stories I may never write. It is socializing for personal indulgence, almost an anti-socializing�and I wouldn't have it any other way.

There is something parasitic or venal or something comparable about such a culture, such inclinations. We are the flaming car wreck sunset no one can take their eyes from for long. It is an insistent, angry erection of a culture that demands satisfaction. Most of its conventions are hollow and unsatisfying, leaving little to service actual needs but to lightly scratch at them with proxies.

But there's a paradoxical love of misery in my own mind. I appreciate only the absolute rarest moments where I feel fully satisfied. I am forced by boredom and ego to find that next fix. Intellectual, sexual, physical, emotional. I am compelled to fill a hole I cannot see or feel. And I see it in the eyes and actions of everyone in this urban sprawl.

And you know what? It's beautiful. In the same way you ever so slightly ache when you experience an amazing stranger, when that sad song comes around. It is uncaffeinated diet tragedy. One post-modern calorie.

It is beautiful because it hurts.

All the couples and kids are gone. And now I will be too."

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