Nature works to maintain a balance even if, at times, we lose ours.
Here in Norwich CT, a "Dominos" pizza place and a "Curves" fitness center peacefully coexist under one roof. If there is a God, s/he must be amused. We have come as close as we may to a perpetual motion device....one place puts the pounds on your belly and your thighs and backside and the other part helps take it off. And so turns the Great Mandala.
Driving this afternoon to visit "the mall" in Waterford, though not the Waterford known for the crystal but rather for its Speedbowl, passed, on Route 12, another 'strange bedfellows' pairing of businesses: a personal injury attorney sharing the building with a chiropractic service.
A couple more pairings like this and I anticipate we'll soon see the Four Horsemen dismount and open up their own "Apocalyptic Discount Outlet Store", where 'everything must go! No offer refused!'
Walking into the mall I passed TPTG, The Post-Teen Goth.
You know the type even if you don't actually 'see' him anymore:
Hair sort of spiky, but only because during the week he has to comb it down for that job, probably in the audit department of some large corporate operation;
the jeans with the holes/tears at the knees, that are sold that way (remember how loud it would get at your house when you came home after playing with a hole in your chinos or dungarees? Your mom would carry on like they were the last pair of pants on earth even if they were older than your kid brother. She couldn't understand how you could do this to her, again.);
and, of course, the Pale Rider long coat.
Has anyone else, aside from Clint Eastwood, ever worn one of those and pulled it off? I have to concede he also made that poncho in "The Good, Bad and the Ugly" work and not even Ugly Betty has come close on that one. (Of course, Clint had spurs while Betty has braces.)
TPTG lives in his parents' partially finished basement and sleeps on a pullout couch.
He has a couple of posters scotch-taped to the concrete walls (Mom doesn't want him ruining the wood paneling she and his Dad have started to put up when they have a few extra dollars); more than likely one of the posters is of Ozzy, post 'Sabs, while the other is of Killswitch or one of the other shriek-bands whose vocalists all sound like fingernails on a chalkboard who lament long and loud at how horrible their lives are. And from where they're yelling, they probably are.
That NONE of his heroes live in anything approaching the style that he does, has never crossed TPTG's mind or he'd be shrieking louder and longer than they are and then ordering a rifle scope via the Internet.
I'm by myself on a Saturday afternoon because my daughter, home from college for the weekend, is attending, with my wife, the marriage of someone they both worked with back when I had more hair than scalp on my head and the Norwichtown Mall had more stores than mall-walkers (and it has less than a half dozen of the latter-you do the math).
I had a bit more candy earlier, those 'Starburst' chews sneak up on you, than my type II diabetes is comfortable with so I need to walk off the sugar rush, and it's pouring outside.
Indoor malls of America, unless they're located in Norwich, CT, are like village greens where everyone you know, or would like to know (and a few you'd rather not know) all meet.
I've often wondered if it would make more sense to move most of the apparatus that is the municipal government of Norwich, the departments and service agencies, etal, into the Norwichtown Mall, as there's literally acres of space. Acknowledge the inevitable and get it out of the way. Then we can stop the"Search for the Guilty" part of the problem-solving exercise and proceed directly to the "Solutions" portion of our program. And we could then offer meaningful rehab activities for those suffering from TPTG and other maladies of our age.
-bill kenny
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