For this particular post I would like to embrace my scattered thoughts and simply spill them all out on this virtual page, like orange juice that my kid just dropped on the floor after I explicitly told him to "use two hands, please!" First, I'd like to get a complaint out of the way; I am surprised that after centuries of inter-class psychological warfare, rich people have yet to realize that they need not trumpet their richness. I get it.
Recently I was at my local gym, avoiding the yoga-for-babies classes while gracefully dodging the aggressive glances of "serious" weightlifters who probably have to be kept away from the yoga-for-babies classes because they clearly eat the souls of babies (how else would you get so swole, brah?). I was wearing a sweat-shirt (how appropriate!) that says "Air Force," because sometimes I like to remind people that they should thank me with some flag waiving and a low altitude fly-over (or maybe just a "hey, thanks"). I had my headphones in, blaring some serious hip-hop - since I identify with the struggling inner city set - and a gentleman began talking to me. He had headphones in as well. I am not a virtuoso when it comes to social interaction, but I am aware that is a fools errand for two people wearing headphones with music playing are not in the ideal setting for creating friendly banter. I am also not so adverse to small talk that I will ignore someone making polite noises with their larynx in my direction, but if you have headphones in, and the person you would like to make polite noises at has headphones in, and they are holding a bunch of weights and grimacing from the shear struggle of it all, perhaps now is not the time to make conversation. As he said something to me (my lip reading is poor, so I'm certain he didn't say what I thought I saw him say, which was "are you pooing this?"), I simply responded with my standard gym response "yeah." This seemed to signal for all involved that our exchange was over; I was wrong, and unbeknownst to me it was on "pause."
Half an hour later I found myself, wearing nothing except a towel, facing this same gentleman as he made a second attempt at "small" talk. Small is in quotations because my stereotypes of the rich were hugely reinforced in this conversation, in which the man in questions clearly did not grasp what constitutes "small" conversation. Side note: I do not expect people who I do not know to have any spectacular insight in regards to my "10 favorite ways to kick-it." I am confident, however, that I am not alone in that "talking to strangers while being butt-naked" is absent from said top-ten list. To speed this along I will simply write out our brief conversation below:
Gentleman: "So were you actually in the Air Force?"
Me: "Yep."
"What did you fly?"
Why does everyone think that everyone in the Air Force is a F&*$#ing pilot? Damn you, Hollywood. "Actually, I started out as a mechanic for jet engines. I didn't fly anything other than a lap top, ha-ha." (This little wise crack was met with silence and a blank stare).
"Oh, Yeah. Well, we have a G4. A close friend of mine is in the Air Force, but he is thinking about getting out so he can be our pilot. I like the G4, but it just seems to be a little much, you know what I mean? I mean, when we traveled with my mother - you know, she needed such a large entourage - it was perfect...but for us, well we could make do with something smaller. Perhaps something that only needed one pilot."
How did we go from "were you in the Air Force?" to "I have too much money. Please listen to me passively complain about how I have too much money." "Uh, yeah, I totally know what you mean? Well, hey, I smell bad, so I'm gonna hit the showers. Good luck with everything." If you get to over-share about being rich, I get to over-share about my body order.
"Have a good one!"
"You too. Um, see ya."
I am not saying this guy was rude intentionally, and maybe it's too harsh for me to offhandedly judge him for going totally banana's over telling me about his personal airplane problems; if I had my own airplane I would probably tell everyone. I would walk down the street, and as the less fortunate asked me for my spare change I would gleefully hand them a 20 and say, "here you go, I have an airplane!" and then I would leap in the air and click my heals together in a perfect freeze frame, cause if I'm rich enough for an airplane I'm rich enough to buy a time-freezing-80's-pose device.
In short, I feel like we have spent the last couple centuries having a punch-drunk back and forth with the super-rich about their nose-to-the-sky attitude (by "we" I mean the unwashed masses), and the result is that being a super-rich captain of industry is fine; it's just not o.k. to drop "oh man I don't know which private jet to buy for myself," in casual conversation with said unwashed masses. Speaking of unwashed masses, lets get on that scattered brain train and talk about Halloween!
I don't have much to say, save for this; I miss the days of homemade costumes. I realize that there are still lots of people doing their own homemade costumes, but it seems to be an increasing rarity as we drift ever closer to becoming a "Disnocracy" (that's a term I just made up as short hand for identifying the impending Disney-conglomerate nation-state that we will all be singing and dancing through within the next 10 years).
Last evening my wife and I took our boys into town for the local trick-or-treat event and we wore, as a family, super-hero capes, masks, and shirts (and the boys wore super-hero underwear over their pants because they are young enough to get away with it). It was heart warming, and as much as I hate to be the guy reminiscing about the "days of old," it did make me miss the Halloween's of my youth where only the rich kid bought a costume from the store. We had a "super" evening out on the town, and the nostalgia for the classic home-town family friendly Halloween was palpable. This brings me to 2 final points; 1) I am eternally grateful that my wife has a sense of adventure and is willing to stand-out from the crowd, and 2) I am pretty sure that the rich kid from my childhood who used to buy costumes at the store just accosted me in the locker-room at my gym....
BADAH-BOOM! Happy Halloween to my 3 or 4 readers!
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