Where I live it’s mostly liberals and hipsters. A clump is a cluster and then a posse. They are who they aren’t with a vengeance. Liberals vote their issues and hipsters don’t fuck, I said to a large crowd in front of city hall, but my local representative didn’t get the message. He was horse-trading traffic signs and dead-ending byways for his more substantial constituents because nothing says get out of here like that small-town feel in the city.
Citidiots, as they say in Montana, will take to the streets at the inference, the hint, of falling house prices. In my neighbourhood near is the measure of distance itself, up to and including the piling of bodies. Only they who have nothing still need their boulevards.
It’s easy to disappear when you have money and when you don’t, but then you’re the atmosphere, the scenery in someone else’s adventure. I belong to the first group, by the skin of my teeth, by the hair on my father’s chinny-chin-chin. His choice was clear, work like an ox and then croak, making it possible for me to become a criminal.
Set out or die are the rules I live by, depending on whether or not I need garlic. I choose one then the other, both when I’m feeling reckless. Success is inevitable and therefore insignificant, but I still take an umbrella so space satellites won’t know who they’re looking at.
Between me and my provisions there’s a gaggle of indigenous people who are closer to death than is typical north of the forty-ninth parallel. The first are always the first to go, except for the few who manage to circumvent their annihilation. I wish I could be more specific but so much of what happened took place before we got television. Were we to do it again – guided by the beauty of our weapons, said Leonard Cohen via Brian Williams – we’d have got more of them.
Those stragglers are now a testament to the mosaic. We’re one big tent, or so says the website of the local residents association. But I still think that tent is a tepee, no room at the top, I told Kiki. She likes it when I wax idiotic. There’s a place for the meagre – I’m thinking Winnipeg, the Chicago that wasn’t – just not on those cul-de-sacs we’ve been gerrymandering.