I was just listening to the William Shatner/Ben Folds collaboration remake of the Pulp song “Common People” and I was taken back to a moment in time where I managed to make an ass out of myself…

This moment wasn’t so long ago. It was that tumultuous July 4th weekend when all my little stories broke apart and continue to flutter in the monsoon winds.

I was at a co-worker’s mothers house in the shadow of A-mountain. Why is it called “A” mountain, you may ask? Because it’s got a big fucking on it! That’s why. A big painted A made of boulders. Why would someone bother to make it and then every holiday repaint it with the appropriate colors? I am not meant to understand.

If they were putting haikus on the mountain that might make some sort of sense…

Not quite a mountain
It is only A Mountain
On fire each year

So anyway, I was there in the yard videotaping someone else’s family and hovering around the grill because it was food realated and I couldn’t tear myself away from the carne asada cooking. It’s become a habit kind of like how guitarists hover near the guy with the guitar thinking all the while, “This guy sucks. I could do this way better.”

Around that time I am introduced to one of the family and I’m not good at idle chatter, my brain kind of turns off when there’s nothing obvious and directed to say. Talk to me about Kant and Dostoyevsky and I’m a happy guy. You want to know what I think about the grand strategy of the USofA and the useage of military power and I’ll blather on for days. Make me talk to some guy who’s drinking a Natural Ice and my brain just plain old shuts down.

I asked what was to me a perfectly, naturally icey, question, one that I had been asked countless times on first meetings in NYC, when I was a miserable-go-lucky computer department, a simple question that was so natural and obvious to me that it never occurred to me that it might lead to a terribly awkward moment where half a city block, since that’s how large the family was, would laugh at me.

I asked, “So what do you do?” That lead in a short while to him saying, “I’m looking to get a job at Raytheon, just have to finish my degree first.”

Now, if I explain that Raytheon is a huge defense contractor making all sorts of really cool weapons, super-high-tech sciencey stuff, and that I know an engineer there, and have met some others, and that I used to be terribly fascinated by physics when I was in college and still think that I have the mind of an engineer, then you might be able to get into my head at that moment.

“Cool, man! good for you! What are you studying?”

Right about here he laughs hysterically, and then Chris the co-worker laughs at me, he’s got a couple of beers in him and he is practically weeping from laughing so hard, and then it seems like most of the west side of Tucson is laughing at me.

Why was this so funny to them?

“I’m trying to get my GED so I can get a job as a security guard there. They have great benefits.”

That’s the great thing about having no real perspective on life. On most people’s lives. I have spent so damn much time in that lofty realm of pure intellect that I have almost no ability to wander through the muck of actual life.

Even now with me living low my basic mindset is still that of a technology guy working at a specialist ad agency in Manhattan, with all the cultually specific attitude that entails.

In the real world I’m a complete loser who sitting in a coffeehouse on a Sunday night because he has no where else to go right now.

In my head I am a stereotypical cultural mover, I get the fucking references, I try to keep up on what’s trendy and what’s happening the cultural centers of the world, fuck I watch Thai movies and I love them. I am the quintessential bourgeois bohemian except for the fact that I’m poor and I make food for people who couldn’t give a shit about what they eat and I’m too poor to leave Tucson.

So there I was, caught at that moment in time, caught in a dichotomy. In my fucking brain, I was perfectly justified in my line of questioning. There was no way I could not have assumed engineering student. In the world in which I live, the actual one filled with actual reality, I should have just said, “Hey, man! That’s great! What great day! Isn’t it cool to watch stuff blow up?”