Still Drinking

So I was riding home on the subway, sick, tired, off a hard day's night which makes a lot more sense since daylight savings turned the best of the day into another irritating period of vitamin-D deficiency.

I was paler than usual, feeling thin and generally unappreciated professionally, and especially unappreciated physically, because I hadn't been eating right the last couple of days, and had skipped shaving because I would afraid I'd have a dizzy spell while holding a razor to my neck. The same could be said for showering, so I said it and skipped that too.

Since I wasn't going to any client meetings or impressing any girls that day, I decided to go the full deadbeat and donned my skull encrusted "Beer Drinkers and Hell Raisers" super tight biker shirt, and threw on my crotch-rocket girls' motorcycle jacket (however you want to parse that noun phrase, you'll probably be right). To reduce irony and make sure I wasn't mistaken for a BB (Billburg Boi), I found the largest, loosest, scummiest cargo pants in my laundry, and went to work.

Work sucked, and that brings us back to the train on the way home.

About midway home, a kid gets on the train and double takes my visage. To tired to even put up with first takes, I just sigh and hope he's not afraid of me, or shocked by me, or offended by me, because really, all I ever wanted was to be comfortable and hot enough to be dateable, so all these things are just layers on the skin, they don't say who I am except in so far as they display the kinds of things I'm willing to display about myself, and everybody should be able to express themselves and fuck you for judging me man, and so on. My head rambled freely and slightly feverishly through all the various identity issues and counter-issues that so occupied my college years, as I stared fiercely at my magazine.

The kid checked me out a couple more times, and on the way out, I had to get around him, so I mumbled a semi-audible "excuse me" and stepped on his shoe, which was pure accident. He said something garbled, I said sorry, and trudged up the stairs to get to the trudge down the street that leads to the trudge up more stairs to my apartment.

Then, midway through trudge two, I realized what the kid had said, which was "Nice shirt, man."

"Fuck me," I said. Because there I was having a miserable, self-loathing moment of outdated angst, and this kid comes along and validates my outfit, and by extension my whole tactic for dealing with the day, and almost snaps me out of my whole underage, fever-induced funk, and I just mumbled sorry because I assumed he was an asshole for no good reason at all.

So dude, if you're out there, thank you. You are awesome, and your shirt was cool too. Catch me on a better day, but don't compliment me on my shirt on a better day because then I'll just think you're shallow.