i know it's just the war

[rm]

I'm walking home with a sack of groceries, and as I pass down a block I pass down several times a day every day a man from a group of people hanging out there takes a handful of change out of his pocket, shakes it like dice and then pours it out on the ground. $1.37, but reading the results he informs me, "The signs say you will always have that ugly, retarded face and there is nothing you can do about it." The people he is with, of mixed gender and race, and all between the ages of about 20 and 35, laugh. I ignore it, and try tell myself it's just the war, not the one in Iraq, but the one that happens every day in New York about gentrification, race and money. I know half my neighborhood hates the other half and vice versa, but mostly, we all keep it to ourselves, except when things get out of hand like in the blackout or when the buildings come down.

It's hard for me to be surprised by these things. It's a rare day when someone doesn't call me ugly. Isn't that strange? It may be a rare day when someone doesn't call you ugly too, you just might not be as tuned in on the streets. Or maybe I'm just lucky.

Sometimes, I think it's because I don't have a modern face. It's such a throwback, the issue isn't that I'm not an MTV hottie, but that I look like someone who should have died decades or centuries ago. Maybe people see me and recognize the dead, and in their fear of mortality declare my features sin.

I wonder about things like that all the time. Strange mystical reimaginings of the casually cruel world. I also wonder sometimes if we hate the Arab world because they gave us the zero. Perhaps we do not see a revolution in math, an efficiency in accounting but an entire people that innovated the language of numbers solely so that we would at long last be able to name our worthlessness.

All of this though just underlines the reasons I don't do so well in the world. I think there's some sort of sublime artfulness under all the random hate and it makes me oblivious, both to the sheer bludgeoning stupidity of it all and of course the fact that I may indeed be ugly.

Comments

[aynatonal.livejournal.com]

I presume that when we're in our 40s, we'll be glad of our youthful appearance. I agree that it's difficult now, though. I'm itching to look old enough for Medea and Margaret and all those other ladies that people have been telling me for years that I'll be perfect for someday, just not yet.