A Certain Crowd

(Hippolyte Flandrin)

As a white male Evangelical, I am very impressed with the Rick Santorum.  He just makes sense.  Think about it.  If you were the Devil, who would you go after?  The United States of America.  Right?

Of course, I am not an Evangelical, and being of sound mind, Santorum is simply one of the funniest figures in town.  He's passed Chris Christie even though he is not so physically comical.  Christy said yesterday that he wished Warren Buffet would just shut up.  Ditto.

Neither of them are scary figures. . . but the people who take them seriously sure are.  It would be as if Colbert fans thought he was really a conservative.  I will take a poll of professional wrestling fans on who they want for president and get back to you.

And that is why I do not write overt political entries here.  It is just awful stuff.  It is stupid stuff.  It is funny, but only at a pathetic level.  It is obvious.  It is best left to the midcult minds of late night t.v.

But here is another story, the kind I do write, that is really as simple minded as this.  I was in the YMCA last evening trying to be nice to all the stand around talkers who block up the place instead of working out.  A woman I know from yoga classes and who I talk to from time to time moved in to use a machine I'd been working on.  I've always thought her a nice woman for no reason, really, other than she was in my yoga class.  There is a residue that clings to the yoga practitioner, I apparently believe without ever giving it real thought, of enlightenment.  And if I do this, of course, it flies in the face of my own yoga experience.  But this woman is older than I, I would guess, and bone thin with alabaster skin and hair that does not speak of age, hair that is boldly modern and not the hair helmet that is too often evident in women of a certain. . .  um. . . type.  She is calm and regal and yes, she is attractive.

I stood by as she worked on the machine, and I noticed she was wearing a orthotic boot.

"Been fighting again, eh?" I said with what I thought must be a twinkle in my eye.  She paused.

"I'm trying to think of something clever to say, but I can't.  It is a stress fracture.  No reason, no trauma, I mean."

I almost said that getting old is hell, but I thought again.  What I did say, however, suggested it.

"That's a difficult place to heal.  Hard to get much oxygen to the feet."  I left off "for old people."  "You need to huff some 'O's," I said, holding my hand to my mouth like I was sucking on a respirator.

What happened next was so subtle, I might have let it pass without noticing, but there was a faint shift in her features, a subdued but definite disapproving, and then a verbal tone, subtle, too, but present.

"Oh, no. . ." she said shaking her head as if I'd just offered her a shot of tequila while asking her if she wanted me to stick a hit of Ecstasy in her butt.  "I'm doing some blah blah blah blah blah."  I was so consumed with the subtle stuff that I didn't hear the stupid shit she said about healing bones with herbs.

Cut to the quick, I tried to recover.  "All the NBA players do it.  You know, they have a hyperbaric chamber over at the sports complex.  You ought to go sit in there for awhile.  You'll be playing basketball again before you know it."

But the gig was up.  It was as if one of us had farted a little on the first kiss and were each blaming the other.  I would never really enjoy encountering her again.

You see, it doesn't really matter that I'm a foreman at the factory.  I still work at the factory.  You don't escape that, not in her crowd.  I am suspect in both word and deed.  And, truth be told, I play it a little.  I mean, if you were the devil. . . etc.