I was looking at the scene as I walked by. Out of curiosity, not pity, but that’s how I tend to view events, people. And hate. Hate? No, more like derision, and not aimed at the person in question, but at the kids laughing at him. You laugh at someone else and you are a coward. You haven’t grasped the fact that you may well be the subject of laughter yourself in the many years that lie in wait for you, not because of one stupid thing you have done, but because of what you have become. Damn the future. For this is what these kids were laughing at, the fact that this man was, in the conformist view of every day, derisible.
So, arms on hips, elbows pointing back in ungainly pose, shapeless knitted cardy over crumpled shirt in the middle of the high street on a hot summer’s day in the late 1980s, he was staring through thick rimmed, sellotaped frames with cracked lenses (why replace them? they work, they do) at the small change he had just (I assume) dropped in the puddle of puke on the pavement in front of him.
He looked like this, and was staring at the change in the puke, as if he were thinking to retrieve it. Fuck off, thought the kids, just go, you are a state and you can’t possibly want to go through with that, that social suicide of your wreck already socially dead, surely, remove yourself from our sight, it’s funny, but it’s so immediately embarrassing, how much longer will you stay there? The joke is finished; it’s a good anecdote for an otherwise uneventful Saturday, talking shit in town, but enough, enough. Get gone.
Cowardly to laugh, cowardly to think like that, cowardly to deride. But what of the pity of the thinking, liberated, educated, sensitive person? What are they thinking? Fuck off, don’t stay there in front of those kids, they’re laughing at you! It’s only small change; the longer you are there the more they will laugh. It’s embarrassing. Fucking move on, I feel uncomfortable, for me (as I say to the person to whom I relate the story later, a useful anecdote as I talk profundities over a Saturday evening meal), but really, you feel uncomfortable for you, don’t you?
The curiosity. Don’t you dare move on. You can’t seriously think it matters that these people are laughing at you, and it certainly doesn’t matter that someone is being made to feel uncomfortable by your resistance to the derision you might not be aware of around you. I can’t tell whether I will that thought on you because I want you to say fuck off to the starers, the deriders, (I don’t care about the pitiers) or because it makes an interesting anecdote to relate to anyone reading this.
But perhaps you are above us all. Perhaps you are not thinking about how to get the change back. Perhaps it is of interest to you, an anecdote to reflect on later to yourself, for reasons we have not yet fathomed. And if you think as you will, take your time and your leave when you want, walk off unaware of, or indifferent to, the laughter and the pity and the cunts, you would surely have won the day, a victory in a contest you had no idea of and which those trapped in their conventions, their derision and their pity, couldn’t even conceive of.
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