the incredible sulk

We were breakfasting at the Blue Plate, and this couple comes in - they're boho, edgy, but older, you know. They have energy, good smiles. Jacket that wants to be a couch and a naughts variation on cat's-eye glasses for her, puma gear and gravity pope shoes for him. Probably vestibules at home layered with confusing sex toys. Letters-to-the-editor sheen. They're nearing fifty.

Two minutes after they sit down, they both get up and they're standing in the middle of the restaurant, looking with chins perched on fists at the new painting on the wall directly between me and the woman of my dreams. Basically they are staring at us, and in a really ostentatious way, which means that now everyone is looking at us to see how we'll respond to this awful, dickish behaviour.

The painting itself is a Nintendo oil-slick of pastel blue and splotches of Mondrian red and gold. It looks like someone's dream of Super Mario Bros. It's hard to eat beside, actually. But I didn't hate it until this fucking couple made a capital p point of taking it in.

There's art all over the walls, everywhere, and this painting beside my head isn't the only new one. It sure is the loudest thing around, though, and so of course this guy with the bright shiny green workout jacket and his SO with the carefully measured bangs are flies on cowshit with it. Which would be fine if it were our living room and we'd invited them over. That was not, however, the reality of the fucking situation.

Whatever I said would have been some kind of comment on the situation, and there'd be no way to keep that out of my voice. So I couldn't really say anything. I couldn't try to ignore them and get back to what we were talking about, either, because what we were talking about was how I should really try to find some kind of job where I'm interacting with people more, because I feel like I'm getting better with that, and so does she, feel that way about me, meaning. In the fullness of time, I'm seeing that I really am doing better, and so maybe it's time to get a job where I can move forward and build on these burgeoning people skills instead of just being a security guard again. I feel like if I get a job as a security guard (once we get to Ireland, meaning. I really haved no idea if I could be a loader operator over there, though I'm sure they have loaders, and they are having some celtic tiger crap with their strong economy, so I guess anything is possible but what I'm saying is that I have no idea what I'll get a job doing there or what will be possible), I'll be taking a huge step backwards.

So we can't return to this conversation, especially because it's just now coming to me how if I were a fully functional agent of appropriate social behaviour I would tell these horrible people to please sit down and stop making us feel uncomfortable. I am not going to say anything like that, or crack something like asking them if they'd prefer if my girlfriend and I switched seats so they could get an idea what it would look like in a different setting, so how good am I doing with people, really, anyways? If I can't put these metrotwats in their place? The very situation was negating the conversation it had interrupted.

So we were hostage to silence, waiting until they were finished. I started to think, too - are we becoming these people? Is this us in twenty years? It must never be allowed to happen.