Strolling Across Town in anticlimatic

There is an interesting little street on the other side of the river, about a block long, connecting the McManus Bridge to the old Industrial quarter (currently undergoing gentrification). The street is owned by The Tribe on one side- where they build homes and hand them out, via council of elders, to various Natives in (theoretical) need. On the other side of the street is the AA Church, the male and female halfway houses for the county jail, a couple condemned houses and a few more privately owned by lower-middle-class-at-best folks.

It’s one of my favorite streets to cycle down in the evenings, in the summer. Half of the residents sit on their front porches taking in the sunset and that cool post-afternoon, pre-dusk breeze. Half of them smoke cigarettes, and the smell of it in the air takes me back to the bars of my childhood (when you could still smoke indoors) and all the adventures I had in my youth in lands forgotten.

Summer is soon upon us, and although I take most of it off, I do occasionally have to venture into the belly of the beast for emergencies and actually deal with my own customers face to face- rather than having their houses completely to myself the other 10 months out of the year. I am not looking forward to a single interaction, but some are surprisingly enjoyable. For some reason I get on well with the Matriarchs: the oldest surviving woman of these big wealthy families. I think it’s my insistence on mannered language and etiquette, but I always understand what they are getting at and have warm feelings when the interaction is over.

Their sons are often good enough guys that, though a little off relative to what I am used to, are also warm communicators. Their wives, the younger wives- often who married into things- are less charming, I fear. Surviving older men, for some reason- wealthy older men, are often insufferable (though occasionally as kind as Christ), and I get on with them about as poorly as I do the rich trust fund “grandchildren” that ‘we who are workers’ affectionately refer to as “pajama boys,” for reasons I’ll let you deduce.

Occasionally I’ll have to do some work at the golf club and see all these people out and about in their full glory, and it is Tough with a capital T. The way they move about- shuffling, hands awkwardly held- like their senses have atrophied. Or been pampered so much that they are now dependent on only the most controlled environments to function normally.

I consider myself a sensual person, almost to the extreme- just in that I interact with the world primarily through my 5 senses directly these days. Last ten or fifteen years I’d say, after a lifetime prior of interacting with the world through theory, intuition, conjecture, and speculation. I don’t remember now exactly what brought the change, but there is something about a sensual life- a stop and smell the roses, or look at the stars life- that is............the most priceless treasure a person can discover, I believe. No wonder I never looked back.