real world update, part five

You need not remind me, see it every morning when I look in the mirror. I know who I am. It is a blessing that I can't help but to take for granted. Yet I must confess that from time to time it grows tiresome. There are those rare moments when life seems almost a burden. Well, okay not a burden, but at times I do feel encumbered by my name. We all have our moments when we wish we were someone else. For most people, those moments are filled with dreams of being me. As for me, well, I guess I don't go so far as to actually wish I was another. How foolish would that be? Really now, you've seen me. How could me or anyone not want to be me, with that whole single, filthy rich, and so fucking hot I've made lesbians switch teams thing that I've got going on.

Still, I feel the need for brief respite once in a while.

When I was a young child growing up in my isolated and insulated upper Manhattan world my father, The Bastard, would sometimes disappear for weeks at a time. When I asked my mother where he went she would say something about a business trip. He would inevitably come home unkempt, unshorn and dishevelled, covered with the filth and reeking with the stench of the city. He would answer my queries with rambling comments about how we should all take turns in the gutters dreaming about cars like we all spend time in the darkness dreaming about stars. He's weird like that, my father, The Bastard.

Sometimes I feel one of my turns coming on.

When that mood strikes, I forego my usual impecable grooming and immaculate fashion and just let it be for a few days. No showers, no shaving, no combing my perfect hair.

I grab a truck-stop baseball cap, convenience store sunglasses and some off the rack clothes from a second hand thrift store. I head out into the world, just to imagine and to play.

I once found it quite entertaining to go out in such a state and splatter my clothes with copious quantities of theatrical blood. I'd leave the comforts of the city and venture up the suburban freeway to some Big Box Hardware Store. I'd absently wander the warehouse aisles, filling my cart with things like shovels, rope, rolls of duct tape and industrial size trash bags or plastic tarps.

Then just for kicks, I'd push my cart up to some part-time high school kid in the cleaning supply section and ask them what product they would recommend to get blood stains out of carpet. Or I'd stop in the power tools section and ask some Bob Villa wannabe which saw works best for cutting bone.

Ah, the looks on their faces. Priceless.

I stopped doing that after 9/11. That damned day should also go down in history as the day our great nation's sense of humor died.

This evening I felt the urge to briefly escape my gilded cage and get away from me for awhile. In an attempt to alleviate my growing boredom I travelled to the suburbs in my slumming it incognito style sans the theatrical blood. I stopped at one of those mega supermarkets with parking lots full of SUVs and aisles full of soccer moms buying boxes of fruit roll-ups and frozen microwave dinners.

I filled a cart with cases of cheap canned beer, boxes of condoms, and several cans of that weird spray cheese that tastes good on a cracker.

I wandered the aisles with my cart full of a party waiting to happen, acting for all the world like a way past his prime David Lee Roth asking women without male escorts if they were looking for a good time.

I received the anticipated and highly amusing looks of disgust, fear and loathing from my fellow shoppers. One woman actually called me repulsive and disgusting. Several turned away to avoid having to pass me in the aisle. Men straightened their posture, puffed their chests and gave me menacing glares. Primate behavior baby, just like those monkeys in the jungle.

I was expecting to do this for a half hour or so and then store security would come up to throw me out. We'd have a good laugh, I'd toss them a few c-notes for their trouble and we'd all be on our happy way.

I never expected those three women on the frozen food aisle to say yes.

As they abandoned their basket of ice cream, brownie mix, and cheap chardonnay I noticed it also held a current issue of one those tabloid rags. On the cover I saw a small photo of me leaving the courthouse a week or so ago beneath hyped photos of dead Anna and that rehabed bitch Britney.

Fuck. My cover was blown. They called my bluff.

I'm a Barrington. I don't bluff. I don't need to. It ain't braggin' if it's true.

I have just returned home. Oh, what a night it's been. I had never imagined doing that with spray cheese.