Strange folk, these Americans.
If actions speak louder than words, is money really the ultimate means of communication?
Maybe daddy dearest was right, that buying me Private School Education was more important than helping me carve my identity.
In the old world, I have few doubts that he may have been a little more right.
But here... In this magic land of warm wiccan stores and geek-barbecues where circles of shiny people share doobs and hurl quips sharper than spears...
It's the scheduled Sunday afternoon melodrama where I turn around and wonder which way I should fork my road next.
Meander slightly to the left this time, maybe? Drag out my ploughshare and carve a monstrian trough in uncharted wheatfields.
Dig a little deeper, as one might say, though possibly one more preoccupied with old things and with less insight into the monstrian process.
Heh.
Maybe it is time for the ploughsahre, though - as opposed to the copper rocket.
Maybe I've sent enough walls sky-high, and it's time to pause awhiles and pile the debris into new stratifications, new unrecognizable labours of art.
Regardless, I still hold by the ultimate in self-centered arrogant statements - that I am not people.
I, as I've iterated a thousand times before, some in reminder to myself, some in largely unheeded warning, some in sheer exuberance - am not people.
I am monstrous.
Maybe the kind your mother warned you about, skulking just beneath the veneer of the Safe Places, but mostly the kind that will bite you if you kiss them, but not hard.
Never too hard.
Well, not usually.
I still hold to the arrogant idea that I react in my masks, that they are inversed energy barriers for the nervous, and faint of heart.
I maintain, that if I am behaving Out Of Character, it is because you perceive me as Out Of Character.
I know I am an idiot.
I know, that when Marc says something piercingly intelligent, I feel momentarily lost, scrounging for handhold.
I also know, as well as a soldier knows the staggering outline of his opponent's eyelashes, when that overturning in my confidence begins to rumble.
And I know when it is stolid and rock-hard, and it is you in your nervousness at my approach, you in your self-imposed intimidation, that are painting me as a trembling lilly,
tremulous, and afraid, and spilling over with childish prurience.
I will always be too old for my youth, and too young for my age
or perhaps I am simply being contrary.
I am the Great Contrariness.
But I am never afraid.
And I will barter my shawl for an icepick any time, and perhaps, when you look beyond the truths you have come to lean on so heavily that a MonStreal breeze may upset you,
you will think quietly to yourself
I have seen butterflies more fearsome
and roasted cockroaches more dangerous
than a monstre with an icepick, in the shadow of a lass in a floral-print skirt.
Because an ice-pick cannot stab you in the back, perhaps.
Or perhaps it is far less simple.