"Nice Tie"

           So, I’m sitting at my local Grand Central Bakery, drinking my coffee, reading my Hegel, when an older man, wearing a slick top hat and an aqua sweater, settling in at a table beside me says, “Nice tie,” to which I respond in good faith, “Thanks,” to which he quips, “I sold mine,” before turning away in apparent embarrassment, for me, to share a cackle with an audience that consisted of few more old people at another table and a younger couple of would-be dance instructors at another. At that moment, I couldn’t help but feel like somehow, someway I’d managed to wander into the butt of a Rodney Dangerfield joke, circa Caddy Shack; “Nice hat. What, I bet you get a free bowl of soup with a hat like that. Oh, but it looks good on you though.”

Now, I didn’t respond to the older man wearing the stupid top hat and ugly aqua sweater (take that!), but not because I didn’t have possible responses kicking around in my head (e.g., “Hey buddy, this tie’s Italian!”); rather, I was so totally dumbfounded as to what the possible motivations of this old man wearing the stupid top hat and ugly aqua sweater could be, that my body and mouth plumb locked-up, froze, stuttered; I ended up just numbly returning to my coffee and my Hegel, doing my best, for whatever reason, not to tap the the older man on the shoulder and ask, “What the hell was that all about?”

Thought of the Day comes from Jean-Francois Lyotard, who writes, “When you can simulate in vitro the explosion of the sun or the fertilization or gestation of a living creature, you have to decide, what you want. And we just don’t know” (“Logos and Techne, or Telegraphy”, The Inhuman, 53-4)