Checking in on my decay

 Ah, a report from nine years ago! Found this in my miscellanea, and recognized that frown. It  has now become the American Gothic. I should be holding a pitchfork at all times. Although that might be a little difficult when I have to go through customs.

I figure the writer, or this writer, should check in with his decay every once in a while, push and pull it.  I have aimed to follow the commandment to "know thyself" ever since I read it in the eighth grade, and I take it that it involves the body as well as the soul, the wounds and the warts, the lost hair and lost brain cells - all the self stuff. I'm down with aspectual dualism: Ahab and the Pequod, like body and soul, are one and different, bound and somehow loose.  It is a natural law, and perhaps a moral conundrum, that the captain must go down with the ship - no exceptions. So this was the ship in 2016 in Los Angeles.

 ...

Mirror in the restaurant

The frown that age etches into your face – or at least my face – is a curious thing, at least when I encounter it all suddenly in a mirror. For instance, here, in the mirror that spans the back wall at Wexlers, put there I suppose so that as you stand waiting for your food you can see yourself and as you eat your bagel and drink your coffee you can be vaguely haunted by your virtual image, above you in the mirror, looking over your shoulder if you are sitting on the banquette. Maybe it gets you out of there some seconds quicker, time for the next customer.

Is the frown simply the result of the second law of thermodynamics, the face’s energy, after all these years, drainging into an entropic catchment? Possibly. After all, the smile goes up, against the current. It is a minor monument of our great struggle not to give up. Gravity pulls us down, even our thin lips – or my thin lips. Don’t have much there.

But physiology is not destiny, or at least not all of destiny. There’s an affective history behind our expression. That at least is how we read faces.

This is funny. In my memory, I’m quite the laughin guy. I’m a smiling fool. I’m not the frowning geezer I meet here in the deli.

Perhaps, I think, it is an after-effect of my bad decade, 2001 through 2008, the Bush years. I went through those years like – well, if you’ve ever seen the music video for Peter Gabriel’s Shock the Monkey, that was me. Chattering screaming banging my cage and soiling myself. It was like American culture was out to get me.

But maybe I should just take it as a sign that I need to get happier. Get more Californian. Get all smily and surf’s up. I wonder if this is going to be possible.