April 24, 2007

A cigarette, Oscar Wilde quipped, “is the perfect type of perfect pleasure. It is exquisite, and it leaves one unsatisfied. What more can one want?”

At the risk of indulging in fatal sincerity, I have attempted, at various time in my life, to bring the aesthete that lives in my head out into the world. It’s a lot of work, and I failed consistently, which is why I have terrible furniture.

This is due, in part, to mere matters of finance. I am not as enamored of debt as Mr. Wilde was, and the era of patronage is over. It also takes more leisure time than I currently have to locate appropriately impressive bookcases, and the siren call of Ikea is strong.

So: I do what I can. I own ridiculously expensive shirts, because the fabrics and colors are unmatched. At work, I wear fashionable jackets, which everyone assumes is because I'm from back East, but is, in actuality, because I don't really do office casual, not the way they do it here in California. It's a deliberate choice, like adorning my body with various bits of titanium and steel. My mannerisms are occasionally epicene, another choice I make: not so much to be effete, but, rather, to not suppress such effects, because I see no need to.

Ultimately, like a cigarette, all of these choices may prove unsatisfying. But I won't know unless I've tried them, will I? At some point in my late 20s, I put many of these characteristics aside, and I've come to regret that. So I will spend some time being more of who I was then, because I strongly suspect that is, in fact, who I am now. And even if the choices do prove to be unsatisfying...they'll still be perfect.

Not that all of this is, necessarily, the stuff of riveting blog-style reading. But: this place has always been about me, really. Now, it is more openly so.

To the dance!