To go to the Library or the Park: that is the question.

At the moment, I am unemployed.  I used to lifeguard, which worked well when I pursued a career on an Olympic Development Team as a cross-country skier, but now that I have decided to stop skiing competitively, I have also decided to put behind me the unbearably bland days of watching the water (I can think of no better euphemism).

I applied as a substitute teacher and hopefully, I get enough work to subsist [If not, the money I make from adsense will have to do (I made two dollars yesterday and before that I had a running total of one cent) Indeed, I was psyched –nay amazed –to see that I had made two dollars].  But in everything there is comedy and I couldn’t help from laughing when I was reading an article in The New Yorker yesterday called “The Death of Kings: Notes from a Meltdown” and I made it three quarters of the way through the article, when I came to a paragraph that branded shame into my complacency.  It was exactly the same as the one transcribed below:

“Economists like to draw lessons from Japan’s lost decade –to see in its example of zombie banks, futile half-measures, mass denial, and a moribund Nikkei a primer in how denial doesn’t pay.  But human nature holds sway, down even at the level of the neighborhood.  In Japan, during the long stagnation, men who had lost their jobs but couldn’t face the shame of telling their neighbors would dress up for work and then spend the day in the library or the park.” 

I can’t say that I get up in the morning and don my red shorts and shirt that bears the word GUARD –made more prominent by the fact that I decided to drop down to a size small once my sinewy ski muscles atrophied accordingly, but by the time I finish the above article on our financial predicament, I will have already finished the article in a park, half a mile from where I began it in the library.  The librarians, perhaps out of pity, give me the old New Yorkers so that I don’t have to bore myself by spending all of my day in one place.

What is it about these two locations that evade the percolations of that rudely awakening existential question that totters over the edge of any café counter or coffee kiosk as we culpably ask for a short, still maintaining some length, black, yet rarely done, latté grandée, a lifestyle that given the circumstances, is currently unsustainable.  And we think that the frothiness, of which we request double, will bury the question.  But the question is everywhere: in the cents we spend on it, in the scents that emanate from it, and in the sense, of which there is none because this question will steam its way to the surface of any espresso, will separate anything we attempt to stir into it, will burn through any enjoyment we try to sip from it.  Fortunately, for me, I have never liked coffee.

Perhaps the park is too windy and too bright for the aroma of such dark flavors and my skimming façade of studiousness in the library is sufficient to suppress any intellectual uncertainties.  Or perhaps, it is just because the visitation of each of these places is free; where as if I even tried to squat at a coffee shop, the empty cup left at my table would be laden with the residue of guilty grinds.

In my worst days, I visit two parks.

But sometimes it is in our own dregs of disgust that the ego flicks the switch of its survival mechanism, which involves putting the attention not on you but on others; a light bulb lit in my head that suggested I could use my time in the park to sit and judge others.  I already know all the aphorisms: that when I point a finger, three point back at myself or before I judge someone else walk a mile in their shoes and you should remember this when you think to judge me.  Got to go.