People with kids are a monolith: Robbed of taste by circumstance, they can no longer engage the zeitgeist. They are occupied by their strollers and giant cars full of crayons and Cheerios, and therefore ignorant to culture, fashion, and habitat. They are broken people, devoid of personality and potential.
Unlike other groups, no special criteria must be satisfied to make friends among parents. All they require for kinship is the feeling of shared experience: people they can relate to over their unknowable struggle.
People with kids describe this exclusive condition with poetic hyperbole: agony of this, ecstasy of that; short years of long days. Your heart living outside your body.
All this grandstanding feeds parents’ insufferable air of superiority. They think they’re doing something noble with their lives, and everyone else is wasting theirs.
Pocket Dispatch from Shit Fountain
When we bought our first apartment we explored the neighborhood more thoroughly, no longer as a place we liked but as a place to which we now laid some claim. Through this process we came to know Shit Fountain, a sculpture of an impossibly large coil of dog feces, maybe two-and-a-half feet in diameter, shiny and wet from the water babbling from its tip, and mounted on a pedestal about four feet tall.
The artist’s statement was directed at neighborhood dog owners who neglect to clean up after their pets, imperiling floor mats and welcome rugs everywhere. Ours is a shoe-free household, but even the worn carpet of our building’s staircase has fallen victim to the violent laziness of certain local dogspeople.
I found it tasteless. When Shit Fountain first appeared on mapping apps, I flagged its name for editing when its name wasn’t censored. But its presence there also made it a landmark we used to help guests and delivery drivers find our apartment. Despite my resentment, Shit Fountain served me.
And even in my disdain for it, I never hoped it would be removed. Censorship of the work itself never seemed appropriate. Even the vulgar name only bothered me contextually, like when my daughter learned to read well enough to ask what it meant.
Whatever my feelings, Shit Fountain remains an enduring fixture, and I have come to appreciate it as political art and a fine tip on the neighborhood’s edge.
Still, I was surprised Shit Fountain grew on me. I realized it one Sunday afternoon when I was looking for parking and found a spot in front of it, where a group of brunch revelers were posing for photos with it. This was typical, but I was surprised to see one of them climbing the fountain.
He planted a foot on the edge of the pedestal, braced his weight with a hand on another sculpture and placed his feet on two edges of the fountain’s pedestal. Then he squatted so as to appear to have produced the coil himself. He grinned at the friend taking his photo and gave a thumbs up.
For some reason I was offended by this. Although I’d watched tourists pose stupidly in front of Shit Fountain for years, something about this guy bruised my pride in our neighborhood, which harbors the artist who created it. Or my pride in the artist, who harbors our neighborhood.
I parked far, leaving more than a foot between my tires and the curb. Not my best work, and an embarrassment of another kind to deal with later. Then I threw open the car door.
“Hey, I know it’s super funny to take your picture with it like that,” I said, dragging out “super” for effect. “But it’s still a piece of art, and you can treat it with respect.”
The man’s eyes widened, and his friends turned to look as he hopped down.
“Sorry,” he said.
I ignored him and took two bags out of my trunk, locked the car, and walked off toward my apartment.
Fucking kids.
Pocket Dispatch from Wood Street at Haddon
A man in his 60’s is playing house music from a Bluetooth speaker in the milk crate on the back of his bicycle.
He seems to understand we are only bugs who might as well play while we briefly crawl this planet. Be silly! The purpose of your existence is to consume and procreate so that our consumption might flourish until the planet can sustain no more and we perish together.
How can I be more like him? What changes are necessary in my life to foster such a lightness of being? What seeds can I sow now to reap his playful vigor at his age, instead of growing more bitter and sad, bent over, head heavy with regret and resentment?
I must disco. Youth is a fleeting physical state, but can be a permanent state of mind. One does not simply retire from the disco. One becomes the disco.
Be the disco everywhere you go, in everything you do.
Pocket dispatch from host stand (bouncer diary)
Party of six. Pre-gamers at their final stop. Two of the girls drop their IDs when I card them. They’re carrying snacks and open containers, which I confiscate.
They’re celebrating a birthday, the answer to a question I didn’t ask. One of the boys, probably late 20’s, sizes me up. I pretend not to notice and say have a nice night as I click my counter six times, turn to the next group, and hold up my hand.
A lot of the art of my job is how you stop people. The nuances of that initial interaction set the tone for the whole exchange.
First I make the traditional stop sign, then I twist it in a sort of half queen’s wave as I make a little smile with one corner of my mouth. “How we doing tonight?” It tells people I’m in charge but makes them feel like maybe I’m happy to see them.
If the guest feels any sting of rejection, a fight’s begun whether or not either of you was looking for one. I can usually feel that heat radiating off them before they do, right when they step up to my stand. But I take the temperature of the situation again as I check each ID. I look them in the eye after looking over the card. They think I’m checking they match the card, but I’ve already done that. I’m looking them in the eye for a flash of indignation, or worse, a cold, dead stare and a clenched jaw. Those are the boys to look out for: more liquid confidence than sense, and plenty to prove. Usually there’s nothing more on board than a pocket knife and twitchy hands, but now and then there’s a gun in the waistband. Those types like clubs, so I see more guns at work than on the street.
The next group is a foursome. Some kind of double date, but casual. Too casual. The guys have ill-fitting jeans and their untucked button shirts are ten years late. At my last job, the crowd was more curated and I could turn people away for bad style. But I got the ax when new owners took over, and I didn’t have the kind of savings that would have allowed me to be choosy.
I check ID’s and wave them in, soul patches and all. …
The truth is some people are already looking for a fight when they get up in the morning, it just doesn’t come out of them until they’re drunk and standing in line to get into my club. They swallow the feeling all day, go to work, fight traffic, take shit from their bosses and co-workers, then come home tired and try to shake it off for a night out so they can let loose. What exactly they’re letting loose is a surprise sometimes.