Seis de Mayo

It’s 12:56 A.M. on the seis of Mayo which is to say the evening didn’t end as surreptitiously as nights do where a tequila tradition prevails. My friend works for the city (not just any city, but New York) and he is passed out on my couch behind me. He has thrown up multiple times. At a party for the occasion, three white people drank and smoked themselves silly and the participating Latin (the one who works for not-just-any-city) was the only reveler to not make it home. My friend, the not-even-Mexican-but Puerto-Rican dry-heaved for an hour into my toilet so audibly that we could hear him from outside the apartment.

Outside, we were talking politics. Would this be it? Would this be the night my friends sit with me and finally convert me to support Barack Obama? These are the stupid things we do, to sit like Socrates did, and just talk and talk and talk like we’re going to decide how the oceans will twist in harmony even as their volumes are capering to us, to end us.

Socrates was killed by the state, what great men weren’t? Let’s not contend that. Let’s talk about how there are no words from his own pen on paper. There were disciples, who famously recollected (oh bless recollection) his speeches and put them onto paper, to transcend what Athenian poison stunted.

The disciples, they are getting less and less reliable. I won’t name specifics. So while I am cornered in my own space, it is two-on-one about Obama (previously three-on-one before a certain employee of the state’s intolerance toward gravity took ahold). Peers are dying to have this conversation with me. Look at me being a recalcitrant, a curse of the counterculture, supporting this woman.

We talk about the I-summon-the-image-of-a-completely-obstinate-bitch complex. What great women weren’t? Name the recent heads of state. Merkel, Meir, Gandhi, or even Peron, they weren’t soft women. I hate the phrase, but it is a mirror of our humanly fragrant sensibilities; soft women remain flippantly regarded, though an edge portends a horn on the elk. We know what we’re getting; the ceiling is set and not massive (but enough) and the basement is short (likely enough).

They Say: What if: the rest of the world saw what we were doing, taking a pawn of history and announcing his arrival, passing him by the last row beside the rook and making him the most powerful player on a board of dead bishops and martyred pawns. Would the bridges align? Would the vines stretch across the continents and we would all drink the same malbec?

This is a trend to me. It’s May and he hasn’t closed yet. It’s not because of Anderson Cooper. Not even because of Bill O’Reilly. There is a subterranean pulsing, my friends, it’s not just the hero waiting in the ring, it’s the crowd that remembers a subversion in the course of malaise, when we were not formica, when the world brushed against us for the decent questions, and they search for answers didn’t pass through us to get somewhere else. I am almost 27 years old, how can I possibly know that?

I am in a small grad school coil atop a large slinky of younger undergraduates. I’d never employ the artistic use of slinky if it weren’t their decade’s mantra. They know of a time when we stood (mostly) compassionately above a winding hurdled staircase, they were not cognizant of it, but they feel it like the Russians feel Sputnik or Stalingrad. The toy is on its way down the stairs and all they’ve collected is the dust from our ascent.

Yes, there is an urging for change, but more cogently, there is also a yearning for the coriolis effect. There was a time once and some of the sophomores don’t understand it (but around their necks they bear keys for the front doors of taken homes and they’ve never seen and) want a different lease.

What is this generation promising? I don’t want haughty celebrity tributes. I don’t want internet video. I don’t want sagacity for the sake of sagacity. It’s too much like Starbucks and I don’t buy it. Wisdom, wisdom, wisdom. Give me someone who has nothing else and doesn’t sleep, doesn’t mean anything beyond the inherent, who will be the house playing against the gambler. I wish it wasn’t so.

It hurts me that I can’t support him. I watch a Kennedyesque shoring of old shoelaces. Hooray for that. But I am watching the last sixty days with bulky hipster glasses and seeing the people we forget about, outside the city with fraying suits, requesting merely alterations. The city is for the drama; outside it’s quiet. I can almost not hear my friend heaving from there.