Returns

"Except for death and paying taxes
Everything in life
Is only for now."

-- Avenue Q, "For Now"

--

Hit up a Hipster party last night, on account of my girlfriend's favorite band playing a house-party gig in Clifton. I've read a little on the Hipster movement, the subculture that has gripped most of the liberally-minded, white, affluent, disappointed adolescents in this part of Cincinnati. Most of what I knew of them came from online mag articles posted by the Sad Bear bloggers, but after last night, I have my own contribution, this one from direct, unadulterated first-hand experience.

They stink. I'm serious. They stink so badly. I've never smelled such sweat, such grease, such cigarette-stained rancor. There's something about dirt that is honorable, that speaks of suffering and work and devotion to the raw experience of life, but there is also something about dirt that is, well, dirty. Poor hygiene. The gnawing, churning sensation of a lot of people who never really learned to curb the secretions of their bodies. The general impression that the house, the folks bobbing heads to too-fast boom-TICK-boom-TICK drumbeats in the cold, drafty, crowded basement, on the charred cement floor between spray-painted walls,--all of this, these images and odors, it all combines to tell you one thing about the Hipsters: They want to stink. They smell bad on purpose.

No, thank you. Thanks for the music (actually, I really only liked song #4 in the set, but then, I was too tired to get really into it), and thanks for the perspective.

--

There was, however, a crayon party happening in the dining room, on the main floor. Some art majors had donated 120 crayons and some thirty or so wax pastels, and the sheets from three oversize sketchbooks, and people sat and scribbled whatever they wanted, for as long as they wanted. Teresa and I created a Dali-esque landscape, complete with a stone bridge, a hand growing out of the earth and flinging a yo-yo sun into the sky, and a robot in the corner wondering whether he was in love. The kid across from us said that he was gifted by God with the ability to draw anyone's name in the shape of an AK-47; from what I saw, he was right. And the guy to our left said he was from a town halfway to Columbus called Washington Court House, Ohio.

--

Today, I just finished e-filing my taxes. Assuming the Internet was right, and I didn't overlook some numbered box with extra income, I should be getting about two months' rent back in about two weeks' time. With that money, I hope to buy either a computer or a car. My laptop's almost on the full-out fritz (one in every five boot-up attempts freezes), and I can only continue to survive on my girlfriend's auto (-matic? -mobile?) charity for so much longer. With the weather warming, I may not need the vehicle just yet.

I'd settle for a bike and a new hard drive, really. But there's a cool wind blowing today, a rough wind, full of wonder and verve. The trees are wondering where it came from, rocking back and forth like amateur public speakers, confused by March's opening hymn. We are leaving winter rapidly behind us. It's time to make some more purchases, to boost the quality of life just so.

So again, with this keeping me awake, I did my taxes--all of the damned things--with the quick and ample help of an online agency. Uncle Sam owes me some dough.

--

Tomorrow has in its itinerary the final performance of this history show, a morning (mourning?) class act, followed by an afternoon rehearsal for Tom Sawyer, an original musical. The script is a work in progress, a fledgling adaptation birthed from a stillborn play, but we seek to incubate it, to nurture it, with some careful attention to text, voice and pace. Or at the very least, with some good old-fashioned fun. And with a director who says to us, on the sly of course, that her method requires post-rehearsal drinks, fun is spelled B-E-E-R.

We meet the new actors tomorrow, too. One half of our troupe is leaving, one for the West Coast, the other for a career in customer-service representative training. One goes to the big city, the other back home. And Cincinnati remains for me a phantom town, not quite the big city, not quite home; not quite Chicago, not quite Omaha. In this hybrid city of confusing highways swooping through town in cartoon grins, in this vast array of the poor and the art-less, I will continue to act, to prepare faces to meet the faces that I meet.

Or something like that.