Being on top is a hobby for me, but some people try to turn it into a profession. The results are seldom attractive. Like the guy yesterday with the Mercedes. Where is he today? Well, I’ll tell you – he’s somewhere feeling bad and driving a rental. And guess where I am?
Sure, pantless and sleeping behind Wal-Mart, but otherwise enjoying the sweet and dawning memory of that Mercedes I drove last night. There’s also the less pleasant memory of mechanical failure after some off-road hill-climbing, but that recollection is a little hazy and anyway the point is this: as a hobbyist, I don’t give a shit. When I’m on top, it’s a hoot, it’s a weekend thing or something I do with friends and a twelve-pack.
Once it becomes work it’s no longer fun.
So this morning I am not exactly a winner, but for now I don’t care to be. Success just infects you with pride, and pride ain’t gonna help me walk into Wal-Mart in my boxers and walk out in a free pair of pants. Pragmatism is the order of the day.
Part of me wishes that I still had the Mercedes, but Mother Nature is now calling that car back to its constituent elements. Rust in peace.
No, today calls for a focused practicality. Jeremy is thirsty and my Jessica needs a vacation, poor dear. And the next step required to move today forward is those pants. I know where they are (the men’s section) and I know how I’ll pay for them (with skill and imagination), so now I need to put boldness into action and see if I can’t get Jeremy to go in there and steal them for me.
He won’t, though.
“How about this, then,” I tell him, and God bless him, he is listening to me as if I weren’t going to re-formulate the same sentence in a bald effort to mislead him. He is the kindest man I know.
“You go in there,” I continue, “you pull some sweatpants over your trousers, you raise a ruckus, and then you get yourself kicked out by security.”
Not my best plan, but Jeremy is giving me that look and I can’t concentrate.
“Get your own damn pants,” he says.
“Exactly,” says I, “once I have the sweatpants, I can cover my shame, enter that store with my head held high, and steal like a man.”
Jeremy nods at this and allows that confidence is indeed important.
“Yes!” I say, “Yes! We are men of action, and men of action do not roam the local shopping center in their underwear.”
Jeremy is waking up. The gears and mechanisms that drive him are beginning to loosen and turn.
“I need breakfast,” he says.
“My friend,” I tell him, “one-stop shopping was invented for the drinking man. Aisle one, sportswear. Aisle two, Night Train.”
“Damn civilized,” Jeremy says.
“Yes, and no doubt you can sip your way through a bottle or two before you are escorted out in your new sweatpants,” I say, and he is immediately up and gone.
Jeremy’s urge for breakfast animates him sufficiently to get him off the ground and into the store, but it leaves no room for my plan, for the sweatpants first, then the drink. Instead, he walks immediately to the wine section, sits upon a case of Carlo Rossi and begins guzzling every screw-top fortified vino he can get inside of him.
Waiting outside, it is fifteen minutes before I come to my senses.
He is going to focus on his own needs, not mine, and I am a fool to think differently.