The Jenga Echo Chamber

The great principle of English law is to make business for itself.-- Charles Dickens, Bleak House

 I may have had money once, briefly, forged on the dried grinds of feral welfare culture, once I left behind Daddy’s rat pack wheeling and dealing, but Bed Bath & Beyond , founded in 1971, encapsulated upper caste suburbia I would have never been able to capture on my own without the right marriage, but that was never forthcoming in the bracketed time young women have to recognize and forge the character of the hypothetical man in question, so the death of Gustavo this past Friday, who wasn’t the retailer’s CFO for any great length of time, is not only reminiscent of the 1929 suicides which ushered in The Great Depression, which arguably didn’t end until the GI Bill picked up pace after 1944, it is also a harbinger of the American upper class warped by a pandemic decompression. Not only will the last boomer deaths signify the loss of what life was like before the digital age, but there never will be a reverting back to normal  after COVID-19, ever, not when otherwise reasonably ambulatory men like Amal emote beyond rationality in such a spectacular fashion. Businesses fail, even in state model economies, and one man’s ruin is not necessarily only one step out of the gutter, beaten to a pulp, horizon eclipsed and narrowed by the weaknesses of age. This same sort of visceral reaction pierced the gut when Robin Williams took his life in 2014. The comedian, however, in the passage of time, had a debilitating diagnosis. Amal had pressure. Some of us should be so lucky to still have a head in the game.

The Second Law of Thermodynamics

"The law always wins," -- retired FBI agent  Steve Moore,  not square enough not to know better.

If we grantt sufficient levels of cognitive awareness behind the assertion, all humans have coping mechanisms for those compartments lacking in emotional fulfillment, and my relationship to the family who ran the Golden Lake Chinese take-out on the cross grid at 20^th and Market Streets was one of those, though points of reference are clandestine and otherwise relatively infinitesimal, as thin  as gruel; clandestine because it often involved the envelope of darkness in the depth of night, sometimes barreling my mobility device in a rush of motor parsing our fortuitous lower atmosphere, with its prevalence of nitrogen and the lesser one twentieth amount of oxygen most complex organisms need to keep hemoglobin enriched and flowing; Infinitesimal because I was simply a responsible customer not truly overtaken by culinary aesthetics one might find in a late eighties avant garde parable like Tampopo, a niche film, forever endeared to me, but let us condemn the impatience which never gave Juzo Itami enough credit for the absolute joy of life she embodies, whether it be through gangsters in their last moments discussing pigs guts or saving an old man choking to death at a noodle counter. Golden Lake was more hit or miss with indulgent carbs than a true gateway into the glass encased globe of cultural diversity. The restaurant was nothing more than a ground floor conversion of Philadelphia’s industrial era row homes, as you can see from the photo, and as is usual for powerchair dependence, braving the one step up with a left turn to enter into the well trafficked linoleum was a hazard, so the children met me at the partitioned glass door, or their mother, less often the men, men whom would not tolerate my queries to them in American English, always for the sake of an article, in this case something along the lines of an assimilation antithesis given the sinews and reticent, warded off nature of Chinese and Korean social groupings within American urban environments. Egg foo young, indifferent or enthusiastic, we have transposed it into generic expectation, kilograms of steamed rice which hold their shape, a nearly rubbery omelet entrapping pork, shrimp, onion rims, perhaps caramelized, the type of takeout which threatens the poor into a stoic acceptance of nutritious cardboard. We’ve all been in one place too long if these are the threadbare locomotions we’ve left to mourn.