news  |  recent  |  archives  |  dispatches  |  goods  |  contributing  |  about
inane annals
Their Circles
by Mark Pompeo | 02 Feb 2007, 0:00

You know the other day I was in this room full of people and some girl happened to ask me where I was from. Just for shit and giggles I told her that I was from "Orange", and she gave me some sniggling little comment like "nothing happens there", or the like. I asked her if that was a chortle or a guffaw and then she kind of looked at me blankly and then I asked her where she was from and she told me that she grew up in Hancock Park. And sure, I could have applied reason, but these things tempt me and besides I knew that I had her where I wanted her, that she had opened the door, that I could now hit here where she lived and piss in her punch bowl with impunity. And so I stood up and in a voice that was probably a little too loud drew the room's attention to myself and said that it occurred to me that people in Long Beach look down on people in Orange County, and that people in LA look down on people in Long Beach, and that people in San Francisco look down on people in LA, and god forbid you should be from some place like Washington or Oregon, or Wyoming or Kansas, then you don't even get looked down on you get looked past, and of course people in New York look down on people in San Francisco, and that people in Paris look down on people in New York, but that the funny thing is that people in Tokyo look down on people in Paris, they think the French are a bunch of deracinated fags, which they are, but that the thing that is really funny is that I look down on the Japs, and what I wonder is where this is all going to end, and I personally think that it should end right here in this room, I think that everyone in this room should look down on everyone not in this room, and by the way the minute you leave this room everyone here is going to begin looking down on you, and anyone who walks in the room we are going to treat as borderline at best. Now of course you can imagine their chagrin, I mean it wasn't so much that I pissed in their punchbowl but that I was the turd in it. And I thought about giving them the moral of it, the fact that all of us are provincials and we all live in backwaters, and that each of us possesses an ignorance that is vast and uncharted, and that no matter what you know or how much you know about it, there is always someone somewhere who can walk into a room and school your shit. But I just left them hanging.

[comments]