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Sunday, December 14. 2008
Au Revoir, Mon Rêve
this past summer.
•••• •••• •••• •••• •••• ••••
Saw the trippiest thing today on my weekly pilgrimage to the warm embrace of the Pacific Ocean: on the #30 bus there was a couple, early 20’s nice looking and the young man was sucking his thumb. At first I thought it was a gag, one of those cutesy games young lovers, or lovers young in the relationship, play, but after watching them it was clear the young man was sucking his thumb. As a habit. Really.
For nearly 15 minutes I watched in first wonderment and then shock as this young man sucked his thumb, wondering why on Earth a grown adult would do such a thing. Maybe he was just trying to shock old people (it worked), but after watching him snuggle and twitter with his girlfriend, that theory melted in the not-so-hot July afternoon.
Then I was distracted by a gaggle of young French girls who got on the bus, heading towards La Jolla Shores. They were dressed for the beach (obviously) hence the distraction. One was wearing this airy purple dress that was nearly transparent. Alas, she had a skimpy blue and white bikini underneath, but nonetheless the mystery of the shadowy figure under the purple, visible only with the proper and fleeting angle of sun light, set my imagination adrift in a warm sea of immoral thought. And it kept me from staring at the thumb sucker who was mostly forgotten for the remainder of the ride.The bus was so crowded the gaggle of French girls were standing in the aisle and when any of them wanted to move from front to back, or visa-versa, they would push against my bare right arm. You’ll just have to imagine which of their body parts were doing the pushing. It was quite a distraction.
Back in the good ole days, when I was a young(ish) college man, I took French.
Oui!
Parlez vous Français?
Je le parle pas beaucoup. Je ne parle pas Français très bien.
You’re killin’ me Smalls. Speak English.
My goal then was to study the poetry of Baudelaire in his native language at the Sorbonne. It would have been a rather quick course of study. Baudelaire was such a naughty, naughty man, he died young with but a wisp of literary works left behind, the most important of these being his collection of poetry, Les Fleurs du Mal.It was to be a year abroad in a very romantic setting with a very beautiful young woman. She and I studied French for a year, in different class times, but pretty much on the same course so we did our homework together, speaking in the little French we knew, all in an effort (for me) to maintain a “C” grade. For some reason she got a “B.” When we studied together, which was everyday, my attention was most often centered on her wonderfully exposed cleavage.
When the semester ended in May, I headed to Northern Wisconsin for a bit, thinking of my young French partner. When we returned to school that following August, she was pregnant — by another man’s sperm. Alas, the Sorbonne quickly lost its allure. Au revoir, mon rêve.
So it was on to Shakespeare and Henry V.
Back to the crowded bus with the gaggle of French girls — and the thumb sucker, lest we forget. The bus (and transit system) is a wonderful place to make friends, if you speak the same language. Alas, my year of French was gone, interrupted and forgotten over 20 years of neglect and indolence. The gaggle quickly lost interest in me and returned to the fast pace chatter of the young, only theirs was a tongue foreign to my ears. I couldn’t even eavesdrop properly. Ah, the bane of middle age, forgotten and left behind like an old piece of furniture, functional, yet no longer comfortable.
The thumb sucker and his girlfriend got off the bus a couple blocks before it reached the beach, Mission Blvd. Gotta wonder why a man in his 20’s would still be sucking his thumb. Berger, a man of low taste and questionable morals — a good man to know obviously — theorizes that the young man hasn’t been weaned from his sucking. You know, as in sucking a pacifier or his Momma’s tit.Berger’s had children, lots of them apparently, so his insight makes perfect sense. The thumb sucker’s parents never weaned him from the tit. Makes you wonder what’s for dinner when he goes home to visit mom. Makes me wonder, in that immoral imagination of mine, how much time does he spend sucking his girlfriend’s nipples and does he ever get past her breasts to enjoy the rest of her beauty, the graceful curves of the woman’s form, the warmth of her vagina on a pulsating penis.
Sucking one’s thumb may appear to be the epitome of innocence, yet innocence is lost once our carnal desires have tasted the nectar from the Tree of Knowledge. Sucking thumbs becomes, at best, a fond memory and for most, a forgotten chapter of childhood when we find so much else to pleasure with our lips and tongue.
If religion has taught us anything, it is guilt and shame; the latter for even thinking of the pleasures of life, and the former for indulging in those pleasures. To paraphrase Baudelaire, we know from birth all pleasure lies in evil.“Evil,” Baudelaire quoted, was in the Christian tradition of the word, encompassing every pleasure of the flesh. In the old religious tradition forced into our young lives, only the veneration to “God” was to be exalted, which, for all practical purposes, meant one was to subjugate him or herself to those who held the religious, and therefore political, power of the land.
A middle-aged man on a bus fantasizing the young curves beneath a purple sun dress therefore is evil, and even more so for fantasizing an adult thumb sucker wrapping his mother’s nipple in the warm embrace of his lips and tongue, imagining that the young blonde girl friend is but a surrogate for the woman the thumb sucker truly wishes to love. That it mocks the edicts of religious rigidity is one thing, but it also brings up Sigmund Freud.
The sin of Oedipus was not that he married (and had sex with) his mother, but hubris. Pride. In our society, to wish for the warm carnal embrace of one’s mother is a sin and indeed, inbreeding has its physiological problems, but what really is the sin?
To be honest, I have no carnal interest in my mother and I doubt more than a fraction of a fraction of men (or women) do, but we all, including women, have early in life, an Oedipal Complex that must be resolved before we move on. Most children resolve their Oedipal Complex before the age of eight (although it lingers subconsciously for our entire lives), but for some, the challenge of coming to terms with parents lingers long into adulthood and manifests in a variety of ways, including thumb sucking.
Sex, with its power, drives us and the suppression of that instinct inhibits our emotional growth. Few Americans grow up with a healthy attitude towards sex. Which is why beer commercials are so popular and work. Sex sells and the idea that having a Bud Light can hook me up with a young French girl in a diaphanous purple dress is a compelling fantasy.Years of experience have taught me otherwise, but the dream of that purple dress will linger and any connection to Oedipus and his famous complex will be long forgotten once I press the “publish” button on this blog’s administration menu.
Hell, Oedipus and Freud wouldn’t even be a topic of discussion if not for the thumb sucker, damn him! The real sin is, I didn’t continue my study and use of the French language. Who knows where my Sunday would have ended had I dazzled them avec mon Français.
C’est la vie.
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