From: Snook (The Elder) at Home

Of Fashion Statements

Lenore and I were out late last night buying books at one of those remainders shops that can be found here and there about the city. (Yes, I admit that I occasionally stomp the throat of the honest bookseller thus. But let's not dwell on that, eh?)

Satisfied--after an hour's worth of plundering--that we could fit no more books between our chins and loosely cradled hands, we made our way to the till. And the woman there (the cashier, I mean) had a most extraordinary appearance! She wore a black beret and turtle neck--which was entertaining by itself--but what really caught my attention was her eyebrows. Either she didn't have any or considered it necessary that she should shave them off (Lenore insists that waxing was the more likely procedure), and in their place she had drawn a pair of straight lines, like shallow-pitched ramps, each running from the bridge of her nose out to the perimeter of her forehead.

Her sweetness precluded my suggesting that all she needed now was a couple of stick figures pushing wheelbarrows up and down them.

As we were leaving it became clear that the fellow who had been waiting in line behind us, with a pony-tail and wearing a black trench coat, was her beau. She greeted him as her "partner", you see (code, apparently--employed both to spite capitalist fat cats, and to remind the Proletariat of the non-existence of genitals). He too was oddly adorned: his nose, ears, and mouth displaying the tackle of an apparatus which I took to be a pulley system sans the rope. It is my guess that he was in the process of developing a method for hands-free dining.

It seems to me that this generation has managed to twin the most unlikely things: an almost gruesomely functional appearance with a total lack of pragmatism.

Still, viva la revolución/différence!