medius ocris

The Palookaville Mental Health Walking Team 2006 is in bad shape, literally and figuratively. A third of the team has been either suspended, injured or out for personal reasons. Tula, our Peruvian MVP was the latest casualty. This was quite a setback. Tula is a natural walker; small, slight and built low to the ground for speed (Her Incan ancestors were the builders of a roadway system that is the precursor to today's highways, yet they did not discover the wheel. This suggests most travel was done on foot). Our current line up is no match for even the league's worst team, the Dawgpatch MH Walking Team, known in the league as "The Waddlers" due to the size of most of the members. The morale of the team has sunk tremendously in large part because of our winter practice headquarters, the Palookaville Athletic Complex.
The PAC, like most of Palookaville, is still stuck in the 80's. The color scheme is black, gray and red. Cheesy rounded fonts spell out "sun tan" and "massage" down the sides of the doorways. A huge graphic of a guy with permed highlighted hair wearing a tank top with neon lettering and the slogan, "Fitness means dedication" hangs between the men's and women's locker rooms.Team members joke that it is the perfect location for a Napoleon Dynamite sequel. Some of the regular members have been assigned walkon roles in the team version of the film. The skinny guy, Matt, who polices the direction of the track by passive agressively asking, "Uh, is this the right direction?" is a shoe in for a Kip sidekick or stand-in. Dr. Samson, the elvish psychologist should appear as himself, offering therapy to Uncle Rico or Tina the Llama. The ultimate walkon is of course one Eric Snidley, who would be a perfect assistant to Rex, the martial arts instructor who asks, "Do ya think I'm a loser cuz I go home ta Starla every night?" while gesturing to a picture of a male to female transvestite bodybuilder in drag. Snidely has come to represent something personal to each remaining member of the Walking Team.
Snidley owns a huge used car dealership in Palookaville. Adjacent to the lot is his office. The lot and office complex boasts no less than 14 signs bearing, "Snidley Pre-Owned Automobiles" The sizes of the signs vary. The color scheme is royal blue against a white background bordered with silver background. Some of the signs are backlit and stay illuminated at all times. They are on the roof, in every window, on each telephone pole flanking the lot, on each side of the two entrances/exits and on a massive billboard on the north side of the lot. They are visible from every possible angle on Maine Street. Across the bottom of every single sign is written, "Eric Snidely, Owner and President." Kiki pointed this out during practice. This display of ostentatious boastfulness represents the ultimate in poor taste to Kiki, who aspires to civility, subtlety and graciousness. It really bothers her because her mother is ill mannered and inappropriate, and Kiki has tried to become the opposite all of her life. We spent the remainder of that practice declaring ourselves "Owner and President" of different things in our lives. For example, I am "Owner and President" of my own big white ass. Siobhan swears she is going to show up at practice weraing a nametag that says, "Siobhan Sullivan, Owner and President of a Chin Strap Dildo."
Roisin is a musician, so the eighties hair metal that Snidely insists play between 6 and 8 a.m. sets her teeth on edge. She has written anonymous letters to the owner and site manager. She has conducted an informal poll of all members of the club present between these hours. Most of the members were wearing headphones they had to remove when Roisin approached them. Many couldn't discern between his music and the regular station. She found one ally in a middle aged woman wearing a fuschia shiny tank top and a pair of floral running shorts that split up the sides to the waist band. Her skin was loose and her thighs were mottled with celluite and roadmapped with vericose veins. The shorts just concealed her deflated ass. Yet she ran around the track with abandon. The woman told Roisin she had been a member for years and had complained several times to no avail. When she asked Don, the friendly elderly desk attendant why Snidley could demand his muscial preference despite objections from other members, Don just replied, "We have to have that hard rock stuff for Eric." The reason it really bothered Roisin is despite being talented, her father never once complimented her. He didn't like her choice of classical guitar and insisted on blasting "new country" like Shania Twain while he worked in the garage. When Roisin expressed her dislike, he told her, "Tough shit, Miss Priss, I'll play what I want as long as I pay the bills around here."
A common thread among the Palookaville Walkers is a desire to live a life that isn't common to our experience. We all at some point struck out from Palookaville and had extraordinary adventures in big cities, foreign countries or destinations significant for thier oddness. Through some ill-fated accident, an illness, a death, a pregnancy, a marriage, a divorce, we've all returned to Palookaville to regroup before heading off again in search of our lives. The regrouping for some of us has taken quite a while. Now that we are back, most of us have settled back into the Palookaville way of life; television, fast food, mainstream films, suburban fashion and limited experiences. Except for Siobhan. She will not go calmly into that dark night. She follows an organic vegetable based raw diet, breast fed her daughter until she was three, regularly fasts, has had waist length dreadlocks, studied with a Reiki master and lived on a Hawaiian island in a tent. When Siobhan was in middle school, her mother sewed designer labels onto her K-mart jeans. The "cool" girls busted her on it publicly and she never lived it down. That's the last time Siobhan tried too fit in.
Siobhan hates Eric Snidely. He represents all things Palookaville; the flashy American gas guzzling car, the preoccupation with 80's music, the Alpha male posturing, his overall cheesiness.
"He makes me feel bad about myself." She told me on the way home from practice. My heart seized up a little. She was speaking my truth. The deep down truth you don't speak, even to yourself. "He reminds me that I live here, a place where a vapid dork like him is considered a big deal."
I was relieved. She didn't exactly speak my truth. Eric Snidley makes me feel bad about myself for a million different reasons. He reminds me of my age. He reminds me of all the youthful indescretions that are sad and shameful. He reminds me that I am no longer attractive. He embarasses me. I am embarrassed to be my age, still regretting mistakes I made as a child. A directionless, parentless child. I am embarrassed to care about the opinion of this ridiculous person who is so base and common and simplistic; who shares none of my core values or beliefs. This parody of an alpha male gym ape.