Traffic Light Epiphany

Dedication for this write is to brother Theo Dyssean; thanks for everything!

I saw a man today poised on a street corner waiting to enter the crosswalk. I saw him from in my car as I waited at that same intersection for a green light. The man was old and he was carrying a purse. It was not a cool-guy modern man’s purse, one that was all sporty and rugged, sensible and functional, earth tone and with testicles hanging from it. It wasn’t that sort of purse at all.

It wasn’t the sort of purse that you could dismiss away with a catchy pseudonym to distance it from the feminine persuasion. It wasn’t a “go-kit” or an “EDC kit” or a “War Bag” or even a Day-point-Five Bag… this was a purse like your grandmother would carry because it was not sexy and neither was she; not for thirty years now, and her name was likely Estelle.

The man was an old man, late sixties I would venture. He stood staring waiting for green, his purse in hand handing straight down in his left hand supported by two looped carrying handles, and… God help me… I do believe it was lavender because a worse color it certainly could not have been.

Men… =roll eyes=

Yeah, they carry purses by other names and endeavor to shrug off the notion that it is anything other than a Personal All-Life Management System (PALMS). But when it comes right down to it the PALMS description boasts only words of a pretense of supposition.

To look into one of them would reveal wads of tissue of questionable color gamut, gum, mints, tiny salt/pepper packs, chapstick, rubber bands, band-aids, really stale candy, a tiny pocket knife of almost pointless functionality, and a clutch of paper money… a purse.

I mused how things had changed since I was just a boy. Why, if a man were caught (somehow) carrying a purse, he would certainly be instantly rolled up by a band of neighborhood brigands and roughed up for being a fag, a homo, a sissy — oh my! Nowadays it’s not an at all oddity to tote a whatever you want to call it, men… though the lavender part did send my right eyebrow on a northern excursion… momentarily.

The man even chatted the up lad waiting next to him sporting a skateboard. I’d say he was a kid, though in my day you only ever saw a kid with a skateboard. Today you see dudes in beards and mustaches with no jobs who live with their mothers and ride skateboards.

They also ride those tiny BMX trick jumping bikes with their beards and mustaches. Yea, though I may try to rationalize that jumping dirt mounds on tiny bikes is a thing just for kids… the reality is those tiny bikes are, in fact, primary sources of transportation for these… “men”.

The old purse man seemed to be confirming a quick set of directions from the bearded skateboard man, who seemed cordial and engaging. He nodded in fervent affirmation that the directions for the old purse man were true. Bearded skateboard man knew his way around this part of town well because his mother had taken him out and around many a time.

And they two stood silently waiting for green.

Finally green came and I reveled in the epiphany of change I had just experienced there at that intersection. Everything had changed, or would soon enough change, and the world will not come to an end after all though we may most of us wish it so in earnest.

A wee-wee is the only truly girl thing, and a tally-wacker is the only truly boy thing; beyond that, there are no other girl things or boy things left. But those things too are subject to the whim of change. They were all unisexual things, I says. Just a mismatch of madness that comes in one size fits all, says I.

There will be no men’s cigarettes or women’s cigarettes, men’s shoes or women’s shoes, men’s jobs or women’s jobs. Soon everyone will be everything. Skateboards and BMX bikes are not just for kids, they are also for grown men with zero responsibility but opiates and their X-Box. Men are men and women; women are women and men. Purses are for men and women, tricks are for kids, dogs live with cats, bathrooms have no distinction, little pink houses for you and me… MURICA!!

I am Spartacus!

As I trucked through the interaction and came nearer and nearer to old purse man, as our apogee became perigee… I saw that after all old purse man had in fact actually been… an old purse woman. He was a she. Well… cheese and crackers damnit! I had it all figured out, really I did… and now I had nothing. Another one of life’s simple pleasures ruined by a meddling bureaucracy

And in that very moment, it occurred to me then that after all this time there at that intersection, my epiphany… had been scant less than a big fat flaming-yellow lie.

By Almighty God and with honor,
geo sends