Architectural Digestif

.

They say eat the rich, like some sweet bearnaise; maybe just I say the second part. But why go down bitter? The rich, a tough stupid bunch, are more delicious with flavorings. Bong Joon-ho knows, and Parasite marvelous Parasite delivers such flavorings - peach dusted and soft, succulent, ripe as can be. Run your fingers along expensive skin and take a bite, a sniff, a snifter's worth -- you'll see. You'll want seconds.

I remember being in rooms with the rich for the first few times -- piggy-backed on my betters, whispering in silent tones through stately lobbies and riding elevators up to one stop shop luxury; skylines painted on the window frames like an old-fashioned backdrop. Perhaps it was all a drop-cloth after all -- it always felt like sham-walls that might slide apart at any moment, revealing lighting and camera operators fussing with knobs. I was only playing a part.

I'd keep my mouth shut. I'd stare in mirrors. I'd accept the hors d'oeuvres. 

If you grow up as dirt poor as I did you're never going to feel right in those places. You're a tourist snapping photos, stuffing the idea of extravagance away for a rainy day. Secreting fancy bourbons away in a plastic bladder. Set it aside for the moment it collapses and you're back to folding pizza boxes, pushing grocery carts, and smelling like you smell -- a boiled rag, a subway person.

You learn to stand a certain way. Suck it in; memorize the script. You're fake, but precisely so. You find the right sort of outfit buried in a heap; it'll look right if nobody looks too closely. Imposter Syndrome, the new fragrance from Calvin Klein. Drink it down by the gallon.

Like in Jordan Peele's Us there are always two families -- one right side up on the surface, and a dark mirror glinting sharp underneath. Father, mother, boy, girl. Father, mother, boy, girl. There are a lot of stairs to climb to make it to the flip side, the place where the sunshine blooms, where the large windows slap nature in a frame and not the other way around. The rich make the rules; the rest of us pretend. We are characters on a children's show, farcical on the false surface.

Sewage, like economics, trickles downhill. So keep your head up and keep your smile up higher! The stars are keeping tabs, pinching their pennies and their rhinoplasties tight. Dance monkeys, til your heels suffer and your scabs have scabs have scabs.

Our silly games -- piss elegant parties in the streets. Stiff elbows and uppers as the help can up kibble and call it quiche; the world's only spinning faster, hotter, and au courant pickled chaos reigns. The mid-afternoons of a thousand knives, just only recently purchased delicacies sent straight off from America -- the pricily packaged woo-woo costumes of one place's genocide all set up for a kid's birthday party. Silver spoons plunged right into our pudding hearts, lip smack. I taste like chicken, cheap and headless.