So it’s Monkey Tuesday; my boss is more than a touch strange, and every Tuesday involves activities like drawing a monkey, thinking up a name for a hypothetical moment of monkey ownership, and other such nonsense. As the owner of a number of plush monkeys (don’t ask, i just like monkeys), I occasionally bring one into work for the brownie points, and of course the opportunity to make a spectacle of myself is something not to be missed.

So it’s Monkey Tuesday, and I’m walking to work with a plush monkey on my shoulder; it’s about two blocks from my apartment to work, and in those two blocks I encountered two humans, both of whom I greeted with a big smile and a friendly hello . . .

neither of them
would so much as look at me

Taken alone, the incident isn’t really worthy of a post; but it reminded me of a score of other incidents where truly interesting events have gone un-remarked-upon by people passing by.

My favorite incident, and the one that kicked my fascination with this phenomenon into high-gear, happened a number of years ago when I was living in Connecticut and sharing an apartment with a number of environmental activists. There was a demonstration coming up, and one of my room-mates had been shipped an inflatable ‘Smokey the Bear’; we’re talking about something like eight feet of inflatable bear here. Being the sort of people that we were, the only possibility that seemed at all reasonable was to inflate the thing in the front yard while drinking beer and listening to music.

So there we are; at least four folks, drinking beer around a slowly inflating bear, and nobody walking by showed the slightest interest. One of the people who lived in an apartment upstairs came home, walked within ten feet of this sudden spectacle, and made no response to the merry greetings we called out. People in cars seemed to slow down and look, but the people on foot averted their eyes.

are so many of us really living
in a state of fear so intense,
so crippling,
that any form of deviance
must be ignored
in the hope that it will just go away?

is that all this is?

i feel certain that anyone
with prominent tattoos
knows exactly
what i mean

even if i don’t

not exactly anyway, it’s more of a feeling, this sense that if we could only become invested in our surroundings, to the point where we are actually and honestly present in all these moments of our lives, if we could do that . . .

if we could only manifest the essential core of these countless quasi-mystical statements that i’ve heard all my life . . .

I’d really like to know what it is about a man with a plush monkey on his shoulder that makes you unwilling to respond to his friendly greeting?

It can’t just be me, because I don’t look that threatening. I’d blame the monkey, but the damn thing is just a half-pound of blue plush with a stupid looking grin. If the people had been elderly, or betrayed their strait-laced tendencies with business attire; that would be easier to understand, but we’re talking about college-age kids here.

In truth, I know that there are many people out there how would have gleefully replied to the sight of a man wearing a monkey, but what the hell is wrong with the rest of you?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 28th, 2006 at 11:22 pm and is filed under indiscriminate, guerrilla theater. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.