What’s it like to be a Marquis? I’m sure this is the burning question on everybody’s lips. Is it all glamour and cavortin’ with the pretty, pretty ladies? Paparazzi and autograph hounds? Best seats in the restaurant/opera/airplane? Fashion shoots and weekends in the Carribean?
For the most part, yes, it is just like that.
But other days are somewhat less spectacular.
This is what your day might be like if you were a Marquis.
- 7:11am. Alarm goes off. You emit the first vocal sounds of the day, and they are not suitable for prime time television.
You find crummy clothes to wear — old jeans, an old Cure shirt, whatever. Make a brief, cursory visit to the bathroom mirror. Scowl. Hairflip. However it landed is the do o’ the day. You then drive to work with a friend across the street, listening to NPR and commenting morosely about the state and habits of the peasant-class these days, and pontificate that if children were given Atari 2600’s instead of guns, crackpipes and hiphop, things would be better.
- Arrive at work and plug in your G3 PowerBook. Check personal email. If you’re lucky and popular that day, this could take all morning. Rarely does it, however, and by mid-morning, you are resigned to actually doing some work. You are frustrated and tense already, but not inordinately so because you are drinking copious amounts of green tea and gingko tea and that’s mighty cleansing and soothing to … whatever needs to be soothed.
- 11:02: You start fidgeting. You’re just about ready to call it a day. Too bad you have another 5+hours at work. Ha ha. Poor chump. It’s your own damn fault for taking a full time job. Won’t make that mistake again, will ya! You were warned.
- Go outside and smoke. Frequently. If any uppity self-righteous neo-healthfreex approach you and say, “Y’know, that’s 10 minutes off your life right there,” then you reply, “I don’t know about 10 minutes off my life, but it sure as hell is 10 minutes off my day!”
You may also be visted by a chipmunk scurrying along branches stuffing his cheeks with little berry lookin’ things and you will think, “Ahh, nature,” — or less bucolic, you may be stopped by random faculty or staff members of the college at which you work and they will ask you questions about their computers, phrased and inflected with a tone that seems to say, “Hey! We have something in common! I have a messed up computer and you can fix it! I bet nothing would excite you more than to speak about it at length!”
You may find flaws in this reasoning, but the conversation will go on nonetheless. For a very long time.
- 11:58 and you wonder what the rest of the day will bring. You decide to try your luck at Salad Divination. You are either encouraged by the chicken pasta bowtie salad made available, or dismayed at the lack of choice as you chew your rubbery babycarrot and pick dirt out of yellowing broccoli. Every day it’s something new. Keeps life exciting, most Marquises find.
- Over lunch, you may choose to spend 20 minutes writing a diary or something. Or you may decide that the day is too ugly and you are too uninspired to undertake such a lofty task. The choice is yours. Just know that if you skip more than three days in a row, any number of stalkers will start emailing you angrily, demanding more installments. Try not to hate them.
- You try to get old work done in dusty piles of papers or ancient emails as you sit and glower in your darkened corner desk but you are constantly interrupted by emeriti faculty coming to you like the undead, arms outstretched like Vampira in “Plan 9 From Outer Space”, smelling faintly of rose water and cigars and (more strongly) halitosis, chanting their mantra, “Helllp usssss with our arcaaaane haaardware! Showw usss how to yooooze our compewwwterzzz…” You feel oddly compelled to start hurling sharp objects through closed windows after about two hours of this. The only thing that stops you is knowing that one day you really will snap, so you might as well save it up for that imminent übercatharsis. You know it will make the front pages, and any publicity is good publicity.
- 4:06pm: You start throwing darts at the calendar and you announce that you are taking off the days they land on. You pray one dart straddles two days. You think you will finally be able to rest, relax, have a cocktail, be sociable, whatever, but before the hallowed day arrives, you foolishly opt to accept any number of design jobs or other freelance stuff and you find yourself busier than ever. You like the money however, it’s nice to be doing something creative, and you feel it’s an improvement to be able to work at home, naked, with a cat circling your feet. You briefly consider doing this at your day job, but realise it may not be such a good idea.
(Some people are allergic to cats.)
- 4:28 is close enough to 4:30 by your watch, and you call your friend in the biology department and prompt him to git goin’, cos it’s time to leave godammit — it was time to leave three months ago, if you must have the truth. Driving home, you exchange bitter banter regarding people in general. It is not limited to work-related issssues. No subject is holy as you both vent and hiss and make bus noises. By the time you get back into the city, you feel sufficiently more lighthearted.
Burbs can be mighty, mighty oppressive after all.
- You go into the house, open the back door to let the cats out into the yard. You get on your bike and tootle about the city for a while, tending to errands, returning videos, just circling, whatever. All the while and with every revolution you think, “My thighs are going to be lovely one day.” That may not be the case for the ‘idle-classes’ like us however.
- You briefly water and tend to things in the garden as cats wander about rubbing their faces on things and birds chirp in the trees and city sounds do not permeate the foliage and Julie London or Ella Fitzgerald or Skinny Puppy croons from the boombox inside. You are as relaxed and as at-peace as you will be for the next 24 hours.
- You pick at the piano. Something dirgey or light or epic or stoïc, just as long as it’s technically improbable for you to play that particular piece convincingly well. You choose this method of piece selection because you’re a sadist (a Marquis de Sadist?) at heart and failure and humiliation get you hard and/or wet.
- You screen your calls.
You’re a Marquis, after all, and couldn’t possibly be expected to pick up for just anybody now, could you?
The machine picks up and it is a friend asking if you’d like to go out to a pub tonight. It sounds like a delicious time, but if you don’t go to bed before 1 am, your already-dangerously-short-fuse will be even shorter and you’re saving up your energy for that aforementioned übercatharsis which will be the Shot Heard ‘Round the World™ — if you have anything to say about it!
- You spend the rest of the evening doing semi-creative/quasi-lazy things like writing and smoking and painting and drinking and outlining and gaming.
- To top off your exciting day, you take a shower because mornings are hard enough without having to make extra time for that kinda shit — then go to bed with wet hair and see what fascinating sculptures will be made of it in the morning when you do the same godamned rut over again.
And that, in a nutshell, is a day in the life of the Marquis. This particular Marquis doesn’t much care for ruts such as these, so he may be moving back to New Orleans sooner rather than later, and adopting a different kind of lifestyle, but shh, you didn’t hear it from me.
Gawd, I feel so nekkid, baring my soul without my usual guises, ruses and veils. Pass me that figleaf, would you dahhhlink?
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