Eulogy

Beyond the vain pretentiousness of the bourgeois and the sleepwalking cynicism of the workaday live a mass of people, giant-like in their understatedness, who emerge from the urban gloaming to reveal themselves briefly, and, like the lambency of a flashlight under a blanket, illuminate us the ordinary from the inside out. They are human, these creations of a higher power, but do not possess identifiable human characteristics, being (for example) unable to feel baser emotions such as guilt or envy. They are proud, but not crippled by pride; they are self-assured, but unable to patronize. They will tell you about themselves and their achievements with a sympathetic smile on their faces, and a song on the tips of their tongues; this last not because they are condescending, but because they are, for want of a better word, of a fuller, more fraught adjective, happy.


These people twinkle -- not in the pedestrian manner of stars, but ephemerally and with more inherence, like mica on sweltering asphalt -- with the force of their own love for life and the energetic manner in which they choose to lead it, lending to us as they do some of their effulgence, leaving us blinded but joyous.

Until 12 AM today, these people lived only in the remotest regions of my imagination; now their existence is bolstered by the assenting nod of reality.