| - -- Next Year 11/2/05: (c) Kirk Marshall
Leaving Dewey Samtown:
A contemplation on personal love
I’m not sure who exactly Dewey Samtown is. We’re all zoological menageries of various, conflicting alternate personalities, and that’s a truism that has remained universally actualised since our human ability to propound upon the pros and cons of any situation. That part of you who opts towards letting fly with a stream of piss down the back of your primary school oval, he’s Ludney, the mischievous fuck with the Cockney accent. Gideon’s the dark prince whose head emerges occasionally from the pool of vitriol within your stomach. Francine is the part that ensures you remember all the names required to devise the Christmas card list. Perhaps Dewey Samtown is the me who conclusively manages to win the girl. He’s the candle of cool providing romanticised, porno-fuzzy ambient light on a date. If I get the girl laughing, it’s Dewey Samtown who’s ultimately responsible. If she links fingers with me, she’s thawing to become nougat-melty for Dewey Samtown, not me. If she’s reaching climax when we’re fucking, you know who the man is.
They always leave me when they find that Dewey Samtown is a person composed of smoke and mirrors. And they expect me, in some species of justifiable manner, to feel overtly apologetic for the remorse triggering their need to move on. I don’t know how I can be sorry, let alone be made responsible, though. They don’t get that there is no Dewey Samtown. If they desperately, intrinsically longed to be suffused in the honest, vehement, witty personality beneath the rakish, instinctual veneer then they’d have stayed for it. They would stay for it. But once they find that the sunglasses I’m wearing are manufactured from dream-thin candy glass, they don’t want to stay to trip through the pools in my actual eyes. If I can’t offer them the obvious and subconsciously-rendered facade then I’m not worthy, and it subsequently follows that neither is it warranted, that they stay.
I know now why that is. Peacocks, mad avian geniuses formed from the hues of childhood laughter and the colours of an island safari, are made nothing without their plumage. People ingratiate themselves to the belief that peacocks are marvellous, inspired, wunderkind birds because the tangible and orchestrated beauty that they exhibit are reflections of the beauty in the people themselves. In that way, Dewey Samtown is only a kaleidoscopic mirror for vapid people to find love for themselves. Take that mirror away, remove that plumage, and you’ve only got me. And effectively, who feels the wending subversive inclination within them to be with someone who doesn’t make them feel good about being who they are?
Dewey Samtown is the bastard child of Dorian Gray. This is only what they want. This is only what people lust for. Trip the existentialist fantastic, distance myself inordinately from the emotions for which I’m addressing, and I feel no burgeoning cynicism, only epiphany. I can’t recall the last time a girl, nor an intimate partner of any genus, has maintained a relationship with me once the unencumbered, divulged, serenely articulated emotive stuff within passed my lips. Because a play is so thoroughly less interactive, nor necessitates as much exacted involvement as an improvisation demands. A play is better. A play is less real. And there are exits for whenever one feels as though the money invested was a relative waste. You can’t possibly be found to bow down respectfully when immersed in an improvisation, however; there is no money spent, no money wasted, as you alone are providing the entertainment. If you fail, you can’t blame artifice or timing, nor Dewey Samtown or me. If you fail, the thing collapses. And that’s a scary thought.
So I fail to find people enthused about being introduced to the me rendered flat without the three-dimensional graphics, the affectations, the postured coolth. You – a ponderous, self-deprecating small-time guy – become normal, mundane; you provide no rose-tinted options. Everyone I know has wanted Dewey Samtown. Everyone I have wanted has known Dewey Samtown. Everyone I have lost was due to their losing Dewey Samtown. Everyone forgets me.
Hence, this is it. I’m divorcing myself from evolving into someone who requires to perpetuate a false persona, a projected bravado. And we’ll see if people genuinely warm to the pragmatic realism, the inner me, painting the glory in my eyes.
There are no more sunglasses. I’m leaving Dewey Samtown.
It’ll be great if one day, you’ll do it with me.
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