Thought for the Day: Slow down, Little Bond

I remember when you were just a wee thing. You were crazy creative and always had somebody coming in and out of the house - Maurice Roucel, Michel Almairac, Aurelien Guichard. Everybody was your buddy back then. And you put your heads together and came up with wonderful things. Mostly. I still go to H.O.T. Always and Broadway Nite and think, wow, where does something like that come from? You had a sense of humor about the past. You were pretty irreverent. Big peachy peony lipstick rose. Big fat patchouli and cinnamon, like somebody told you about Givenchy Gentleman and with the balls of youth you thought, I can do that better - and, you know, you kind of did.

Oh but that mom of yours. We'd get together and suddenly we're making noise and she'd come stomping down the stairs into the rec room and she'd threaten to call my parents, or the cops or whatever. Seriously, the cops?? She was really kind of too much. She was really kind of way too much. She had big big plans for you. I guess she wasn't content with you being just kind of fun and silly and guilelessly overblown the way people who've just arrived in NY from small towns can be. The way you looked at NYC was really fun and refreshing. It was idiosyncratic. And maybe that didn't really fit with your mom's plans. Your mom always made me nervous. She was so overly protective of you I thought, this ain't going to end well. No kid whose mom thinks he's the most brilliant thing on the planet ever turns out so great.

Sure enough, now I look at you and I'm like, where did all the fun parts go? I think that mom of yours got to you and reined you in, after all. But who knew it would happen so fast? You're barely a teen. No more fun stuff. No more peeps over to the house. She keeps you busy, cranking ideas out, only they don't seem very much like ideas - not bright ideas, anyway. I mean, okay, I like Earth Day. It's not something I dislike. I'm all for marriage equality. I like mother's day, and father's day, and Saks is okay I guess, and Andy Warhol's funny enough, but who says you need to have something to say about everything? Who says you need to be all things to all people in every corner of the party?

Oh right. Your mom.

The truth is, your ideas are really lame now. You come out with a lot of them, sure, but they're all the same idea, and you don't have the right people around you anymore so maybe you don't see that. You're in every corner of the party and you're screaming there, and everyone moves to the other side of the room, because I guess they figure, why sit next to you when it's more pleasant not to? And that's a catch 22 because then you just try harder. More ideas. More screaming. More mom. It's just you and your mom now, and of course your mom thinks everything you do is BRILLIANT, and it doesn't sound like screaming to her, what you're doing, because she's talking even louder than you are.  So it's strictly folie a deux.

Example: That amber thing? Over three hundred bucks? Who do you think you are? And all these gew gaws you're gussying your ideas up with - the big vinyl flowers and such - don't really compensate for the lack of big ideas you once had and now sorely lack. You're covering the waterfront, but you're not Christo, Bond. You just kind of go to these areas and throw up a tent and you say, look at me, I'm artistic! And everyone else looks at you and they're like, so you pitched a tent. It's New York. Get over yourself.

You're pitching tents, your mother's pitching fits, and - listen, I'm going to let you go. I realized, halfway through writing this to you, that I'm bored. The whole thing bores me. There's no talking to you, really, and you've been boring for such a stretch now, and seem so excited about your boring self, that I don't really see a lot of potential for turnaround, for epiphany. Maybe I'll wait for your mid life crisis, little guy. But - oy - that's gotta be a big mess waiting to happen, the way you're going this early on. I was your biggest advocate at one time. I was like your mom. Now I just want you to go away.