america, butt cracked

This is not my fault. We need to be clear on that right here at the outset. I would gladly never have seen what I am about to relate to you, and which you may soon also wish I had not shared as well.

What was it Barney the purple dinosaur was so fond of saying? Oh, right: The horror.

Yet if wishes were horses, then we big-boy beggars would likely have to waddle right alongside, I suppose. Which is to say I’m gonna tell you anyway.

Buy the ticket, take the ride.

So, this: I was recently hoofing it through a neighborhood a few over from my own, whereupon and whence I glimpsed a man, oh, a man, just a-shamblin’ about in his driveway – and such a man this was, and in so very many ways uncontained, as the very worst of our country is now so egregiously uncontained.

Big fuckin’ guy. Here, there, a bit everywhere. Big.

Now, I am no small feller myself, as I have alluded, so my seeming body-shaming remarks may come off as the family stew pot calling a witch coven’s cauldron fat.

And yes, I’m aware that’s not how that saying goes. Yet really, why bring color into this? I’m no racist, after all. Just an asshole.

So this guy: middle-aged; slightly above-average height; facing away from me; shirtless; in oversized, loose, black athletic shorts; his sides hanging significantly over his sides, his pallid vast expanse of lower back folding downward from his center in great flaps, like flightless skin-wings.

Now up to this point, this whole saggy vignette has really amounted to nothing more than some happenstance glimpse of gross adiposal abandon, walk on, why are we even talking about this, so what? As in one fat guy takes in several eyefuls more than desired of a much mucho gordo bro, yet who am I to judge? Because there but for several dozen wheelbarrows of pasta and Boston cream pie perhaps go I.

Except that Mostly Marbled Beef Boy’s shorts were also hanging low, in the rear there, damn low, revealing another crease that, now that I have been so horrifically enlightened, I would vigorously celebrate never having seen, could that somehow ever be an option.

Some valleys merely to look upon can vanquish all hope.

And save for that last detail, I would not now even be sharing this. I would likewise not be suggesting that it was all somehow representative of something bigger.

Indeed, bigger. Here, there, a bit everywhere, etc.

Suddenly I’m all like, hide your fucking shame, dude! Not out loud, of course. I’m no monster.

Note to anyone keeping score: Not a racist. Not a monster. Just an asshole.

Also, to be clear, I myself have a belt on, and my own pants are doing the job that God intended.

He who casts the first stone should himself allow no bare-bum crevice. I believe Shakespeare said that.

To continue: Flip-flops were also involved in this. Because why wouldn’t they have been?

And just to, y’know, flesh this out further, there was also a much smaller, much younger man on his back in the driveway, mostly pulled up under an oversized black pickup, working on something beneath, his pale, skinny legs extended and crossed at the ankles, and with tools all scattered around him.

I’m not exaggerating any of this, by the way. Of course, I wouldn’t tell you even if I was.

You might perhaps consider this whole scenario like some contemporary slice of Norman Rockwell, our premier magazine-cover photorealist, peering over his little glasses at the county MHP. As in trailers, yes. A bunch of the metal tornado-toys, in haphazard rows along a crumbling two-lane just outside of town, beside some sad scrap of woods flanked by a trash heap of beer cans, alarmingly discolored old mattresses and used, disposable diapers.

Clearly I didn’t think we were drowning deep enough in the well of available cliches.

Also, I’m white, which means I’m allowed to allude to something being redneck as hell, and it can’t make me a racist. Which we’ve already established isn’t the case regardless. You persnickety woke snowflake fuck, you. Geez.

But once again to our human monolith: He was walking, slowly, to the top of his driveway, in the general direction of the shadow of his own fast-food victory of a belly, and the mostly obscured skinny guy on the ground.

Need I even mention the full-sized American flag on a short pole to one side of the driveway, framing all of this? Do I really have to be that much of an asshole?

Yes, I do. I feel we’ve already established that. Anyway, our republic, such as it remains, now demands it. Patriotism, some call it.

Anyway, sue me. It’s not like I set out to make this whole unwished-for vignette into a simplistic symbol of how we, as a country, have grown, in all the wrong ways.

You cannot, as I said, blame me for any of this. It was all laid out plain, for anyone to see, the butt-crack, if you will, in the Liberty Bell. I am merely your humble reporter, sharing some of this country’s awful abundance.

It’s like a young John Mellencamp once sang, long before he swallowed that dying bullfrog and was still contractually being chased by a Cougar, in that popular little ditty (no, not that one), the one celebrating modest and colorful American real estate.

Somethin’ to see, baby. Somethin’ to fuckin’ see.