After arising from my strange nap in the car, I was well rested and ready to explore Kansas City. To be clear, when I say explore Kansas City, I meant drive by bars that had been recommended by Trip Advisorm places where we could eat drink and be merry on our brief stopover. I drove first to the Park Plaza neighborhood, a chic shopping district, sporting the names of fancy stores, as I walked the heat blasted and near empty sidewalks, but for the occasional women in her forties or sixties, dressed to the nines in heels and short dresses, emulating women twenty to thirty years their juniors, the older women had surgically modified faces to try and finish the effect in full. Halfway down the street I saw a set of steps that looked, in part, like the Spanish Steps, in Rome. Unfortunately, at the top of the steps there was nothing of note, just an office park.
In a way, it reminded me of Georgetown in Washington, DC, on an empty day, moved from the water and transplanted into middle America. I kept looking around trying to find people with good values, but their values all looked the same from the outside, youth, money, finding a place to sit with air conditioning when it was too hot outside to function.
I was hungry. I grew up in a single parent home, which has a tendency of generating a vexed relationship with money. In that, eating out was going to a McDonald's. I tend to think of eating out then as an extravagance, the equivalent of Cinderella attending the ball, and I have mental fits over whether I should spend five or ten dollars on lunch, and wonder how closely my wife will be watching the credit card bill back home, noting that the grilled Quinoa burger I'm about to eat for lunch was twelve dollars at The Good Cup, when a Cold Cut Trio was just around the corner.
The frugal, or cheap, or whatever is going on with me and money, means I don't drink when I'm out either, which is a shame, as being pleasantly buzzed in the early afternoon is one of life's pleasures. Drinking early in the day, in relative moderation, always makes me more congenial, it makes me feel more like a part of the landed gentry that I've always wanted to be.
In a way, it reminded me of Georgetown in Washington, DC, on an empty day, moved from the water and transplanted into middle America. I kept looking around trying to find people with good values, but their values all looked the same from the outside, youth, money, finding a place to sit with air conditioning when it was too hot outside to function.
I was hungry. I grew up in a single parent home, which has a tendency of generating a vexed relationship with money. In that, eating out was going to a McDonald's. I tend to think of eating out then as an extravagance, the equivalent of Cinderella attending the ball, and I have mental fits over whether I should spend five or ten dollars on lunch, and wonder how closely my wife will be watching the credit card bill back home, noting that the grilled Quinoa burger I'm about to eat for lunch was twelve dollars at The Good Cup, when a Cold Cut Trio was just around the corner.
The frugal, or cheap, or whatever is going on with me and money, means I don't drink when I'm out either, which is a shame, as being pleasantly buzzed in the early afternoon is one of life's pleasures. Drinking early in the day, in relative moderation, always makes me more congenial, it makes me feel more like a part of the landed gentry that I've always wanted to be.
do "landed gentry" still exist...maybe in england?
ReplyDeletein america it is the technology gentry and corporate gentry
does the buzz include a good wine or beer or whiskey on a hot afternoon?