Choice Thrift of Waynesboro went belly-up this week, with bag-sale prices that echoed back nostalgically to the Golden Era of Secondhand Commerce. With the widespread resurgence of glittery Puff-Daddy materialism, my hope is that Demand will take a nosedive, and thrift store shopping will be restored to the hysterical and gratuitous ritual it once was. On this day, the past came alive. I padded my wardrobe with the usual finds for my post-apocalyptic/Dickensian street-urchin anti-aesthetic, weighing each items for imaginative effusion, faux-pas horsepower, and sheer comedic punch. Sweaters with horses and kittens playing with yarn, single argyle socks lost from their twins, green leisure suits, pink nightgowns, über-Christian daycamp shirts, shirts with tigers in glitter-graphics-- the more incongruent, the better. After filling a grocery cart over with costumes and accoutréments, and after some sleep-deprived "Spanish lessons" in the music library, I went home to try on every item, in every combination, before the closet-door mirror. Occasionally succumbing to bouts of giggles and ga-ga self-love. On any given day, my narcissism is reaffirmed by long, sultry stretches before the bathroom mirror, wondering what miracles I worked in my past lives to become so devastatingly beautiful. I put on bedroom eyes for myself. My lips hang kissably open. I drift away into a whole videomontage of sappy scenarios: millions crowding around my casket, far-fetched seductions in Morocco or Northern Italy, windblown portraits on future currency. I am in love with myself.

For spoilsports who roll their eyes and deny the virtues of narcissism, ask yourself why they are so quick to demand modesty in others. What does this mean, subtextually? What would be the problem with everyone being a narcissist atleast five days out of the week, regardless of what Nature and Fate had given them. Even though my image tests the boundaries of my own heterosexuality, my narcissism is, for the most part, ironic and outside of physicality, outside, even, of merit. Narcissism, in my myth-system, is the Pygmalian project of selfhood, and rarely needs or expects confirmation from the outside world. Self-adoration is the premise, not the product, of infinite perfectibility.
Ra, ra, ra.