Are You Willing to Suspend Your Disbelief?

Yesterday was full of those moments where I thought, if I saw/read this scene in a movie/book, I wouldn't believe it--no willing suspension of disbelief, to use the famous phrase of Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

Since real estate transactions require much in the way of paperwork, phone calls, and money, I found myself headed to a lawyer's office yesterday.  The lawyer's office is right at the edge of Wilton Manors, which is famous for its huge concentration of gay men.  So, in between regular businesses, like the Dairy Queen, are businesses targeted to gay men.  There are bars and some of the best thrift stores in the county.  But there's also the furniture store that advertises that it's always the 50's, 60's, and 70's inside the store.  There's the plumbing supply store, which seems to be an old-fashioned plumbing parts store--just several blocks away from a huge Home Depot.  There's a sign for LeatherWerks--not sure of what this business offers, in specifics, but I'm fairly clear about the people it hopes to attract.

I'm aware of the smirking possibilities in the stores that have no gay theme, the Dairy Queen, the plumbing store, and the fact that the signs have no sense of irony at all.  You wouldn't see that in a movie.

The lawyer had a landmark, for which I was grateful, but disbelieving when told to look for it:  a cream and orange colored rocket.  I couldn't quite imagine.  But yep, there it was, a rocket in creamsicle colors.

My spouse had looked up this lawyer before writing the checks that will serve as our earnest money.  He's legitimate.  The inside of his office looks fairly normal--except for the stuffed alligator, which sits right next to the stuffed bears.  The bears are toys, the alligator the work of a taxidermist.

I drove home, feeling delighted that I live in such a place, that I'm about to make an even larger investment in living here.

At the end of the day, I came into the living room to find my spouse watching an episode of Everybody Loves Raymond, a show we both have hated.  That might seem strange enough--but he was watching it in Spanish.

If that had been a scene in a book or a movie, it would have been a portent--but of what?  Last night it symbolized only boredom

The show doesn't improve in a different language.  I've never been able to relate to a show about a family with members who treat each other in that way.

This morning I feel gratitude that I can't relate to that show.  I feel gratitude that a show about a family who verbally abuses fails the test of my willing suspension of disbelief