Infatuated

I don't know what he's wearing, and I don't care. I love this man. Completely infatuated. Completely.

The Handmaid's Tale

Is that how we lived, then? But we lived as usual. Everyone does, most of the time. Whatever is going on is usual. Even this is as usual, now.
We lived, as usual, by ignoring. Ignoring isn't the same as ignorance, you have to work at it.
Nothing changes instantaneously: in a gradually heating bathtub you'd be boiled to death before you knew it. There were stories in the newspapers, of course, corpses in the ditches or the woods, bludgeoned to death or mutilated, interfered with, as they used to say, but they were about other women, and the men who did such things were other men. None of them were the men we knew. The newspaper stories were like dreams to us, bad dreams dreamt by others. How awful, we would say, and they were, but they were awful without being believable. They were too melodramatic, they had a dimension that was not the dimension of our lives.
We were the people who were not in the papers. We lived in the blank white spaces at the edges of print. It gave us more freedom.
We lived in the gaps between the stories.

You forgot how much you loved this song

Until it unexpectedly came on the car radio right as you park your car.

You loved it even more around the 2:59 mark when Clarence tears through the air with those delicious notes enticing every muscle in your body to move.

Then you were sad because you realize it's been exactly a month since he's been gone.

So you play the air-sax in tribute to him the song blasting from your car's window as your white trash neighbors and their friends invited to their BBQ watch.

You slowly get out of your car and slunk to your porch steps as Rat-Tail-MC-Hammer Pants yells, "Come pour one out for Clarence."

So you do.