Play station

Always so serious, especially after an extra long day at work, even more after reviewing the dispiriting news of the day, but is that any reason for me not to be playful?

Just as I got off the 32 bus after riding to the end of Mt. Hope sitting next to a older woman (she struck me as sour-looking, but then I always look dour), I wondered: Do I have to be who I am?  Do I have to talk the way I talk? Must I be this teacher coming home at the end of the day? Why not play? Why not an alternate self, an alternate world operating according to other rules? Why aren't I making more nonsense. Do I have to be so prosaic?

What I mean is a jokiness, a extravagant rhetoric, an adoption of attitudes, a proliferation of similes, wacky associations, make-believe formalities, inventions, fictions a la Baron Munchausen, yes, and lots of what ifs, and let's pretends, more poetry of the rollicking kind, more doggerel, more verbal chasing of one another, silly songs galore, more strange voices, twisted faces, broad gestures and weird walks, more absurdity, some hyperbolic exaggeration, frivolity, oh yes, much more frivolity.

I don't mean sports (far too down to earth), and maybe not fantasy (if it means living a role vs playing one). Irony is  not at home in this kind of play which is no less sincere than my down-to-earth, work-a-day way of being Peter. The playful Peter is light and limber, quick and creative, expressive without being emotional, a card but not a cad. I encounter this side of myself when I'm with some people, in certain settings. In the classroom, I feel it coming on sometimes and have to hold it back.

I can be playful alone but I need playmates. Perhaps we all do, maybe even the woman on the bus. How can we make this happen? Even this post is far too solemn. I'm not succeeding. Help.