Waiting for Higgs Boson

by Geno Petro

Chicago Broker Owner Realtor | RE 2.0 Blogger

Author website

Dark matter can be a bitch.  And I mean this in the politest of ways; a mere postmodern posing of the generational Petro/Girard  family tenet, ‘in a hundred years it will all be over.’  Anything after that, please, draw your own conclusions.

I’m speaking as a  self-actualized moving part of an economic algorithm (and every time I use this word I must ask, ‘is this particular rithm an Al Gore  invention?’) that I was born into—with about the same amount of choice I had in the decision whether or not to crawl from my mother’s womb (yes, I was a breech birth baby) several decades earlier—the end result of a totally nother flawed rhythm method.  I have become cyber-morphed with the last four digits of my social security number, a randomly assigned superfecta I’ve lately grown to loathe…

“Excuse me. What was your name again?” I ask the voice who finally takes my call.

This was my second twenty-two minutes on HOLD in the Michael Bolton Greatest Hits audio loop queue of the American Express Blue Card Department. By this point I was looking around my office for a blunt object to off myself with. (Excuse the non-participial modifiers and occasional tense shifts as I’m a bit rusty at posting any thought that requires more than 140 characters these days.)

“It is Jess-ie, Mister Petro,”  the voice answers.

I instantly think of my deceased father, a passing memory still fresh in my mind; the other Mister Petro, forever with a faint whiff of expensive cologne and a seemingly wise and vast financial demeanor. (And that Mister Petro survived a real economic Depression.)

“Thanks you very much today,”  the odd voice, not from this hemisphere, adds on cue.  “How  may I assist you?”

“Hmmm. You don’t sound like a Jessie,” I say, looking to cyber-bully an over-matched, out-sourced CSR.

“Thanks you very much, Mister Petro.”

I swim back in space and think of my father and me playing  golf under the lights back in old Charlotte, many years earlier; that little Par 3 course on a swampy lake  just off Independence Boulevard. At once I  smell the honeysuckle fragrance and imagine the chatter of  the late night crickets…I recall the real Mister Petro as a much nobler man than I find myself today; a Post-World War II protagonist who paid his bills uncontested, never looking for a break, or an angle, or a re-work.  

I take a deep breath but still can’t find the humanity to mince my words.

“Jessie. Look down at your shirt pocket…. Do you see a name tag?”

“That is correct, Mister Petro. Thanks you very much.”  

I think back on our younger years and how the old man would join me after work to observe every football and baseball practice; both of us with our own personal reasons for not heading directly home…just yet—to that humble place where time chipped away at the kitchen table reminding us daily of our mortality, much in the same manner that the post-gothic South of the 1970s reminded us that we’d always be, in most ways, outsiders in their territory; carpet baggers who swooped in and swept away the prettiest debutantes for ourselves, leaving their mansions of memories and debt behind. Time and Space  hanging in the magnolia air.

“You do or you don’t have a name tag?”  I press.

“Yes, Mister Petro.”

“Then I don’t want to talk to you,”  I snip.  They shouldn’t have left me in the same one-way chatroom with a whining DWTS loser for 44 minutes.

“I’m very sorry about that, Mister Petro. Thanks you very much.”  Oh my sweet, sweet Jess-ie.

“Quit yanking my crank, Jessie, and connect me with someone in your department who has been promoted to at least short sleeve shirt and cheap necktie status (as I sit at my desk in my boxer shorts) and also has the authority to lower my APR to something more in line with…. say,  my bookie!”

“Please hold, Mister Petro. Thanks you very…” 

Click. Silence. No Michael Bolton. Dial tone. Again.

And,  as a movable social  part, I’m left with little choice but to take another deep breath and re-enter the queue. Tiny pieces of  my identity are tethered in so many separate but interconnected directions—my real estate buyers and sellers,  American Express (Blue, Gold & Business),  Bank of America Home Mortgage,  BMW of North America (and not even the 7-Series), NAR, CAR,  AARP (gasp)—that I dare not make a false move lest my FICO score, or Page Rank, or LinkedIn social rating suffer a virtual ding.  I am, at the very least,  defined by the last four digits of my social security number. At least for the time being.

I’m waiting for Higgs Boson.  And if the world is still in this mess in a hundred years, you can mark my RNG words in 140 characters or less, that I’m coming back as a cyber-ghost super-hero to put everyone with a name tag on permanent HOLD,  godammit.

(sound cue:)

‘….Tell me how am-I sup-posed to-live with-out you?….’