I BUMP INTO THE GIRL just outside the door to Artoe's Nail and Stud Boutique, the latest cross-merchandise consumer dresser to open up on Paradiso Avenue.

"Oh, geez—sorry," she says, eyes wide blue, one hand covering her smiling mouth as I drop my copy of the Palm Coast News and bend over, palms on knees, eyes staring at the sidewalk just beyond her sandaled feet. I notice that her feet and nails are original equipment—nothing ringed, tatted, painted or adorned. Unusual.

"You breathing?" she asks, bending down and holding back the giggle.

"Sure thing," I answer, letting out the first breath in five seconds.

It was the freakiest of accidental meetings. As I began to pass Artoe's door—which, as everyone knows, is between Palm Tree Tapioca Ice and Angel's Palmistry & Gun Express—I was six-inches deep into a story about a girl who'd had a neon-blue bikini tattooed on her body, when the peripherals of my right eye caught a sidewalk oyster the size of Philadelphia about to swallow up my foot.

So in a ... quick ... two-step ... done ... to dodge three baby teens in braces, A+ halter tops and skin jeans, my left foot clipped in toward my right as my right leg whipped toward Artoe's door—and missed the giant mucous—just as she was zooming out the door and looking up the street the other way. Then she turned, a tall girl in a real hurry, and strode between my legs, her right thigh moving like a fence post uprooted by a windstorm as it met my innocent and dreamy orbs of joy, swinging in their wrinkled hammock.

"Does this mean your boys will hate girl legs, now, forever?" she asks, still having fun. She puts a soft hand on my shoulder.

"No," I answer and straighten up, blinking in the noonday light. "They're very forgiving."

"Oh, really," she says.

"Really. The most empathetic gonads you'll likely ever meet."

She mini-hoots, repeating empa ... thetic ... go ... nads as a lady with puffed blue hair, and matching Prada bag and shoes, walks past. The lady looks at us like we've just skinned and tanned the language.

I watch her pass, then turn back. The girl has stopped laughing now, her features frozen in a half-smile as she does some serious face time on me. This is not unusual. It's the thing where everyone, for ten seconds, can become a head painter as they take you in; which means they take your image and internalize it; which means rework the it-you in their heads—often with special psychic oils and brushes of the best idea airs—to see just how their own romantic, post-romantic vision of the world might look on you.

As I watch her model me, she slowly lifts her left hand from my shoulder and I sense the art jury has returned. Then she snaps back to her life and stammers: "Uh ... so ... you're okay, then."

"Yeah. Okay," I answer, not surprised by how difficult it can be to do a de- and re- construction on my lack of me.

"Good." She runs a hand up through her hair and fingercombs it back and off her face, reassembling her persona, ready to move on.

I smile back, speechless-clueless as to how we ever came to see that going from the individual and personal, back to the impersonal and common, could possibly be moving on.

"Good," she repeats, in catchword full-breeze now. "So ... nice to meet you. I guess. You and your boys take care." Then Have a great day! flashes through a trademark smile, and she turns and disappears into the crowd on Paradiso.

Still standing on my mark by Artoe's door, I look across the street to watch a mom and dad and two kids get out of and alarm a yellow Hummer at the curb—a wide-track, muscled icon of the hold that crowding has on us. Less clueless to the cause-effect of our conditioning, I'm thinking, than hooked on shooting up the baubles of denial.

If you put the crowd in time, you see a beast that's old and set dead in its ways. The clueless part would come in stepping out of that and, living on our indie own, let instinct free to find its way in thought. For that our social packing comes with no directions for assembly, and no clue on how to make the human Cinderella real.


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