I’m a writer and this word can tell you why, probably

Omar Sanchez
Aug 22, 2017 · 5 min read
The smile of a twerp and the tie of a cigar shop owner

As a little boy, I started looking out of car windows constantly. I wasn’t necessarily looking for something, but nothing in the car was going to do it for me, either.

Mostly what I would find interesting on long drives with my family, as my quick glances turned to long and distant gazes, were the McDonald’s gold arches or pigeons perched across telephone lines. I mean, these pigeons were so perfectly single file every time we drove by it was like my fourth grade teacher had got to them, too. It always seemed like these telephone lines never could stay up right. Some of them you can tell tilted slightly forward every few weeks and then some creaked so much I could imagine a “Final Destination 2” scenario going down on Tuesday. Those telephone pole tilts also made the pigeons I looked up at look like they peered back at me — eyes of contempt because I wanted to know what their life was like. Pigeons are a private animal, after all.

I was a curious kid who with time, mixed with ungodly amount of hours on YouTube trying to learn how to talk to girls via the pulp “pick-up artist” channels nobody should watch, grew up. As a pensive, fractured high school kid I made the decision that I was going to be famous by the age of 21. Yup. I didn’t know it then, but my decision a few years later to write things down — spit the words out that I never could in my childhood— led me to a place far away from fame, and that’s completely okay.

If I didn’t, if I somehow kept thinking at the age of 20 I was going to be a slightly-but-just-so-slightly more worthy of fame mogul ala Jake Paul, I probably would have ended up being famous. But, it’s the kind of famous that would never make headlines, the piss bucket of news that I somehow went mad and did something unthinkable. It’s the kind of famous that runs front page if your family had their own newsstand and each newspaper on a random day is either about your Aunt Linda’s divorce (the New York Times) or your cousin Anthony’s new job he posted on Facebook (let’s say WaPo).

Me? I’d go front page tabloid. Even my family would be calling fake news that I was even related.

Luckily today is a different story. I have since shifted into the lofty but uncomfortable driver’s seat in the car, right in front of where Omar would have been 15 years ago. While I still have that same tendency to look outside car windows, it’s subsided like my love for Weird Al Yankovic. I don’t really know why I started looking out into the horizons of Aurora, Illinois, as a kid so often, but I did.

Not quite me looking out the window, but I wish I was chucking myself out of it after this picture.

In French, there is a word that rolls off the tongue in a way that makes you feel like only the Most Interesting Man in the World could say it.

Now, although i’ve been toiling with this word in my mind for years now, I’m about to rip the description of what it is straight off Wikipedia. “Flâneur” is just what you think it is: not English. It stands for, in the exact words of someone I will most likely ask in four years how they make any money, “the man of leisure, the idler, the urban explorer, the connoisseur of the street.”

For 20-some-odd years I was exactly that, so much so that it was eating away at me. I couldn’t talk to people; I couldn’t express myself; What I was able to do was look out car windows. I could take a scene in front of me and imagine what went on at that house or this restaurant, creating stories that would keep me company in my own brain. The great thing was that scenes in front of me changed fast, so as soon as the Coke-red street light became a Sprite-green light, the line of pigeons would be gone and in came a field, or a mall, or, if I was lucky, another car. Then I would imagine what they were doing in that car, why the fussy kid sat biting his Spongebob toy or what it takes for a couple to share the same drink, as the one in front of me did the same.

I still have those thoughts sometimes in my daily life, but in the last few years I’ve learned to use the colors in my mind to paint a picture for everyone else. I was building a Bob Ross-sized easel but wasn’t sharing it with anyone else. Once I decided to go into journalism, it was easy to find a canvas to lay my eyes on. There are so many I have left to doodle on, to splatter across.

The thing is too, I also wasn’t sharing the stories in my mind with myself before journalism. I wasn’t recording my thoughts in any way. I guess you could say bits and pieces of my journalism in the past have bread crumbs of what my thoughts look like. Hopefully it isn’t Wonder Bread.

This is going to be my first post on this blog that i’m doing for very selfish reasons. I want to work out the kinks of not only my writing, but my thought processes. In that time, I will be writing things that come to mind for me in pop culture. Whether that is about why Mark-Paul Gosselaar needs a fifteenth chance or why threesomes are mentioned SO MUCH across all genres of music in the last 10 years.

I would like to write daily, but i’m a bit of a flâneur, so who really knows.

)
Omar Sanchez

Written by

Pop Culture Writer and Meme-first journalist

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