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Choking on Self Importance

I was at a fancy hotel on the North Coast, sitting outside on my patio, when from a room down the way this guy comes up.  He is deep in his fifties, has a swagger and an attitude.

“I’d prefer if you didn’t smoke…” he announces with majestic flourish.

“Breddren…” I say, so he won’t think I’m a tourist like him, “This called patio. This is where we smoke. Seen?”

I don’t usually speak in patois. I don’t usually act like someone two words away from putting a bullet in his face. But this guy annoyed me.  Everything about him annoyed me.

He was tall and had remnants of being quite handsome in his youth and the smarmy manner of a spoiled brat.

It was kind of a stand off, although I was sitting. The more I looked at him, the more familiar he was getting.

I don’t know what came next because Mego, a friend of mine came up. The guy stood a few seconds,  then walked back to where he had been. Mego asked;  “A who dat?”

“Some guy being annoying…” I said.

Then I realised who the guy was. He was an actor.  He was an actor who had portrayed a character on a sci-fi programme I’d watched years ago.

I never watched much T.V. so it was kind of strange I would have turned it on just as TVJ was airing an episode of a programme that had gone off the air in the U.S. about four years before I saw it.

There was a character that fascinated me, and I thought he was Jamaican because he had a look to him.

I  looked him up on Wikipedia.

What I read about him was nothing much and assuming he was some star,  I did a search, wound up on a fan site, learned he left the show after the second season and hadn’t worked regularly since.To say he was a ‘has been’ would mean that he ‘once was’ and he never was.

It was pretty clear to me why.

<a href="http://couples.com/resorts/negril/accommodations" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Source</a>

 

Here we are, at a fancy North Coast hotel. Each room in this section opens to what I called a patio, a little outside area with a table and chairs and view of the sea.

The rooms are far enough apart  to grant privacy.

This guy walked  from his section to mine to tell me that he doesn’t want me to smoke. Who would do that? Only an ego driven spoiled brat who thinks he can look at the sky and say ‘Rain!’ and be rather annoyed it didn’t.

I could imagine him, on the set of that show, thinking he was so important that he could tell the other actors how to live.

Getting fired, not finding other roles did not in any way alter his perception of himself. He still thought, after all these years, he was important.

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Written by jaylar

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