Tuesday, September 24, 2013

I wish you all the best:

In what may be a continuation of a past installment of this blog, I continue to wish you all the best; I may have already written most of this but here goes anyway: I want only the best for you.

I hope that someday you will find a flavor of toothpaste that really is to your liking - not just one where you merely tolerate using it, but one where you actually look forward to leaping out of bed and jogging to the bathroom and slathering the toothpaste across your teeth and gums every morning before summarily spitting it out.

I would love to hear that you have come up with a really clever and funny name for your home wireless internet network, and a yet-funnier password to accompany it; a name/passphrase combination so artless and inspired that you can't wait to have guests over who will need to use your wifi.

I dream that you will have occasion to eat unflavored greek yogurt out of a tub late at night while sitting in a basement apartment in a foreign city.

It brings me great pleasure to think that you might be presented with the opportunity to comically leap over the net after a tennis match, or to spike an american football into an official or unofficial end zone.

May you one day take a drag off of your cigarette, looking off into the middle distance, and then realize something very important, which causes you to take off your glasses suddenly, then you take a final quick drag of your cigarette and sort of shake it and go "that's it!" or "yeah!" or something like that, and then you throw the cigarette down and stride purposefully away.

I wish for you to take in the sight of a sprawling vista, just standing there, arms akimbo, legs shoulder-width apart, and perhaps to bellow in a manner not inconsistent with that of Early Man, or Woman, or whatever Early Gender you might choose.

I  hope you get to run down the steps to the subway, hearing the train arrive even as you bobble down the hard stairs, and you make it through the doors just in time, securing a seat on the end of the bench so you can't be sandwiched by humans; and further that as you feel the conditioned air (hot or cold, depending on the season) wash over you and you shudder a little, you are afforded the luxury of watching someone else run towards the train and not make it on in time, and your schadenfreude kicks in, and maybe the person who didn't make it is someone who looks differently than you like people to look, or maybe it's even someone you actually know and don't like, and you get the singular pleasure of shrugging slightly at them, sort of a "too bad for you" face, and they get really mad and maybe yell and point at you or pound on the door, but are ultimately left freezing or sweating on the platform as you glide away in your magic carriage into the dark.



 


Monday, September 16, 2013

Woodhull

I'm sitting on the train platform, waiting for the M train to take me back to Ridgewood. I love the M train, it's one of NYC's hidden treasures. Not really but it beats the shit out of the L, at least during the week. I don't work for the MTA but they pay me $60 every six weeks to mention the M train to at least 40 people so I figured I'd get that out of the way with this opening paragraph here.

Anyway there I am, outside, it's pretty deserted, it's nice out, oh I should mention that the JMZ is an elevated train line in Brooklyn/Queens (just for all you people who live elsewhere) so yeah I'm outside, in the shadow of the most frightening-looking hospital I've seen in the United States, Woodhull. It's the facility that serves Bushwick and Williamsburg, I believe (although I think they're building some sort of white-person-gas-pains Urgent Care center over on Metropolitan).

"Serves" is a loose term; although I have never been in there myself (through some miracle I have only been in Wyckoff Heights and Kings County hospitals), I and probably everyone I know has heard a story from a friend who walked in with, like, an earache and left three days later in a wheelchair. The building itself looks like a spacecraft from a dark future, some industrial freighter that has temporarily touched down to harvest mineral ores and will at any moment rumble and lopsidely roar into the sky.

A woman comes through the turnstiles and walks over to the bench I'm sitting on and sits two seats away from me. I notice that her shoelaces are untied, in fact they look like they've just been re-laced. She rolls up her sleeve and I see the hospital wristband, even as she brings it up to her mouth and starts biting at it. She rips it free from her arm, in between her teeth, and spits it out in front of her, breathing a heavy sigh of relief.

Psych ward. Back on the streets.   


Sunday, September 8, 2013

This was printed on the back of the pack of gum I just bought

We're looking for the next big thing, we're not sure what the last big thing is, but we're relatively confident in our ability to identify big things. There's something on the horizon that's coming up, it's gonna be big; right now it's shapeless, looming. We're ready for it to envelop us all. It will be a benevolent enveloping, a security envelope with a window, a maximum security envelope. We will spend 23 hours a day inside it. There will be a bubble; and as before, you will expand with it until it bursts.

I'm not sure you undersatand, sir, the idea of the Rewards card. You do not get a reward simply for signing up for the card; although many people who are unable to provide a phoine number and hence do not qualify for the rewards card may consider owerrship of the card itself to be a significant reward, being as it is unattainable/unobtainable by/to them. You get nothing, right away. You get nothing right away (immediately). But over time, after you buy our products, we will periodically reward you, over time, with the chance to buy further products at a reduced rate, and this is your reward - the opportunity to buy more products. Treasure this.

I don't want to twist your arm here, I don't mean to put you on the spot. I'm not trying to back you into a corner or anything. I want to make this as easy on you as possible. I'm not looking to make enemies, I think we should all take a chill pill, smoke a peace pipe, and just take it easy. We should just take it slow, take it as it comes, play it by ear, not think too much, don't overthink things. I'm not trying to rake you over the coals or throw you under the bus. This isn't a witch hunt, I'm not on a crusade, we're not making martyrs out of anyone. I don't want to rub anyone the wrong way, or go against the grain. Usually this kind of thing goes off without a hitch or a raised eyebrow. Usually nothing untoward occurs, nothing pops up, no red flags.

There are cats screaming in the yard. I can't ever tell if a cat is screaming in a cat pain compliance fight, or if it's just the sound of cats mating or cats in heat. From what I have read, the sounds are virtually identical. I have seen diagrams of a cat's penis, which show the penis to have little barbs or hooks on it, so once it is inserted, it can't easily be backed out. I don't know why I was ever under any circumstances shown diagrams of a cat's penis, either in school or by anyone else, but it's now information that I have that I'm pretty sure is true but may or may not be true.