"Stand man, don’t wilt in these hobo enervating rose bushes.” -- Lucien Carr as quoted by Jack Kerouac in his journals.
Written yesterday on iPhone
Sitting in the hardware store. The missus and I picked out a fan and then she went looking for a thingamajig. That was about five maybe six eons ago. I am slowly dying of starvation thirst and boredom. Hardware stores are not my thing.
I've caught up with Words With Friends. The game is a godsend for times like this or waiting for the trolley or when you're too crammed onto a subway train that is too crowded to read your book let alone get it out of the backpack.
I'm sitting near the checkout counters. There are millions of tons of candies, chips and sodas positioned near the counters for sweet toothed impulse buyers. (It's a chain hardware store.) Rather cynical I think, but then so is the whole snack food and junk food industry. They know good and well they're selling sweetened garbage and making mighty contributions to the nation's obesity and diabetes problems. But hey no one is forcing the poor saps to buy it. So they make huge profits. There are a lot of businesses making obscene profits and driving hundreds of smaller business out. Unfettered capitalism has created an oligarchy in this country. Huge profits for a few and below subsistence wages for workers. Bah!
Written tonight
I once saw a man emerge from a burning building on fire from head to toe. Human torch is I believe how it could best be described. Turned out the fire was a work of arson and the man on fire was the arsonist. He subsequently died in the hospital by pulling out all the tubes that were keeping him alive. Seemed a logical choice given the severity of the burns all over his body and the certainty of horrific pain to come and disfigurement and skin grafts. I recall some people at the time opining that his fate was poetic justice. Maybe. People weren't terribly sad about the whole thing. Why should they be? Life goes on and how do you find the time to waste pity on some poor schmoe who brought about his own death in the act of committing a crime? I didn't say much about it. I had seen him ablaze and its a permanent memory. I stood there for awhile more and watched the firefighters battle the inferno. It's what one does. I continued on my way down the street and noted the arsonist on a stretcher about to be lifted into the back of an ambulance. There was a sheet covering him but not all the way down to his feet. I saw that some of his toes had burned off and his feet looked like charcoal. I've never been in a war zone and that was enough to convince me that I hadn't missed much.
I had nasty unpleasant commutes coming and going today. It's no way to bookend a perfectly satisfactory work day. Delays are generally compounded by over crowding. So you wait longer and then more people are added and the eventual trip is slower. The subway train was so crowded that not only couldn’t I get my book out of my backpack and not only would I have had little room to hold the book and turn pages but I also had difficulty playing Words With Friends on ye old iPhone. Plus some dinglebutt was giving me the once over with his backpack. I had to satisfy myself by listening to Crosby, Still, Nash & Young. One tries to make do.
I keep getting emails from people who want me to review their books for Amazon. This is because I used to write reviews on Amazon. This used to ended seven years ago but I still get emails. Sometimes I write back and say sorry not my thing but lotsa luck. Other times I ignore them. Depends on my mood. The other day I received such an email that began thusly: "Hi Jon...." I responded as follows: “My name isn’t Jon.” He wrote back to say he was sorry and that he “must have made a mistake somewhere along the way.” Oh it was a mistake. And here I thought he had intentionally written to a stranger named Richard and called him Jon. But no, it was a mistake. How bout that?
Now if you’ll excuse I am going to redirect my attention to the television screen and the Giants game.
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