Monday
I wake up monday morning and somehow I am still feeling that shitty brittle and queasy feeling from a hangover, which is particularly strange since I haven't had a drop of booze since Saturday night. Sunday morning was pretty awkward, waking up in bed with the girl I had sworn not to wake up in bed with. This oath was based on the fact that as near as I could tell, neither one of us was likely to want the other to get anything healthy or positive out of our acquaintance, the only difference between us being, I knew that stuff going in. At some point in the hours between saturday night and sunday morning, probably around 5 am, I realized that drunken sex, as good as it usually is, was somehow less funny that drunken wrestling, so we spent a solid 20 minutes trying to out kung fu each other, which afterwards left me tired and untalkative, and I laid face first on my pillow and blacked out instantly. She left on sunday morning shortly after I woke up. Phew!
But for some reason all the way on Monday morning I still feel queasy. I make myself breakfast, a bowl of bran buds, with 2 ounces of pumpkin seeds and a sliced banana in skim milk, and a glass of grapefruit cocktail, whatever the fuck that means. I know what cocktail means, 20% grapefruit juice + 80% random shit cheaper by the volume that grapefruit juice. Oh well.
I drive downtown to work. I see some young women in cars around me in traffic. Pretty brown haired girl in a new Acura ... hmmm. Did her dad buy it for her? or does she make good money? Tough call. Pretty blond haired girl in a new Chevy Cobalt. Did her dad buy it? Yes. Did her Dad mention that her Chevy Cobalt, brand new, costs only slightly more than the high end set of tires on the other girls Acura? Nope. Would I burst her bubble if I had the chance? You bet. She has a Hawaiian lei around her rear view mirror. Barf.
I arrive at my parking lot downtown and manage to find one of the last remaining parking spaces. When I park I have to make a pretty serious effort to park super close enough to the car on my right side and basically make it impossible for them to open their driver's side door. Why? Because the driver has parked their SUV with its tyres actually on the yellow lines demarkulating the parking spaces. So the he/she/orc has asked for it, and I have no choice. I wish the driver was there so I could demand that they explain themselves.
One time last summer I was in a parking lot and I saw a woman double park right in front of me, so when she got out of her car I asked her why she did it and she tried to go ballistic on me. But she was a dunce and so not too clever with words, unlike yours truly. It was pretty easy to make fun of her and shoot down her crazy arguments which were entirely laughable. So I shot her arguments down and laughed at her while I did it, which was actually more fun even than it sounds. But it didn't deter her or make her go and correct the way her cheap piece of junk KIA Sedona was parked. But it did clearly make whatever passes for her mind become stressed and beleaguered by some vague recognition of her failure to accommodate even a simple courtesy that decent people show each other in society. Making her feel bad made me feel like a bigger person. But it stood no chance of fixing a thing. The real answer was to hire a bum to slit her throat. But who has the time, and besides, I've got bigger fish to fry.
Anyway this particular monday I step out of the parkade and make my way down the street to the building where I work. I try not to look directly at any of the complete freaks who stumble, shuffle, wander and stare. These freaks in sad truth consist of the majority of the crowd in the downtown of my city. Not a lot of professional types cross my path between the parkade and my office. Only drug addicts, ex-cons, crooks and any other variety of the different species of downtrodden and totally messed up. It is a unique aspect of downtown Edmonton, where you're at least as likely to see a grown man with a ponytail as you are to see a guy wearing a suit. Grown men in ponytails blow my mind. When I see a guy with a ponytail, or hair grown out that long on a man, its tells me one thing. The ponytail says, "do not listen to a word I fuckin say." Am I being unduly harsh? If you think so, that just sounds like ponytail talk to me, so spare me.
Grown men should not have ponytails, except in the case of fat people, where the equation is actually reversed. If a skinny guy with a ponytail is talking to you, you are in for an earful of shit. But fat guys with ponytails will tell you things that will blow your mind. A fat guy doesn't grow a ponytail just because he is a lazy useless dunce who can't keep up with the rest of adulthood and so instead he surrenders and becomes a longhaired failure. Nope, a fat guy grows a ponytail because he has tried every other possible way to look cool, and when none of them worked (of course), he got into music, computers, pornography and comic books. And because he's able to appreciate those things he will be interesting. He will know facts about the origin of vampire myths, and how spaceships could work, and interesting historical facts about our crumbling culture, and all sorts of other little things that a person will learn with all the free time they have while attractive people are having sex and stupidly spreading their DNA and viruses all over each other like monkeys. Anyway, I'm off topic.
I get to my office building where I work, and I am in the lobby of the building waiting for the elevator.
So I'm standing in the lobby, killing time I kick back on my wheels knock off on all these marbles. I stand there and just bop in my fancy garms waiting for the elevator ding. Some guy comes into the lobby and stands next to me, another young office type, a chump like me. He's wearing a pretty decent coat and slacks, I can't help but notice. He's also got his white headphones in and is listening to something, who knows what? Coldplay maybe? I am always a little back taken to see guys with headphones in dressed up clothes, especially considering my downtown is such a circus. Wearing headphones seems to me to be so deliberately cutting yourself off from the world. You won't see headphones on me, I'm living on all my 5 senses to survive in this asphalt jungle.
That sucka cuts off his hearing, he won't even hear it coming if he is gonna get it. He's too into living the materials life that he doesn't know that some comforts only dull your senses, and I keep mine like razor sharp. But he's got good taste in clothes so I must respect that at least.
Some men don't think there is a difference between cheap and expensive suits. That's good, as long as you don't think that looking like totally cheap shit is a difference. A few years ago I didn't know the difference either. But a few years ago I would wear pants made out of cotton, or ... polyester blends. Today the idea of wearing a suit made out of anything other than fine wool makes me want to puke all over your cheap ass clothing, thereby diminishing its value only negligibly.
Being covered in wool is convenient because then it doesn't feel so strange how I keep getting fucking fleeced. I overpay for everything, I can't negotiate and I can be talked into buying anything. I act on impulse, greed and narcissism being my strongest influences. I really want a Mitsubishi Lancer Evolution.
There are now a few other people waiting for the elevator. One is a young woman, fit and pretty, looks like maybe 20, maybe younger. She is dressed in what a 20 year old girl wears to work in an office. Pol-y-ester. I can see she is smiling about something, I expect she is smiling about something she saw on MTV or something. The crowd gets on the elevator. Everyone else gets off the elevator at the first stop, and then it is just me and her going up. She is looking at me and smiling. I smile back, not knowing what else to do. Her face is actually very pretty, the better looks I get at her. When the elevator reaches her floor and the door opens she looks at me and says "See ya." and smiles. I say "See ya." And she gets off the elevator. I ride the elevator up to my floor, and put the whole thing in the back of my mind.
I work all the livelong day in an office, in the sense that it says Office in our title. I personally work in a little rectangular MDF fort, where one side is an exterior wall of the building(lucky), which is in fact a big window(which is very lucky), 2 of the walls are MDF partition walls, and the last is a doorway and a wardrobe, which is very handy. My day at work is interesting, except that if I told you what I do for work you wouldn't care after the first 6 words.
When speaking to someone who I think is important I get nervous, and when I am nervous I have a habit of trailing off while talking. I also occasionally will abandon a sentence part of the way through. This happens enough that if the person knows me, they quite generously ignore it and pretend I had already stopped talking. So now I am talking to someone at work about something. They understand what I am trying to get across already, in spite of my fluxing incoherence, but I want to, like, uhh, impress them anyway. I am saying, "so it should, um, be that like I said. Uh ... and, oh sorry did I interrupt? No? Yes. Right. Uh huh."
Then they aren't listening. I am still speaking, "So I will I then go and get to going on this here. Cuz," cough, cough, "yeah, they can still go ahead at different times. They ... aren't ...uhhh ... indisquidable."
After I leave work I have to go to the grocery store. I am looking to purchase some pretty funny goods. I go to a store called "The Real Canadian Superstore". That name amuses me. A store that names itself in the manner of "the-adjective-adjective-adjective-noun" is not trying to suggest that it is high end shit. High end shit usually tries to go with one word names, or at least anything aspiring to be high end does. Sometimes the word is an adjective, sometimes a noun. Clubs will have names like "Light" or "Sky" and restaurants will have names like "Spago's" or "Orsay". Anyway, a store with 5 words in its name, and only one of those words is a noun, it is trying to send you a very clear message. It should skip all the subterfuge and call itself "Cheap-You-Spend".
I am looking for a lufa, that is not a joke. If you have ever been in to a "The Real Canadian Superstore", whatever time of day you go in, and whatever season, it looks like a bus full of monkeys covered in sand, dead grass, coniferous pine needles, and swamp water had just busted in and torn the place the apart. Open boxes of cereal are scattered across aisles. Shelves are stocked with dented cans. I try to remind myself to check expiry dates, but I never do.
Did George Lucas have any ideas for what a female Wookie would look like? Cause I am sure I just saw one. This store reminds me of when the crew of Star Trek does an away mission to an interplanetary bazaar. Next to the "Cheap-You-Spend" those scenes look like the motherfuckin Guggenheim. So here I am, firsthand witness to all of this scavenging activity, watching the most cheapest, and/or most brokest shitbirds in this city rifle through heaps of dumped and scrambled chaos, and they call it shopping. I amuse myself with this image, be glad I'm not the kind of boring fuckhead who is amused by irony, and then I begin my rummaging.
I find the Lufa's, but all they have are purple and pink ones. That won't do, that will make me look like a pussy( irony!!! ... yawn). Why do I want a lufa anyway? Well sometimes I use a lufa and body wash in the shower. It is actually really effective at softening your skin before shaving. This is especially helpful for someone with my hirsute hormone balance, since I can grow a beard during a particularly long movie. So I need all the help I can get. I use Ivory body wash, I find it makes the beard a lot softer. And it contains a high amount of sodium laureth sulfate which is a powerful detergent and really good at deodorizing your body. I found it quite useful after sex to get that sex smell off of me. Anyway, I have to get a new lufa, but that purchase is gonna have to wait until they either bring in some masculine colors like white, or I find a pink one that comes with a horny Czech supermodel.
I get home and the day is nearly done. The sun is down. I have cable, but the only thing on CNN are FLDS wives with very dark unibrows doing very little to shatter any of our imaginings of the goings on within polygamist cults. Our imaginings are almost as dark as their unibrows, and the impression that they are even slightly well adjusted, thanks to them, never roves into the debate, even weakly. I suppose most people would imagine that a polygamist cult might be creepy, considering that for a woman to join requires some pretty serious reconstruction of the notion that all humans deserve to treated with the same dignity and with respect of their own autonomy, sovereignty and the opportunity to fulfill their own potential.
I am not a feminist, or a male chauvinist. I am a secular humanist, who admittedly on bad days gravitates to pretty serious nihilism. But the idea that someone like my mom, or any of my strong black sisters, or any daughters that I might have out there, would ever submit to the wacky, frayed and mismatched belief system of some warped cult leader figure does not make me feel relaxed. The idea of trapping kids in that environment doesn't appeal to me either. Chances are good enough a kid will grow up a dimwit or jerk, but raise them in a cage in some cult acid trip lifestyle and their chances certainly don't improve.
All that stuff gets me down. That and one more thing. I am at the center of how I experience the world, it is inescapable. It is my senses, my organs, eyes, ears and wang that meet the bigger world around me. I would like to see the world through someone else's eyes. But my senses and my brain, and the world that they tune in to, are ... indisquidable. But still I would like to see the world through your eyes. I mean that. In case you missed the subtle point of everything you just read, I have been putting myself in the center of the universe. In the sense that I put myself at the center of everything that involves me. So I am totally self centered and self absorbed. Which really helps me to act narcissistic and vain.
I guess I am headed to a philosophical point here. I think I can still choose just how self centered I act, and lately I have really been siding with fucking pure vanity and bare egocentrism. Which is, I think, not good.