In the morning, walking to work from your bus stop, you pass a skeletal crackhead grasping on to a street sign and retching for dear life. One of her hands grips the signpost, while the rest of her buffets like a pirate flag affixed to a mast.

Her eyes bug, her tongue lolls, and she convulses as if she’s trying to expel her own brain. For her sake, you hope she eventually succeeds in one way or another. Then you enter the building and go up the stairs to your desk in the Executive Suite.

The restroom in your office building is tiled with a patchwork of periwinkle rectangles. The light seems to have been pilfered from a department store dressing room. The door is hospital blue, metallic, and heavy. While washing your hands, you stare at the grid of linoleum and wonder how often the word “complacency” can be spelled in the squares before the whole crossword is filled.

Everything about this building, where you stew for forty hours a week, is sterile as an operating room and stale as the inside of an airplane. You know there are worse ways to do penance than endless filing and slacking for nice people with whom you have nothing in common, but still, you think, “Okay, Life. You can find me any time, now.”

The day doesn’t really begin until five o’clock, when you step outside and, thank fucking God, the air is open and cool and damp. There’s a rain smell of something happening, and the living sky is lumpy concrete bleeding with mischievous chalky smears. You remember how free you are as odors and colors and sounds of the city rush over you like a tidal wave, flooding your face so fast that you sputter. The bus arrives to carry you downtown, and your eyes have turned into ravenous Pacmen devouring the treadmill landscape every time you blink.

Revived, you disembark your bus a bit earlier than usual, to prolong your walk to the subway. Busy commuters buzz around you, you are part of the hive, and instead of lamenting their narrow tunnel vision, you notice the trails they leave in the air, like comets. Your own 9 to 5 streams behind you like a superhero’s cape.

Every free breath you take is an aphrodisiac. Against the overcast backdrop, the skyscrapers flaunt themselves in full frontal nudity.

If only you had wings! If only you could launch up to challenge the fog which jealously obscures the rooftops, and leaves the blind buildings brazen and vulnerable so that you feel like a peeping tom spying on maidens bathing by a stream. If only you could fly, and have it out with the angels who elude you while you’re on the ground.

They don’t call … they don’t write … They’re busy in their own hive, perhaps.

You swim through the present, your greedy eyes leading your gaze skyward, your head tilting crazy and ludicrous as the top of a Pez dispenser. Your flip-flops flip and flop as you walk along curbs and garden rails, not caring that the world must think you have the mentality of a six year old.

Rock music rushes from your headphones into your brain, as if a dam has busted.

Yeah a lust for life …
I got a lust for life …

… And you know it’s dorky, but rock and roll makes you wish you could tap dance. Or anything-dance, for that matter.

So, when’s the rain gonna start? If the sky would open up and deliver, you’d stomp through new pools, full dunk, and raise your arms to spray the resulting splash upward and outward like the wings of an Esther Williams-inspired rain angel. Just one big puddle, please, to serve as a trampoline. That’s all you need.

But the rain hasn’t begun falling by the time you go underground to catch your train. Oh, well. You’re a romantic, and sort of a cheese ball, but you’re no idiot. You know that life is a beautiful whore, and even though she doesn’t always give you exactly what you ask for, it’s best to surrender to her mercy.

~ Last Five Entries ~

Arm-in-Arm Down Burgundy - 09.05.05

Motivated! - 08.25.05

Moths, and Relative Nonsense - 08.18.05

I Finally Have Internet Access in my Bedroom. But, No Ashtray. - 08.09.05

Here I Am - 08.02.05

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BUY JEN'S BOOK! BUY IT! DO IT!

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BUY DEAN'S BOOK, TOO! YOU KNOW YOU WANNA! SERIOUSLY.

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