Drama

This is a story of two friends one of whom has everything and wants nothing, and the other one just the opposite, of course. That is, she has nothing -- or close to nothing -- and wants a baby. Wants it so badly she's contemplating going off the pill without telling her boyfriend. The way she puts it, "My body is aching for it." She has three different degrees and works as a copy editor at a small press, earning barely a living wage. She already has a nine-year old daughter. Her boyfriend is a few years younger, he's in sales, but not very good at it. The other friend never had babies, never wants to have babies, doesn't see the point of them. She is ehh, well, let's say a professor at a University. Earning not much, but a stable income that could take her quite far in the field of reproduction. Her kids' college tuition would be definitely covered. But she doesn't want any children. The world is overpopulated as it is, she thinks. And what for? Life is pain, and not really worth it. The center of the piece would be a conversation between the two of them, where one is dying to ask for money but feels ashamed, and the other would give it in a second if asked, but believes her friend is making a bad and selfish decision, so she doesn't offer. The goal? The point? There is none. Just the story.

Identity

That white girl is pretty.

One composed, one borrowed

Yesterday
we moved our bed
Now our heads point towards the wall and the living room and the mountains
Our feet lead through the windows towards the strawberries and the ocean
Our faces face the apricot tree
Our eyes look out to the sea
Hawaii, Japan, etc.
Direction is important
Sleep is serious business

It's hard to find young people today who are curious about
the Grateful Dead
The young people are (choose one)
1) not interested
2) Think Jerry was God
And he was just a guy
All of us, just guys,
just fish swimming in the sea.

Warning

Please be aware that Reena, a 26-year old bartender at Sun Cloud winery off of Rt. 12, has recently lost her husband to heart attack. Behave accordingly.

Opera

The story I deleted today was based on the history of the breakup and reunion of a band I like because it was getting too close to the real story of the band, including the names of the bassist and the saxophone player. Tomorrow I'll start from scratch by naming them Alphie and Betty and adding a fictional pianist to the mix.

Buckets

Yesterday I went to one of those Ace Hardware stores, the one on Market Street, across the street from Safeway, you know it, and there was a man there, an elderly man, older than me, for sure, and he was placing all these metal buckets in front of him on the ledge, over the stairs they have there. There must've been six or seven buckets in a row, all of them on this narrow ledge, above that staircase. They have a lot of other things hanging there, over that staircase, and I've always thought that it wasn't very safe for others, because, you know, there isn't a lot of space there, and people are always bumping into things, and imagine one of those things should fall down? So I don't know what this man was doing with the buckets, but there were a lot of them, six or seven, all in a row. They were these shiny metal buckets, with handles. I am not one to tell people what I think they should do, otherwise I could've said something, because I think it's very dangerous for people to be in that store, especially if you want to go down the stairs. But even if you don't, it just looked like a very bad idea to me.

Meat

She is particularly disciplined after a long vacation. She is expecting guests today, so at exactly 18:00 she will close her laptop, throw away candy and gum wrappers, take the elevator down to the street, get on the subway, get off at Church street, go into a store with a name I can't even remember, and buy meat. Several pieces, large and lean. No bones. Hardly any veins. Killed only the previous morning. Her party is going to be awesome.

Nissan

My August Nissan news has arrived, tells me my Inbox. I can click on the picture of a car in a puddle to learn more about the four-door sports car now available at my local Nissan dealer. But instead I'd like to scroll down to the bottom of the email and find the unsubscribe button. This is the seventh mailing list I've unsubscribed from today. In the age when countries lead cyber warfare against each other, my friend (me ex-friend) decided to take revenge on me by subscribing me to everything from TCBY to NineWest mailers. Everything she thinks that I'm dying to have. I can see why our relationship couldn't last: would you want to be friends with anybody who thinks you're dreaming of owning a four-door sports car that is very good at driving through puddles?

Solitaire

Sometimes I find my sister at the public library. She always goes to the Periodicals Reading Room to flip through the pages of Time and the Economist. She's always been attracted to the business magazines, I can't understand why. Today though she was giving trouble to the librarians. I heard her voice the minute I walked through the doors: she is a little hard of hearing, so she tends to speak loudly. "I want to learn how to play solitaire with cards!" she insisted. But nobody could help her. "Is it a game?" I heard a men's voice ask her. "Yes, it's a game," she cried, "We used to play it in fifteenth and sixteenth --" she didn't finish a sentence, and I wonder what she was going to say: fifteenth and sixteenth what? I was climbing the stairs, and couldn't make out what happened next, but as I entered the hall I saw her turn away from the reference desk with angry words: "I better go home. Of course, you haven’t got anything on solitaire!" Then she saw me -- I think she maybe even recognized me for a moment, because she asked: "Do you know how to play solitaire?"