No, I really don’t. This person does. There isn’t room in the whole town for both of us. Besides, I’m self-employed, and that’s all the gambling any soul could ever need.
I offer this as a window into my soul; no offense, but this is exactly how I picture every commenter and author on every page on the Internet until they prove otherwise.
I don’t know what they pay policemen. It ain’t enough.
Wonderful, truly. There’s a visual diversity and ebullience available all over the place. It’s not universal, of course, but that’s the nature of true diversity, isn’t it? It’s the people that say that the culture and its artifacts are monolithic, and bad, that have no idea what a robust society produces. Stuff you don’t like, sometimes.
That’s a house in Madison, Indiana. I do believe I wouldn’t mind sitting on that porch for a good long while. The house it’s attached to is really nothing more than a little ranch house. You could say it was sprawl, and ask that it be flattened, or never built in the first place. Conversely, you could put a plaque on it and get a commission together to decide what colors it should be allowed to be painted, if anyone is to be allowed to touch it at all. It’s likely the same people would participate in both activities without noticing their left hand doesn’t know what their right hand is doing. America’s like that a lot.
It’s really very difficult to lay on dense decoration like that and do it well. It seems like a jumble to many eyes, because we’ve lost the knack. People try, timidly, to go a little way down this route, and make a mess of it. It’s only difficult because we don’t know the rules of decoration anymore, because there’s only been one rule exalted above all: No Decoration. It’s mildly counterintuitive, but I assure you that there’s nothing fussier than an absolute lack of decoration. Everything has to be flawless to pull it off, and nothing is, or stays that way very long.
We drive by the attempts to put decoration on dwellings now and I say to my wife: “Home Depot blew up,” and she knows exactly what I’m thinking without any further comment. Decoration has to be layered on, all of it in keeping with what’s already there and everything else you’re adding simultaneously.
For the most part, no one would have this on their house because they couldn’t picture expending even the effort it would take to maintain it, never mind the effort necessary to produce it in the first place. There is a great deal of contemporary American life and its institutions that answers that description, and that’s not good.
Get some wonderful and keep it. Then you’ll be qualified to make some, maybe.
But there I was, I was taken to a place, the hall of the mountain kings
I stood high upon a mountain top, naked to the world
In front of every kind of girl, there was
black ones, round ones, big ones, crazy ones…
Out of the middle came a lady
She whispered in my ear something crazy
She said:
(First offered in 2006. I’m closer to needing diapers than the little kid is now. Such is life.)
I remember when Friday meant something. It’ s a fuzzy, dim memory, like differential equations or the theme song to The Joey Bishop Show. But it was real, once.
You got paid on Friday. A check that you brought to the bank after work. A slip of paper that represented a fiduciary obligation on the part of your employer; you remember, that sort of thing. You’d go to the bank… no, I’m not kidding, you’d actually go there and wait in a line between velvet ropes depending in caternary curves from chrome stanchions, like it’s an opening night on Broadway and not a crummy line to get beer money; you’d stare at the clock and the neck of the person in front of you and remember lame jokes you saw on the Tonight Show about the little chain on the pen at all the stand up desks. Why, those jokes were funnier than airline peanuts, I’m tellin’ ya.
And you’d have that slip filled out to go with your paycheck– but never correctly; always with your deposit on the first line until you noticed that line was labeled “cash” or “currency,” and you’d scratch it out and fill it in a line lower, and then wonder if it was OK to have scratched out stuff written on a DEPOSIT SLIP. It’s like a legal document and all, and you can’t just have a do-over on that, can you? So you’d make out another and put the info on the second line, like a good doobie, until you noticed the “cash” line you avoided has a check box with it. The first one was correct all along, and now you’ve got one with the first line inexplicably left blank; and you’ do it over but you’re last in line again already and you need to get out of there — It’s FRIDAY!
After you wait and wait, the clerk behind the bullet proof glass that doesn’t even go up to the ceiling barely even looks at what you wrote, they just read the check and push a few twenties back and grunt at you anyway.
But it’s Friday! You don’t care. You need to find clean clothes that match. That’s only two variables. Why do you still end up inspecting your second clothes hamper — the floor –for stuff only lightly worn that looks slightly better than the Mr. Zog’s Sex Wax tee shirt that’s the only clean thing in your drawer? Who cares? It smoky in the bar anyway, and it’s Friday!.
Oh. You can’t go to that bar. She’ll be there, and you took her number and didn’t call it. You meant to… no you didn’t.
Who cares? It’s Friday! There’s many other places with a common victualler’s license, ain’t there? Your friends all have dates — or geez poor Steve got married fer crissakes — but you’ll find someone you know at the Irish Bar, won’t you? Yeah, but maybe it’ll be that guy you impaled with the dart two weeks ago. You keep asking yourself the same two questions about that place: Who walks in front of a guy throwing darts? That, and: What kind of person wears a sheetrock knife on his belt in an Irish Bar on… yup: Friday night!
What’s on TV? Remington Steele. Blecch. A repeat at that. Hello Domino’s? No anchovies. No; no anchovies. The little fishes. No, I don’t want extra anchovies. I WANT EXTRA NO ANCHOVIES.
(fast forward)
It’s so much easier now. Friday! is still the best day of the week. There’s always clean clothes. They still don’t match, but you’re old and you don’t care. Who are you going to impress? Your wife? She bought you those clothes. The money is already in the bank of course. You only go to the bank to sign mortgage papers once every ten years now. The rest is just keystrokes. Where is the bank, exactly? You haven’t had money in your pocket for ten years. What would you do with money? Get pennies handed back to you. Who wants those? Even my children want quarters. Pay the plastic bill when it comes. Keystrokes. Stamps? What are those?
But it’s still Friday! and Friday! is still wonderful, because Friday! is the day you take the six plastic bags that have been lurking at the bottom of the stairs all week to the end of the driveway. Yeah, those bags. The ones with the diapers in them.
Happy Friday! to one and all!
Tag: life
sippicancottage
A Man Who Has Nothing In Particular To Recommend Him Discusses All Sorts of Subjects at Random as Though He Knew Everything.
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