Posts tagged ‘commute’
in five years, do you think they still will be friends?
alright fine, we’re related. but that doesn’t mean i told her how to do everything. and even if she did pick it up from somewhere or another, you still have to be an olympic trained gymnast like me to do those moves.
“is it real?” she asked.
“of course it is,” she said as she glanced at her friend’s thigh. she hadn’t seen anything like that in a long time. “i’ve seen it work with my own eyes.”
“really?” she said.
“put your hand in this bag. do it real slowly,” she instructed. “and when you’re about to scream, just hold onto my arm right there and everything will be alright.”
TO: LEADERS OF THE HUMAN RACE
FROM: THE BATTLE STAR LION FORCE
RE: SUMMER
THIS IS TO INFORM YOU THAT SUMMER WILL BEGIN ON JUNE 20, 2012 AT APPROXIMATELY 7:09 P.M.
PLEASE MAKE SURE YOU RELEASE THIS MEMO VIA THE PROPER CHANNELS, PARTICULARLY TO THE ONE AND ONLY HECTORISH LEE.
i woke up this morning and discovered i had become someone else. i’m not talking just about physical characteristics. i’m talking about certain talents like playing the acoustic guitar and cleaning out vacuum cleaners. it’s an amazing feeling to know that even though your life was never how you imagined it to be when you were younger, you still have some identifiable talents that your kids, inarticulate or not, could talk about to others in perhaps the same unremarkable situations you did during one of your many life experiences that made you so damn unremarkable. even when i wrote that, i had to read it a few times, and not because these new nails were in the way. it was because of these glasses. they share the same u.v. protection that the astronauts have. on one hand, they protect me from the sun but on the other, i can’t see shit out of them.
children in new york city evolve much faster than the rest of the population. and new york city girls, well, even quicker. sure, you can try to keep them safe but when everyone lives in a blender at a constant mix and pulse, sooner or later that innocent girl of yours that loves to play with carebears and watch ni hao kai-lan is going to see that real life kind of grime that is starkly different than jumping in puddles or playing with finger paint. and the thing with new york city grime is that it doesn’t just sit there on the corner or in the alley or on the subway. the fucking thing talks to you in all kinds of different voices but it always ends with, ‘come on and look at me and then when you’re done why don’t you give me a little touch.’ you can tell your child lots of times to ignore it but sooner or later, the city you are trying to prevent your child from swallowing all of a sudden swallows your child.
I remember waking up that morning with a long tail, thick whiskers, and an insatiable appetite for subway water runoff and fermented garbage. I wrapped the tail around my leg with duct tape, shaved the whiskers off, and then drank a large cup of coffee. By lunchtime my tail had disappeared. My whiskers never grew back. I never realized then that I had an ongoing medical condition.
Nothing ever happened again until a few months later when I began smoking massive amounts of the Purple Spike. Purple Spike looked like prime California Kush. Thick, golf ball size buds covered with purple hairs and crystals, and the kind of scent that just blasted through any container it was in. But the Purple Spike didn’t smell like weed because it wasn’t weed. Purple Spike was the last original strain of Dehydrated Free Will cultivated by the now infamous Clan of
Jompa. More on that shit later, because I have to get some preliminaries out of the way. Otherwise, you are not going to understand or even be prepared mentally for what you are about to learn. There’s a good chance that your body could just shut down and cease operating.
i know some of you know this, but i’m one of michael bloomberg’s unofficial biographers. he asked me to do it unofficially a few years ago while we were eating bagels at le bagel cafe in brooklyn. it’s been a pretty cool gig so far even though i’m not getting paid anything. he throws me a bag of ridiculously salty pretzels here and there and once in a while allows me to use his bathroom at his apartment so long as he’s not around and i don’t crap in it. i was asked a few weeks ago by one of those reporters from the new york times whether i could tell her something about bloomberg that wasn’t on wikipedia. i had to think about it for a few minutes because there was a lot of shit that people didn’t know about the mayor. for example, he uses a reduced fare metrocard, will not under any circumstances shop at c-town supermarkets, loves, i mean loves barbara streisand and elizabeth taylor, and is deathly afraid of squirrels. but the one thing that really no one knows is that bloomberg was one of the founding members of run dmc.
my favorite thing about holiday shopping is the lines. i love waiting in lines, especially at the large national retail chains like target or as they say here in brooklyn, tar-zhayyyyy. there’s nothing like knowing that there will be three times as many cashiers and workers after the holidays than there will be in the days before christmas. i love getting to inspect the back of people’s heads and feeling the front of some asshole’s cart rubbing against my lower back in the only available four customer lines that each have at least eight hundred shoppers in them. i can’t find anything better to do on the day before christmas than wait three hours to get to the cashier and then when i finally do the scanner doesn’t work and there’s no one to price check my motherfucking gallon of milk. i say, ‘i’ll give you a twenty and we’ll call it even,’ because you know, i want to get out of there, but then she says in between chewing gum and twittling with her sterling plated earrings that her cash register is locked. i think maybe i could just steal the milk but then i remembered that during the holiday season there are like four security guards for every person in the store. so given the crowd, i figured there were at least two hundred and forty three thousand of them hiding behind the plastic bags or the woman’s lingerie. instead i went to the dollar store and got some expired milk and seventy eight corn husk angels for my nephews.
i will tax cut your ass off with my tongue. i will shut down your electricity with my cheek. i will divert all your orange juice to mayor bloomberg. i will take your ice cream from your freezer and put it into my toaster. i will move all government jobs to kenya. i will outlaw anything with yogurt in it. i will build a shrine to overweight cows and put it in the center of columbus circle. i will remove everything above 96th street and put it in the bronx under a big blue tarp. i will get rid of the subway and require everyone to drink gasoline. i will force everyone to put a tattoo of barry goldwater above their right knee. i will require everyone to put green backsplash in their kitchens. i will make it illegal to wear anything made of pashmina. i will force everyone to bow down to martha stewart.
e v e r y d a y aperture 