Posts tagged ‘imagine’
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.
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.
i play with rainbows and ferris wheels and cotton candy jump ropes when i’m not at school. i have a special place on top of an oak tree near prospect park where i keep all my magic stuff. i have to put it there because my brother doesn’t really share too well so i have to hide it from him. sometimes on the weekend, i go to vermont because i have a small plane that i keep there. it’s kind of hard to find but it’s only like maybe two hours from here. but i can go anywhere on the plane because it’s solar powered and wind powered too. last week i went to great adventures and the cool thing is that i don’t have to pay for the ticket i just land near the giraffes. they’re cool and all with me there so long as it’s just me.
i think a lot of people think, including myself, that if they stay in the same job, things are going to change, you know they just will somehow, someway. just stick out for a few more days and those days become months and those months become years and then holy shit you’ve been in the same job for almost ten years. and then you realize nothing really changed except you’re going to come home every night and avoid the mirror but every once in a while you’ll look in the mirror and ask yourself, “what i am fucking doing?” and that’s one of those real questions that we as humans like to avoid because it actually makes you think for real, makes you step back from the moving and doing and checking fucking email for the sake of moving and doing and checking fucking email. and right there and then you can make a choice to leave and do what you want to do or you can go back to doing the same shit you were doing before, hoping and wishing that the whole scenario is going to change, or you can step out and do what you’ve been deferring for some undefined moment in time in some undefined moment in the future.
the reach is one of the most difficult techniques to maneuver, particularly in public places. it requires cat like instincts and above all, an affinity for taking chances when they count the most. this is what defines success, both here in the subway and in the corporate world. the lessons i will teach you over the next six weeks will change your life, wherever you are and in whatever station of life you are in. with this once in a lifetime course, YOU too can make the reach!
there is a magic show that i keep in a box at home underneath my bed inside of a secret plastic bag that’s folded between two envelopes that i remember buying the first time i went to paris and saw the beautiful lights. i really miss those days because those were the days you could fly literally with these carpets that you could get anywhere for a pittance. all you really needed was a place to fly and there was plenty of that in the countryside. my father owned a farm there with all these chickens and i remember they use to come in at dinner and ask us to sing songs and we did because that’s the kind of family we were.
imagine a world where everyday is the first day.
for me, the best time to go to coney island is in the summer when it’s raining. the rain washes away all the dust and litter and manhattanites that tend to accumulate. what’s left is the innocence that will always be coney island. even if you weren’t born here, you are transported back, even for a few seconds, to that time in your childhood when you could yell at the top of your lungs, when your daddy was your best friend, and you ran from one place to another because you could.
some of my friends’ friends, they keep talking about wanting to get a better car than the one they have. but me, i don’t even have a car. i like to think i can afford it but really i can’t. i eat three times a day and go out to lunch at least once a week, but i can’t afford a car. where am i going to park it? whose going to pay for the insurance? with all those crazy drivers out there and the teenagers now they just hit my car after a few weeks and then i won’t be able to drive it. what then. then i’ll be paying for a car that doesn’t work. that’s the last thing i need right now with the economy the way it is. some of my friends friends don’t have jobs so i don’t know where they are getting the money but probably from rich uncles or something. that’s the only thing that could explain it because me i’ve got a good job, no a great job at the dumpling house. i work maybe nine hours a day, starting with the lunch shift. we go pretty hard those few hours then we slow down then pick up again right around 5:30. i get to meet lots of people. people from the neighborhood. tourists. the young ones. and i get to eat on the house so none of my money goes wasted to food. i keep my expenses low. and sometimes in the summers, i get picked to work overtime for the weddings. and that’s when i make some good money. i make time a half.
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