100518 mrs digby on a park bench eating bagels st louis is made of brick walls and dark green vines the vines are invisible and help you think potato chips arrayed in careful lines three to four feet above the tile floor the floor of the bodega slants gently downward toward the street as if it’s ushering you out slowly softly inexorably back to the world outside; the streets; the cracks in the streets lined with tar you fall into the crack in the street and take the elevator underground heading toward hone home is a clapboard shack on the outskirts of memory how do you know whewn to stop you don’t a seventh grade conversation neer stops never pauses the opposite of a martian conversation doing cartwheels into the room, your sister smiling brace faced with some kind of palpable pain you listen to usic together you eat creamsicles together you sit in the basement in front of your winnie the pooh reord player how come reality always furnishes memories with rotten pumpkins to sit on i always get lost i’m lost i’m an experiment the rumboing engines of association arent’ quite starting up today it’s too cold the battery’s half dead and so are you having fallen thirty two point thirty one miles downward through the cracks in the street after all watching the sodium glow of the streetlights recede above you; lonely stars receding through a crack in the clouds how long has it been since you i wonder if you are still do you remember when we under the words, the real meaning is wake up i can’t it’s too cold ok stop being dramatic it’s not working any more i don’t know dude. i don’t know what to tell you. i think five oclock is always going to be miserable, whether you’ve self medicated or not. but if you have, it’s just a little worse. you’re trading a tarnished, half bent underwater twenty three year old nickel for a night of plump fuzzy moonlight that helps you think you’re some kind of wonder boy as you fall asleep. twenty some years later, you wake up and you’re distinctively middle aged. there’s things about your body that don’t work properly anymore. not that you can’t drive it; just that you gotta carry a couple extra bottles of oil around, you know what i’m saying? this was literally overnight that these twenty some years happened in. It must have had something to do with time. time spent watching cartoons time spent walking the dog going to the corner bar with your best friend time spent eating cookies drinking milkshakes on the way home from work to make you feel better sippy cup for the little baby; he’s all tuckered out; he’s had a busy day! interacting with people is exhausting the legos were scattered all over the floor; their sodium edges jutting squarely into the haunted night a martian landscape bleak undifferentiated from horizon to horizon this jagged pattern reflecting cold starlight the mirror faces of your childhood, showing you the void on all sides illuminating that great expanse of nothingness between the edge of the world and the tiled floor, sloping gently towards the street patted by day after day of summer feet little kids in cut off shorts ride their bikes to the store play with the legos eat the necco wafers and the now and laters go thru the motions one more time then ride home through the cracks in the street lined with tar and memories. well let’s just say for the sake of argument that i had an obligation to say one true thing befoe i put this bitch down and try to sort of halfway go to sleep instead of doing the grading i sowre up and down i’d get to between now and when everybody comes down here. ok how about this: I have too fucking much to do today. i’m gonna have to reschedule my oil change. welcome to your hair receding and your pisser dribbling like an old man’s. that’s 1 dollar eighty nine. you have a nice day now. we’ll see you next time. no really. i mean it.