I dislike cheerful old people. Something’s wrong there: Them with their fastidiously kempt white hair; melanoma-proof golf course tans; smiling Hitler-blue eyes. The existence of cheerful old people proves that there isn’t an even distribution of pain in the Universe. Cheerful old people do not know the Endless Now.
My cat is dead. I know it even though I’m not looking at his still body.
I know this without having seen him. I’ve been unemployed for four months. For the past 121 days, when I’ve been home in the afternoon, which has been for most of them, Mittens, my cat, has come downstairs at around two o’clock to beg me for supper. It’s now five after two.
I try hard not to be too much of a cultural chauvinist, but some of the things Germans do are just wrong. Over the years I’ve learned to tolerate all manner of behaviors that made my younger self uncomfortable: people shaking hands in non-professional contexts, people not smiling when they say hello, people not knowing how to wait in lines, et cetera. I’ve even adopted a few behaviors that would strike many Americans as odd: I bag my own groceries, I don’t tip unless the person actually deserves it, and I can listen to political opponents without wanting them dead.
“No,” I told him, “we cannot ask the monk for the password.”
“Why?” asked the Apple support guy.
“Because he’s dead.”
I was seated on the train near the center car on the aisle so as to keep my gaze fixed upon the despicable Sandibal Huxley. He was a loathsome creature in need of gazing upon. I had picked up his trail around the Café Fulcro in Naples at about three in the afternoon and had trailed him to the Napoli Centrale. I watched him from a distance and waited for my orders to apprehend, which never came, so I boarded his train and continued my pursuit.
Night Train
Hey, this is for The Sake of Soul, minus rock and roll. I got news for you. I got blues for you. I got things for you to do. Dig what I say. Hear what I play. We gonna fill the hole in your soul, with the best of the blues.
“Does Frida have a good nose?”
Harold Zelenko lit his ninth cigarette of the day, and took a gulp of coffee. “Old ball and chain has the best nose in perdition,” he said. He loosened his tie and unbuttoned his collar. The Florida sun hadn’t yet reached its zenith, but there was no roof over the fenced motel patio, and it was a barbecue pit.
The night I asked Lena to drop out of high school and marry me, it was freezing. We were waiting out a fall hailstorm, hunkered together under the awning of Kennywood Amusement Park’s Haunted House which was Lena’s favorite ride, even though she rode it with her eyes closed. “Oh, Lennerd,” she said, “Yes. Yes!” Afterwards, we rode the neck-whipping wooden coaster, Thunderbolt, and she was a good sport about it.
When I was twelve years old my grade six class went on a camping trip to the Coromandel, a rugged peninsula on New Zealand’s North Island. Three teachers came to supervise the boys-only class. After a two-hour bus trip we pitched our tents at a campsite off a dirt road, thirty minutes from the small mining town of Thames. The site was surrounded by bush and mountain ranges, one mountain caught everyone’s eye, it had a long flat top, a teacher, Mr Larson, informed us it was aptly named Tabletop Mountain.
Here we are with another Saturday and another week closer to the dreaded ‘C’ word.
Just to let you all know that we will finish up on Saturday 23rd December and be back in the New Year on the 8th. Now if you are depressed and write the weirdest most deranged story in the world, send it in, we insist!
Continue reading “Week 153 – Holiday Break, Re-Reads And Crack For The Eyes (Allegedly)”
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