professor confusion and a new baby

so i got to see a baby again. i like hospital cafeterias and the ice scream scoops of potatoes and the new kid is like a dog. he doesn’t have to hold it in. he pees and shits and cries when he has to and when things go wrong, he cries some more.

seeing all this newness inspired me. i walked into the community college classroom. it was a course on american literature. i wasn’t going for a degree or anything, just looking for some connection to something bigger than my self.

The professor recited poetry and i liked the confusion it inspired in me and based on the questions of the students,,,,,,,well, they sounded confused too….and so i thought how great, we could all be confused together and maybe figure it out, but I knew we would never figure it out and ultimately head out to the bars or some beer basement to at least try and we wouldn’t go so far as creating a fraternity or a brother hood, but we’d be less alone anyway and i’d have stories to tell the new baby

but don’t get me wrong, i like chicken and hamburgers

i felt kind of cruel tonight standing there and staring at a brown idaho potato boiling in water, bobbing up and down, trying to escape, desperately longing for a previous state and for a second there, i think i understood the potato because i remembered how good it looked just a few minutes earlier with its brownish pocked skin, all dry and crusty, ready for a nice rain.

i like to take my potatoes out of the suffocating bag and let them breathe and hang out and look at the bananas on top of my microwave or the white wall or maybe they don’t look at anything which wouldn’t be that bad either. i like a few minutes or days of not looking at things.

and if that’s the case, if a potato has eyes, but doesn’t look at things, then i’m like a potato because i have eyes, but i haven’t looked at a sunrise or sunset or a crushed beer can rolling in the wind in forever and i’m slowly decomposing too.

and in other news,

so this 59-year old grave digger commits suicide. he’d been digging graves since he was a teenager so what suddenly inspired him to end it? that’s the thing that sucks about science. You can dissect his brain, but you’ll never find out what his last thoughts were.

funeral homes and baby clothes

i guess the title of this should be reversed. it should be baby clothes and funeral homes since baby clothes come before funeral homes. i was just thinking how baby clothes are so expensive and so are funeral homes – to buy a plot and a tombstone. it’s worse than a five star hotel room. baby clothes are the same and they grow out of them in like 7 months. but i guess it doesn’t matter to the main actor – the baby because a baby doesn’t care how much anything costs and the dead don’t care either because they are already dead. it’s the living that get screwed. I guess I should have used exclamation points in this post, but that must make me seem so bitter, like a victim, but i’m not always like that.

a newspaper salesman and a dumpster diver

“where did you find your relatives? Are they ghosts from your past reappearing in your mind? Do you really have a family” asked the dumpster diver.”

“Well, that’s easy for you to ask about reappearing since you scuba dive in shit holes and come up with the equivalent of gold. It’s the thrill of finding it. Isn’t it? Doesn’t matter if it’s gold or aluminum or an old wood begging bowl from the 14th century India. It’s that feeling of discovery.”

“Or rediscovery,” wondered the dumpster diver. “So where did you find your relatives?” asked the dumpster diver again.

“I invite you for a beer,” said the newspaper salesman.

“And then during the beer, maybe we can enjoy a cigarette,” added the dumpster diver. “I collect butts, ya know, the stuff people think are trash, but they are treasures – that left over tobacco.”

“I don’t smoke,” replied the newspaper salesman.

“Awwwww, shut up you buzz kill,” laughed the dumpster diver.

And the newspaper salesman did buy the dumpster diver a beer, but they couldn’t exchange phone numbers or emails because the dumpster diver had no phone number or email, but they were laughing as they walked away from each other and both said see you later…

cancelling vacations

It was raining today. I was walking along and I came upon a sewer duct and water was dropping into it and it sounded good so I stopped to listen. It was like stopping to hear a street musician. I wonder if that’s what waterfalls sound like?

the dead end flamingo

in the bar, at the rail, there’s everyone with their hoods lifted, engine parts facing the sky, exposed to all the eyes and valentine day queries and sudden kisses from women with no teeth and talk of world war three and the towel rack in the bathroom. nine ball anyone? they’re playing ramble on again. the lights just went on. it smells like carper cleaner. let’s go to my apartment and drink some more beer and listen to ramble on.

i wonder what poets do?

do they have refrigerator magnets?
what do they keep in their refrigerator?
champagne? key lime pie?
do they watch tv before going to bed?
sing in the shower?
read magazines?
what magazines?
study roman mythology?
i bet they do all of these things and much more and I bet they like that there are solstices, two of them, and that there are moon phases because that allows for all kinds of moods.

how to get a girl with just a cell phone and a dog

i’ve heard stories of fathers giving up horses so his son could get “the girl.” this was a long time ago, back when people got around on horses and dragged shit and stuff and what not around thanks to these same horses. i guess the horse was like the cow is in India, but i’m not sure because i’ve never been to india. come to think of it, I’ve never ridden a horse either. but it musta been pretty cool for the dad to be like, “yeh, no problem. we’ll offer the girl’s family one of our stallions and that oughta get you the girl. And maybe it was the other way around too? Girl wanted guy and dad was like heck, we’ll offer them Jones’s over there some of our ponies and that oughta get you the guy……but probably not because woman had little say back in the day unless it was a matriarchal society and i think some native american tribes were matriarchs.

anyway, no one rides horses anymore, but they do walk dogs and carry cell phones and thank god people still get all choked up over seeing someone and studying them for a couple of days, not stalking them, just checking them out and realizing that they are potential lovers, object of desires and what not.

if i had a cell phone and a dog, i bet i could get a girl. i’d bring my cell phone with me, stuff it in my back pocket like everyone seems to do these days and i’d walk my dog like everyone seems to have a dog these days….yeh, i’d bring both and i’d tie my dog to the trough outside of a bar or diner. i’d tie my good old bud of a dog up with plenty of leash so people could pass by and pet it and play with it and i’d be in the window watching it all go down, drinking some fancy coffee moca libertino chino or whatever and then i’d see this connection hatching between stranger and my dog and i’d walk outside and talk to this sudden potential object of desire about my dog and i’d have my cell phone with me too and it would bip or bling or tic toc or whatever cell phones do and it would be some ad from somewhere but this new object of desire wouldn’t know it was an ad and so i’d pretend it was a someone. i’d start talking about what was up later that night…..yeh, i’d lie and pretend that i was popular, that i had other objects of desire and this might (i’m sure it would) generate jealousy in my new potential object of desire and she’d tuck hair behind her ears and i’d know from my marketing guru that she was interested and so then me and this stranger would have a path…

if i could be a drunk for a day…

the SAQ or sack as we call it here in Montreal, the provincially owned liquor store, is such a bummer upgrade (well dressed – uniformed employees, mopped floors, clean windows, and the smell of air freshener) bummer upgrade from the dingy places we buy booze in america. I say bummer because i sometimes like the outside to be like my insides and well, i often feel like an american liquor store though i like sunny days too, omens as we get older, happier daze?