I'm No Different From the Morning Birds

I woke up this morning at 3 because I took a long nap after dinner and because I had a nightmare about my shadow incarnate. And it's just me now, in the middle of my messy room, listening to the fan and romanticizing cross-country adventures. I actually googled walk across America, and I found a journal titled "I'm Just Walkin'". I like the sign on his cart and the way he labels things, but I find he doesn't write enough and that he takes too many pictures of plain expanses of land, local bags of chips, and mailboxes. To each his own, but I still admire him, and the apparent congeniality of the North American states.

I've been thinking about it more and more so. How Jules in Pulp Fiction talks about wanting to just "...walk the Earth," and how Forrest Gump did it a little quicker, and how the father and son in McCarthy's The Road never let the fire die, and how adventures never come home. An Australian girl named Jessica Watson circumnavigated the globe in a sailboat, but she was too young to be considered for a world record.

A man asked me for change today on Mineola Blvd. and I asked him a few questions since I didn't initially hear him. What had happened to his income? Why he was there...and so forth. And he rolled up his pant legs and showed me the turgid socks, brown filth speckling through. He seemed to be suffering from gout, and the hospital could only do so much about it, he told me. And I remembered volunteering at the hospital and seeing this type of thing much worse, cancerous growths blowing up legs to incredible proportions.

And I thought and thought about it, his immobility, hopelessness, and is it recklessness to envisage such a journey when others cannot, will not, will never be able to? All my life, I've been keen on documenting my experiences through the idiosyncratic lens that is my written voice, and I wonder about the travel, and is there something else that can be done to make it more, reverential...How can one bring about change through something big and small at the same time?

The Effects of One Rugrats Episode

Almost refreshing isn't it?

Call me childish, but life is one big regression as far as my new boss tells me,

and why not venture back to Rugrats? A lot of conversations naturally veer in this direction, the Nickelodeon direction, and I'm not crazy because I've seen it happen.

I like to think that the first person to actually use the terms "rug rat(s)," instinctively, was this fantastic guy:

The purpose of this entry though, is not just for idle reminiscing, but because of one particular episode you might be able to recall, unless you're like me and it permanently affected your psyche, in which case you would not have forgotten.

The episode where Chuckie swallows a watermelon seed and the rugrats thought if he didn't get it out, it would grow into a real watermelon.

There's really no more plot to explain besides how they all shrink and traipse around Chuckie's insides without ever suffering a casualty.

But this affected the way I viewed fruit, and eating seeds, especially in watermelons, and I recently realized how fucking silly it's all been...but I'm almost positive this episode was the cause of it all.

Here's an actually creepy picture of a watermelon, to get all your cravings going. Haha.

Unrelated, a video of a man that looks like he's continuously being mauled, but actually just giving really big cats, really big hugs.

Creep Killer

Surprise, I worked the pizzeria today, and as I walked through the door, I was told, "Hurry up, Anthony, we're backed up," and I see the most experienced pizza men, frantic, rushing between the entropy of deliveries and orders and slices in the oven...there's no clock really, it's just the few seconds you have before everything burns.

And so I work. No big deal. Just Friday. And by the end of the day, my callouses are back from the hundred pies I cut. I could have cut more...I used to joke that I kept count.

One old man walks out on me because I kept him waiting too long for four regulars, and it really must have been ten minutes, tops. But I watched him in the corner, standing, brooding...letting his pride take over his patience, letting it all swell into something personal, and I wondered about him after apologizing, somewhat profusely, "Really, sir, it's really my fault, just a few more minutes." Is this moment really happening? Am I the cause of this man's utter discontent?

What happened, exactly, you ask? Well, three people came in, one after the other, and ordered four slices each, and while attending to these ridiculous orders, the old man caught my attention for a moment and ordered another four...and pizzas only grow on trees in Mali...

Later, the men drink. They offer me tequila shots and I accept them. And it's just another Friday, except this time I'm limping around with a hematoma discoloring my right toe, and I'm thinking about the previous night, having slept over an apartment in the lower east-side with the two fantastic girls I'll be driving to Bonnaroo with. I woke up in the middle of the night confused, for only a second, disorientated by the lemonades and vodka, the homemade pizza with sauteed yellow peppers and onions...the night still, with a general calmness you can only find on a semi-rigid pullout.

On the drive home from work, after delivering slices to friends, I see a group of girls walking and I tap my horn a few times, as I normally do when passing a group of whoevers, and I hear one of them say, "can you give us a ride..." and their voices blend in with the wind, and I keep driving, thinking, if this was any other place, I would do it. And so I turn around, and I fit all three little girls in the car, after the serial killer test.

"I was just kidding before, you know, but if you really do need a ride, I'd be more than willing to help."

"No way, no way! You're not, like, some creepy guy that's gunna kidnap us, are you?"

"Haha, no, I assure you."
(I am, I am, you rotten little bags of skin. Hop in this car if you want to feel pain before death.)

And they hop in and I take them to where they NEED to go, so desperately in the night, the Mineola Pool, so they can dangle around little men, and I marvel at the idea of human trust, and murder, and general human kindness, if there is such a thing, since it's all obscured by societal conditioning and John Walsh's precautions.

Albert Fish used to write letters to the mothers of the children he had kidnapped, sodomized, tortured and eaten, and he would explain all of these things in horrific, mind-bending detail.