one of my favorite true stories…
I was running late as I hurried to the bus stop and got there just in time to step onto the bus, throw my change in the box and slide into the first front-facing seat. I had planned on finishing at least one chapter of my new Sedaris book, but I glanced up as I was digging through my bag to see a man with a fanny pack looking at me, raising his eyebrows as if to say “hellooooow!.” Hoping to avoid any further weirdness at 7:00 in the morning, I kept my eyes out the window, until the man seated next to Fanny Pack answered his cell phone and I instinctively looked over to see who was committing the cardinal offense of speaking on the bus in the morning, and on my way to the phone-man, my eyes caught, again, Fanny Pack speaking his dirty eyebrow language. This time, however, I convinced myself that, what with the fanny pack, this man was probably developmentally disabled or something and merely had an eye tick. Satisfied with that conclusion, I readied myself to switch buses, but before I could pull the cord, Fanny Pack himself indicated that he would like to get off at my stop. I made sure to creep behind him, but when we went to board the next bus, he ushered me ahead of him with a wink and a nod, unmistakeable this time, and smarmy. I knew I should head straight for the back of the bus, but I saw that there were no single seats available and made the fatal decision to sit on the sideways bench, right between two empty seats. Fanny Pack pounced. He settled in next to me and, to my horror, began to sing. For the next ten minutes, F.P. serenaded me with an obviously made up on the spot song I like to call “Make Sweet Love”, as this line was repeated several times, along with such gems as: “I’ll hold you all night, all night long” and “I’ll make you so hot, so hot, girl” and “when I look into your precious eyes, I know I want you in my life forever”. All of this followed by his most primal attempt to lower his voice as much as possible and utter “yeah”.
We’re getting married in July.
sunspots
clockwork
Christmas Day, 2005
People are surprising. Good surprises and bad; because people don’t react to circumstances in the same way we would, the unexpected becomes the only thing to expect. In the end, we are alone in our interpretation of the world, and thus reality is fluid. Our function in it is only to temporarily effect the existence of others, and to survive it ourselves. We are all stumbling babies until the day we die.
Phoenix
Homecoming