So what's your excuse?

Life is hard. And somehow, some way, people get by a good portion of their lives without learning a damn thing. How do they do it?

I don't believe I've ever seen a full grown man revert to childhood in public, until today. Fedex/Kinko's will do that to you I guess. The man in question was a poodle haired baby dickhead in braided sandals, of about late 30/40-something, judging by the salt and pepper hair. He wanted to print out some pictures directly from his digital camera. In his hand he held a ripped out newspaper clipping of sorts, with some facacta instructions scribbled on it. He was a mess. When he reached the clerk at the register, he started wailing about how he wanted to print his pictures straight from the camera. The woman floating around to help customers had already told him while he was in line he would need to access the pictures from an email address.

"But I don't have an email address," he whined.

Upon reaching the register, the Fedex/Kinko's folks reiterated the same information to him. The line came to screeching halt and customers waiting and being rung up alike turned to look on as Mr. Archaic stupid-head cried about how this had become so complicated, how this had never been a problem "before." Before what? The internet boom? The bull-bear economy? The atom bomb?

How does a person go a lifetime in contemporary American society without having a functional email address? What's your malfunction sir? How do you communicate with others? Do you work? What in the hell do you do for a living, besides cry like a bitch and hold up the line at Kinko's?

What gets me is, signing up for an email address was not even on the menu for this guy. Here was his chance to become a part of the technological brigade, but he just had to insist on being difficult, whilst crying about the situation being unnecessarily complicated. He literally pouted and raised his voice to a shrill level in front of the cashier, and when the floater came around to check on his progress, or lack thereof, he went to her and rubbed his eyes like a sleepy baby while whimpering, "I don't know why this is so difficult, they don't want to print my pictures off the camera and I've done it that way before..."

The remedy is more ass kickings. That would teach him. How is he surviving in New York City? Just saying.

Thank You

Thank you for freeing me from the crippling need of you. You were the shepherd for some time but you've disappeared from your flock without notice. Though you've abandoned me like a faithless friend, you forced me to seek comfort and approval from a far more important person. This new support will be sure to last a lifetime and I say this without lack of faith, because I now turn to me.

Rat Race

And we rise out from the ground like rats. All of us inevitably wanting the same thing, being just a piece of this immense, limitless city, all for ourselves. We want the same, but head in different directions, at different paces, with different intensities. Yet at the end of the day, after the race is over, we submerge ourselves to the underground congregation yet again, our meeting place, where numerous walks of life share the same space, the same direction, perhaps for the last time. As you grip the steel bars, your body nestled between the performer, the intellect or the vagrant, you exhaustedly sway together under the train's motion, silent and resigned. There's a commonality among you, a stillness, an understanding no one speaks of. No one dares break this rare moment of silence, because once you rise out from the depths of the city, the race against one another begins anew.