Finely Woven Steel Organza

steel organza: different from most other organza, i imagine. i imagine it offers a micro-thin layer of protection, worn around the shoulders in Autumn, when it's undoubdtedly most effective. steel. woven into organza. superman's cape, you might compare it to. organza. a pleasant word to say for its connotive qualities--its similarity to the word 'orgasm'. in this respect it has something in common with the word 'organism', which is strangely not as connotive of a coital power shot of love from the groin to the cerebral cortex, but instead reminds me of biology class. organza. sounds Italian. sounds like 'organized'. a good quality to have, being organized. staple the brain to the desk; don't ever lose it. mske sure everything is in small, neat piles. rinse, repeat, save to disk with hardcopy double spaced, clear and concise, with bullet points, succinctly, um, parsed out, codified, and arranged by height in ascending order.

handy-wipes. Handy Fucking Wipes. handy fucking wipes, which are actual fact known as handy-wipes, without the fucking, which would probably not go over with those that buy them, have to have the most perfect and literal name of anything on earth. they are handy. they wipe. used in hand, they are a handy way to wipe things, these simple little wipes, we call them. wipes. little handy wipes. handy. wipe.

recently, i ended up alone in a strange apartment, with a strange man there, a man who i barely knew--an older man, in an apartment that looked out over the East River from the Brooklyn side, with the Williamsburg Bridage behind, and an impressive view of the two other bridges a half a mile or so down a straight channel of fast moving water, under fast moving white clouds.

i wondered whether this man, who was my boss, was going to make some sort of sexual pass at me, or do something that might require me to bop him over the head with something. he had already showed himself to be eccentric. energetic and absent minded, liberal politically but prone to hire white males, effusive and demanding, with grey hair and long fingernails.

with regards to the apartment, he seems not to like anyone "foreign", meaning any outsider, to use his toilet. he is something of a germaphobe. our weekly staff meeting this past wednesday ended with him explaining that the proper use of a toilet is to flush it only with the lid and cover down, because otherwise a "fine mist of bacteria" is loosed in all directions. he can't possibly deny me the privalege, though (he could be sued for substandard working conditions), so i piss in his pot. i ponder the odd scene while i squeeze out a pee and examine his bathroom, which is bare and sterile, a toothbrush, toothpaste, a razor (which he looks not to have used recently), soap. i worry little about the disturbing thought of this man attempting to molest me. but there is something weird about him and he did just get me very, very stoned.

Franklin Zabor is a work in progress.

Truth and Fiction

my dad urged me to get a job because being idle was "not healthy". i am in qualified agreement because, while having a steady has helped my mental health, i feel that the workaday lifestyle has done little to improve my physical well-being. exhaustion can be fun; a strange euphoria sets in, you float around on wings and forget things in coffee shops without really caring, enjoying a natural high. the disconnected feeling insulates you from the things people do that you would otherwise find annoying. but like any high, you crash. then you're just tired. you get tired, you get sick. you get sick, you miss work. you miss work, your kids don't eat. you don't eat. your kids probably still eat. i'm not a barbarian. i also don't have kids, so, in all likelihood, since they don't exist, they don't eat. fact.

if the bird flu ends up washing ashore here. and by if i would like to mean if, not when, which is what we all fear. if the bird flu washes ashore here, two things will happen. one, innocent birds will die, and two, there will be a decline in public demand for chicken dinners. an added bonus is that many innocent people, may die. whether Chinese restaurants would suffer is a question for debate. flu season would have a whole new meaning. plague season. pestilence season. viruses holding people up at knifepoint in back alleys around the city. cold little turnabout streets in Chinatown, Beyard, Pell, would be referred to as ground zero. flu season, i guess it's on the way, right? pretty much here? i never thought much about it and i still don't.

i ate at Joe's the other night with my friend Pan, who enjoys teaching me about the finer points of Asian dining (the tea acts as immolient, cleansing the mouth. he also got me into chopsticks, which i use religiously and with relish at such times). Pan enjoys a bit of banter with the waiter so he can show off a little Taiwan Mandarin. i think i saw the waiter ask him to repeat himself at one point, but you have to forgive Pan if his accent is rusty for he hasn't been back to his island since he was a boy. he'll get to go back soon enough: one of the privaleges of a greencard is that the government lets you travel to foreign lands. Pan is marrying an American girl in January.

Cherelyn's family hails originally from mainland China. they met in a class they had together back in school. i was in that class too, as were Rory and Duke. we were all roommates. Even completed the Circle Of Trust.

Even's girlfriend, Leelee, is also Chinese. well, she's really an Amercian girl like Cherelyn, but her family is. she and her man, who calls himself Even, are currently in an unnamed South American country whose capital may or may not be either Lima or Montevideo.

Another close friend of mine, Leffe (LEFF-fuh), is currently in a country whose capital may or may not be Dar es Salaam. okay, i'll just say it, Tanzania. he is assisting in the prosecution of Rwandan war criminals. he's a long way from home so i'll just give him a shoutout. i encourage you to track his adventures here http://mzungudiaries.blogspot.com. the truth: stranger, somehow, than fiction.

my girlfriend gave me a beautiful pocketwatch for my birthday, which was ten days ago. it's silver, and it has my initials on it. i listen to it tick, an act that is satisfying, i've discovered, especially on rainy days. soon, if i press the button to trigger the clasp and open the cover, stare at the face, which has roman numeral hours and, strikingly, individually numbered seconds for the delicate second hand to single out as it sweeps around, if i do choose to examine those hands, measure out the long and the short of it, and read the writing on the wall, it will tell me that i need to be somewhere in thirty minutes. if i don't choose to open it, if i forget, i may not get there.

Ecchinacea

i just looked this word up quickly, googled it to be exact, and discovered that i had spelled it right the first time, was proud of myself, then had a crushing realization that i was getting a little too proud of myself. earlier i was attempting to figure out how to fix a digital camera, which i'd like to think is broken because i was not able to fix the problem, which may be a machine malfunction, but is more likely old fashioned human error at work in the workplace. things can go wrong and sometimes they do go wrong, all at once, though in a very boring and tedious way, nothing spectacular like sparks flying out of things. i had a brief thought: trapped in a blaze in the oldest, shabbiest office building in Downtown Brooklyn. what a fucking view though. 25th floor, facing due north. a view to a kill, or maybe a death, from smoke inhalation. that or some sort of freak accident--the old 'box falling off the top of the pile onto someone's unsuspecting noggin routine. an infinitely more ignominious (and possibly more likely) end.

i'm doing the old Texas Two Step and almost falling over. it's midday there and the rain is coming down in buckets, pales, and seemingly every other container known to purvey rainwater from heaven to earth. i tripped on something. it's better than it used to be but still a cluttered office. i'm having a shitty time because nothing is going right. downtown Manhattan is a memory as clouds roil and spill their pissy rain all over things. misty, at that. and it's not going well inside; the day is slowly decaying, and no one is really too uptight about it. pays not to be. patientce will pay off. patience. so long as, and this is another small problem, we get paid once in a while.

Ayoob

Booya spelled backwards. Also the name of the starting quarterback for the Bears of Berkley, Cal.