A Walk In The Park
2001-06-08 - 11:22 p.m.
I figured it all out...quite ingenious, really. You see, I gave the evil serial mouse back to the exact student who let me borrow it, so I was without pointer-motion. To further hinder this situation, I had customized my version of windows to not include the accessibility options (thus, I did not have the ability to turn on Mousekeys). Not to mention that my keyboard has two number pads and two sets of 'F' keys and two number pads, but is lacking in the critical area of windows keys and right-click keys. This was really a head-scratcher, to select icq without a mouse. Not to mention running winamp and word at the same time, because I couldn't figure out how to minimize a file without the aide of pointer-motion. The secret: It's all in Ctrl-B. Open 'My Pooter', and then use the Ctrl-B to open whatever is desired. By opening icq, it will re-activate the icq programme (use Alt-Tab to switch between all other files). And in the valley, the dandelions sighed in pleasant awe. Thankyouverymuch.
Dead Milkmen, "Jesus".
I said my goodbyes today, to this town that has been my home-away-from-my-home-away-from-home. I sat on a gravestone on the highest hill of the town...just looking at the streetlights. Those bluelights people put on their garages. And the trees...dandelions, open space, the sheer modesty of the construction of the town. The straightforward manner of most Mainers, the way everyone can go to sleep at night with their car door unlocked, because they wholeheartedly trust everyone else not to steal their four-wheeled piece of junk...besides, in a small town, everyone know who the culprit was, even before the culprit has made up their mind about their culpriting activities. I wished a loving goodbye to the school, my real first father figure, made of brick and concrete. I told the town, in a whispering sort of verse, the list or things that I loved and would miss about it. But at the same time, I'm gladd to be doing something more, escaping from the dirt/mudd roads and rusty train tracks.
But before I approached the graveyard, I bumped into some townies looking for a fight. They were sitting in their cars (three townies, three cars), most likely with tire-irons laid out on the back seats.
Me: *wearing James II and cap*
Townie: Hey, what's your name?
Me: Jason.
Townie: I heard Jason was a faggot!
Me: *walks over to the cars*...Naa, only about 53%...what's your name?
Townie: *silence.*
Me: Alright...see ya later then. *starts walking away*
Townie: Hey, are you a Jehovah's Witness?!?
Me: *takes off hat, showing his bare head* No, I'm a Neo-NAZI shythead!
Townie: Oh...umm...okay...
Hehehehe...wel, maybe you had to be there, but I thought it was hilarious...
Sidenote: I am not a Neo-Nazi, and I'm not that gay. There go two of my three allotted lies for this year.
But before I encountered the townies, I took a sit in the park downtown. I brought my own chair from the dorms. Stopped into a pizza place and stopped at IGA to get a two-litre Coke. Yes, I walked around town with all these things, heading to the park...and got there and realized that I didn't have a writing implement. A quick visit to the old-folks home rectified this, but the lady at the front desk would only give me a pencil and couldn't spare a pen. These were my notes, written around noon on pizza-place napkins:
...Walking. Walking downtown to find a place to sit, when I could have saved myself a lot of trouble and sat down where I had been before. But having sat, I wouldn't absorb anything new. Sitting in a new place, absorbing something old. That is the quest for my Don Quixote today. There's a bench in the park, next to the pond, but it wouldn't be Mine. Same prospective as my old sit. Must sit someplace new, must walk. Hence the chair. The chair's position is my own, my own choice...Concrete. There's a concrete cylinder near the shoreline, sticking six feet er so above the ground, but just slightly above the elevation of the park itself. Chickenwire had been circled around the top, in a time long since past. Between two of the poles supporting the chickenwire, I find a door into the five-foot diameter space. This is where I sit, on the concrete with a Wisconsin-made sewercover to eat my lunch and think some thoughts...Water. After taking three painting courses, I am more able to see the colours for what they are. A very rich blue, nearly purple, with inversed metallic reflections from the sun. Metallic, that is, from the view of a leaf particle held up by the tension of the surface. The battlefield rages on, but the leaf particle barely moves. From the view of the dust speck on the shore, one sees only the more serene and muddy version of the fluid. Zillions of vertical water molecules living in harmony with one another, even in such a shallow space. How deep does it flow, and how fast does it get there?...Sitting. Here I sit, absorbing the Tuesdayish part of a Friday, that early-noon hour before you notice that the week is all over and the weekend has begun. *sharpening my pencil by rubbing it on the concrete* Who would have thunked that such a primitive methods would work so well. Marching practice in an hour, and I am without a watch to watch me, smile with it's armful face as if it owned Time itself...Assumptions. Looking at the ripples in the water, I am forced to see the ripples virtually propagate themselves on each wire of the chickenpen encircling me. They seem to drill into the concrete base, but I know that it's only my mind playing tricks. The wire is thin enough that my eye/mind connection makes up what it doesn't actually see; in this case, the ripples through the opaque wire. Eighteen years of training has honed my assumptions, because the eyes must assume what in behind the areas where your eyeball has no cones to see an object at a certain angle. Vision seems to get fuzzy at the edges, and a dot drawn on paper may seem to disappear. It makes one wonder what other assumptions one is subconsciously making...Poles. I don't ask myself why, it just seemed like the right thing todo. I kissed the pole with their threaded metal caps. For all their spiderwebs, for all their rust, for all their dirt and bird shyt; I kissed each of the eight in turn. And on the fifth pole, I received a tiny shock. The way a pole would show you that it was smiling and kiss you back, if smile and kiss it could. Some might call it insanity...but without that insanity, I would have never felt that smile on my lips.
I keep all my stubbs. They fill a special place near my crotch, in my wallet (I can't stand keeping it in my back pocket, but that's a different story altogether). Plays, Concerts, the few movies I've seen at a theater, a yearly fair in some strange town. On the back of my stubbs, I write the name of the person/people I spent the day with. This is where I keep my memories, because I'd never had a camera until this year...even then, the stubbs still fill my memory much more full than a piece of paper that can be redeemed for nothing more than a thousands words.
