Hot Work

You say the word "cool" with more feeling than probably anyone I know.

Fixing a flat is pretty "cool"; it makes you feel like you can at least do something right. Watch out, there's a mighty cloud of sentimentality - thick as the proverbial molasses in a Non-Californian winter - brooding between Twenty-Fourth and Twenty-Fifth. While the world and its inhabitants brace themselves against the ravages of earth and water, I reel before these gloomy tsunamies which would have never before been able to touch me. I believe I've put way too much stock in "seasons", and now have a sneaking suspicion that they, more often than not, serve as comely decoys for failures of focus and ideal.

"Stop it; I'm not a gypsy anymore.  I have a job. Plus I hate that word." I recently having traded my ragged clothing for the studied regalia of the reluctant adult, my ragged nerve endings remain; so I still count.

"My mother was an artist.  This is a joke.  It's an excuse to socialize."  This discreet patron saint of the chrome horse (in royal contrast to the gaudy Diplomat, or his tagalong feline), the power behind the 70cc throne, careless champion, knowing, compulsive shadow of the south Mission.  "Mechanics, to me, is more of an art than painting, writing, drawing, music; whatever people are into."  To him, this is closer to creating the spark of life from dead matter than any scientist has ever come.  It's the gloating capstone of the Tower of Babel, the last clasp at the Creatio Ex Nihilo.

"Why the fuck would you set yourself a goal like that?" "Just for something to do."

Ghosts only for lack of a better word. Not wills or personalities, malevolent or otherwise; not intelligences: Static, indelible stamps on time and space, significant images, leaked and replayed through glitches in the continuum. Skips in the cosmic record, as it were: faded but persistent entries in the collective memory.