“Be well,” she said. 

It rang in my ears. Maybe it was the copious amount of cough medicine I had ingested, like a frat boy at dollar tecate night. 

She seemed sweet but lost, the kind of lost you get in a town small enough to not have good looking produce, even though you’re closer to the farm than most people. “Only in the big cities do they get the good veggies, even then you gotta pay out the ass,” I thought to myself as she was counting up change. She muttered some kind of local tongue about counting her coins before her shift was over. I didn’t understand. 

She printed off enough coupons and receipts for me to roll at least a quarter ounce of bud. I just wanted to get the fuck out of there. I got my severe cold/flu medicine and was looking forward to beating this bastard once and for all. The internet told me you might crave sweets with your nicotine withdrawal and, accordingly, I bought two pints of Ben and Jerry’s. 

Didn’t help. Fucking internet. All facts and no wisdom.

Clerks look at me funny, I don’t know if it is the stare I give, or the way I look. Most people small talk in the grocery store, the clerk and the customer relaying fanciful ideas of nonsense to one another, volleying, like a battleship, hitting and missing until they are both sunk and looking like a couple of jackasses. Not me. They never talk to me. Ever. Not one word. 

This weird bit of conversation always confused me. Are they attempting to be friends with each other? Of course not. Their day just sucked so much that any kind of friendly human contact is a godsend in a place where God is always watching. They keep trudging along, as if their boat is being pulled through mud while they are wearing cement boots and a goddamn blindfold. Commentary as such can only come from a spectator like myself. I am tied to no one, dealing with my thoughts alone, in a battle between my ideas and my abilities. Easy-peasy lemon squeezy. 

Occasionally, I’ll get the curious spectator, wondering what in the fuck I’m buying with my money. She will say “kale, I don’t even know how to cook that.” What do I say to her? Do I say, “Yes, your country has failed you. You live in a small town where resources are slim. It’s not your fault you don’t know what kale is. I bet you could tell me how to castrate a bull.” No goddamn hipster ever figured that one out. 

Is it a goal to bring people understanding, knowledge? Is that what all people want? Certainly not the lady in the checkout line in front of me. See, I have experience with TV dinners, the wonder of modern cuisine. But these people, they buy absolutely everything from the largest, most processed companies known to man. And they are happy about it. They are getting more caloric intake than all their families’ generations combined. That’s one hell of a good thing. Who cares if they grow to grotesque proportions in the process. To me thats humanity giving a giant fuck you to the laws of nature. Like they could ever hold us back from achieving a perfect circular shape. We are all performance artists now. 

I’m no better. Nicotine. I believe aliens are waiting to make first contact till after we kick the habit. Then we will be ready. 

But who needs them anyways. Any civilization too good to come down and give me a handshake is no civilization I want to meet. I bet space beer is shit anyways, not enough hops out there. Don’t even get me started on space tequila. 

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I go to class to sit inside an air conditioned room. The air feels nice, like when you go to get a haircut just because you like some other person to wash your hair. What a strange job. I once met a girl who moved to Texas from Montana and she was washing hair. She said people here were different. I thought it was just because she washed hair all fucking day. She actually gets paid to wash people's hair. If I’m ever rich I think my first purchase will be one of those little chairs and head sinks and someone to wash my hair. When those fingers touch my head, I feel it throughout my entire nervous system. Why does the simple touch of another person create such an atmosphere of connection. I should have asked her out, the lonely ones always say yes. 

College is a disgrace to what the first universities were all about. 

Learning no longer goes on here. 

We are taught things we should have learned in junior high school, and most survive the rest of their lives on a tenth grade education. I know I am. It’s hard to read anything and not be distracted by no advertisements flashing into your pupils. Where are the colors I wonder. Enough with black and white, I need red. Black and white was solved long ago, after Lucy and Ricky did their multicultural bullshit dance when Latin fever swept the states. That was before drugs were criminalized of course. Before Cuba decided they weren’t going to take the bully’s shit anymore and went all commie on our asses. Can’t really blame them, being a commie used to be a romantic thing in some circles, before those in power on both sides decided to have an orgy of fuckery to make sure no one knew what the hell was going on. 

Could be worse. That is my generation's expression, at least that’s what I tell myself everyone else is telling themselves. I have no interest in reading about what philosophers thought in the 20th century, the same way I have no interest in some piece of architecture from the 3rd century. I love history, don’t get me wrong. Nothing applies to the current argument of existence. I’ll keep looking though. I’d like to see Aristotle get on MTV and try to bust a rhetoric flow to the youth. He would be tarred and feathered, or worse, be accepted and made into a modern idol, the worst fate in my time. They will never be remembered. 

Why can’t we create jazz again? It would be banished into fucking oblivion if it tried to manifest itself again, here and now. Too creative. Apple wouldn’t have a patent on it. No apps or fucking choruses. Unless we all could sing again. Remember that? 

But I ramble. I am a fucking rambling man just like that classic rock song. Only I don’t ramble anywhere. My actions are very uniform. I guess you’re wanting some kind of story instead of the complaints of an uninteresting well off male. Fine. Consume just as I do. 

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“She looks like she would,” I thought. I usually know as soon as I make eye contact if a woman will sleep with me. I’ve heard some where women do the same so I guess we are on equal planes. She was my cousin's new assistant. Jacqueline. You can tell a lot from a person’s name nowadays. It used to be that their name would have some kind of job or religious value. In this jungle it is all about who is first and the most interesting. 

We all met for lunch, my cousin not wanting to be left alone with his assistant for longer than five minutes to cover his ass in case his girlfriend gets suspicious. I told him, “look man, you gotta drop that chick anyways, you ain’t gonna marry her or anything so why bother.” He said I was a dick and thanks for trying, meet me for lunch. 

As soon as she walked in and looked at me I knew. Now, I know I probably sound like a prick, or some kind of over pretentious asshole, but I swear I know and it has nothing to do with ego. I’m just self aware and they see that and then the choice is theirs to decide to write me into their life story. 

“Jaqueline,” she says. 

“Jacky,” I say, “how the fuck is it going?” 

She isn’t taken aback by the swearing. 

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Making love and having sex, two distinctions I always hear about in nice stories and romantic movies. I don’t see the two. I know a woman really likes a nice laying of the pipe. To orgasm, a rarity that my side of the table doesn’t see as necessary and which the other side doesn’t seem to miss as long as they are comfortable. Comfort is our motto and you better believe we will drone strike your whole goddamn family to maintain it. If she doesn’t need an orgasm from me then shit there is a guy in some stupid fucking collared shirt and boat shoes to take care of her white wine drinking ass. 

“Too many fish,” I tell my friend Law. 

He just looks puzzled. Law makes big deals out of sports and can’t really see past them. He wants a woman who will cheer the shit outta the ‘boys like he does and then go back and give him some good luck dome for next week. Our dicks are just too simple. Nature did not plan that one out. We always have a choice to change though, no sense blaming nature for bastards in power that are motivated by non religious sins. 

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The chick who just moved in across the street walks funny. And not in the hilarious sense. She walks like the first human beings would have walked, without practice from being a child, just straight from being 20 years old and not walking upright to walking upright. Fucking funny stuff. Her arms sway in the most undistinguished manner I have ever seen. Her dog was running away from her in the yard and she picked it up like a gorilla does and took her back inside. It’s the limpness of it all. There is no strength of mind in an apes’ actions. Our arms should be more rigid. 

Her body is funny too. Not the kind you would expect from a young sorority girl but my school is different in that regard. The sororities are the safe places for safe girls with frumpy bodies and attitudes that make you want to question yourself. White wine drinkers and all. 

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Law found God recently. I said man, I don’t believe anymore but I’m too scared to tell him the reason I stopped believing in the first place was because of pussy. Religion was getting in the way of my need for it and I succumbed. I am grateful now for so many things like women. I don’t mean this in an asshole way, but I’ve had sex with more girls than any of my ancestors. Not that I asked them, it’s just a simple fact. I always bring it back to my ancestors don’t I? I guess I’m Chinese in that regard or something. But I’m not, I know that for sure. I go back as far as my grandfather, which is pretty shitty if you really think about it like I do. My grandfather. And I don’t know shit about him or his parents or brothers or sisters or anything. Where the fuck are we from and why the fuck am I here in this state? 

But again it could be worse. Could be. I’ll follow the moon tonight. That can be my ancestor. I guess that’s why America runs so clean and smoothly all the time. We don’t have any notions of our pasts so we just work our tits off until we can create a new present that is not all that interesting, but how would we know cause we don’t know what actually is interesting. No past. History is best left up to the entertainment biz. There is big money in it. 

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“Let’s open a bar.” We all laugh, not uncontrollably. We have all known this story and this same scheme for years now. Friendships don’t last in the world, but for us it has. Maybe it’s because we never shared women. Shit, half of us are scared of them, and most of us won’t commit to anything meaningful. 

Are women just getting more and more beautiful? Is it the water or some shit? Taking my mind off the real problems of the world. 

I’m sitting with the boys, complaining that I can’t go one fucking day without seeing a girl I want to sleep with. “What the fuck you talking about,” asks Wit. He always calls me out when I’m bullshitting. It’s good, it keeps me on my toes. 

“We coulda been lawyers,” I say, as Law stares at the TV, clenching his teeth hoping his bet will make him some quick pocket money. Motherfucker never has a wallet, straight cash like a Russian gangster or something. Russia. Now there is a purge ridden country of unintelligible beings unseen in the world before. At least we weren’t dumb enough to kill all the smart ones and leave a bunch of peasants around. That’s bad business, and business is good. Especially out there on the killing floor, where decisions are about to be made by robots, as if they could choose any worse than we have so far. 

I’d vote for a robot any day of the week over someone who has to worry about fucking, shitting, eating, pleasing, or being comfortable. Robots don’t need comfort, just that sweet electricity. Tesla’s stolen dream. But I ramble again, I know you want proper prose, a story of people to take you away from the life you hate. I keep being coy. You want me to strip for you while I just want to go shoe shopping, drink some white wine, call it a day. 

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Women’s softball is the perfect indicator of how equality has permeated our society.

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