oil crisis

whenever i'm in my car and have just narrowly missed hitting a pedestrian, the cure's "killing an arab" starts playing in my head. the conditions under which camus' meursault kills an arab and the conditions under which i can potentially run someone over are frighteningly similar. it is hot. it is by the beach. i am isolated from society in a metal box on wheels, and i answer to its laws (expediency, speed) rather than the laws of humanity.

then i get out of my car, walk into work, and hear some gangster padre tell his 3-year-old that if he doesn't hurry up, he'll shoot him in the face. quite casually.

my fake plastic love

i started my second gig at the retoucher's today. clicking through the post-production process for a magazine photograph is frightening and perversely fascinating all at once. retouching seems to operate upon the assumption that we are all innately sexually oriented towards smooth, lustrous, and high-contrast surfaces. but if that were the case, wouldn't i want to fuck the shit out of this frank gehry building? wait, do i?

walmart. is that where they sell walls?

no, but it is the only place in town that develops color 120 film. the pitfalls of living in upstate new york during a recession. the man behind the counter is named joel. his hair is completely white and his wire spectacles are completely round. he seems gruff, but has no expression. his accomplice is a much shorter man named moody with thinning brown hair falling to his shoulders. moody hobbles. a maniacal smile spreads across his face whenever he receives a roll of film to deposit in the film development box. it is obvious that joel handles all the customer transactions. wanting to catch the bus, i asked joel if i could check back for my film around 6. he stares off into the distance, then leans in and stares me in the eye. "you can pick it up at 5 minutes to 6," he says with the gravity of a promise and the indifference of a walmart employee.

i left to wander through store, eventually settling on the bottom shelf of their container section (mad spaces, yo! i smell a walmart performance piece in the works!) and reading on the road, in which i discover that the paragraph on page 81 about the mexican girl inspired my sex life this past summer. at exactly 5:55 pm i return to the photo counter. joel doesn't blink. he hands me four envelopes with my film rewound around their spools, held in place by a piece of transparent green tape.