Hunter S. Thompson Reviews Vegan Bakery

(GONZO is sitting at a table at “Flour Power Vegan Donut Shop & Bakery” as the lights come up, laptop in front of him.)

GONZO

After what was deemed a "fascinating but regrettably un-publishable attempt at journalism" in Las Vegas, I was sent… here.  I am serving what is ostensibly my punishment: write a review for "Flour Power Vegan Donut Shop”.  I’m here with the usual tools of the trade: laptop for my official thoughts, notepad for my actual thoughts, a pen with which to impale thoughts, and a snazzy urban backpack replete with 8 and a half psychedelic mushrooms, 17 flavorful strains of cannabis, 2 Pez dispensers of molly, an eye dropper of ketamine, a toilet paper roll dipped in blotter acid, and a flask of tequila in case I need to puke it all up later.  Vegans. These people are here for the same reason I’m here: something went horribly wrong.  They give up meat to try and diagnose their mismanaged lives, or they indulge in gastric novelties to distract themselves from discovering more things that just don’t matter.  Eat that faux-bacon-studded maple glazed pastry and maybe, for just one more day, something like love is still possible.  As though it is possible to experience love when love encourages you to continue doing the things that make you yourself, the one person in the world you despise more than all those other everything-consumers out there. Eat a vegan éclair or a pistol, and be grateful that no animals were harmed when the American Dream was embalmed with a non-dairy based confection.

How did I end up here?  Let me retrace the steps. 

(SHOP OWNER walks in, also wearing aviators and a vintage print shirt, so GONZO thinks he’s seeing himself)

Oh, there I am walking in… except I didn’t have all those goddamned letters on my forehead. I walked in, and took note of all the ads on the door.  They're all...

Swing dancing

Anarchist rhetoric

Memes

Union protest

Equal rights

Live Music

Acupuncture

DJs

Acting lessons

Meditation,

Social justice

Or SAMUEL ADAMS for short. 

(SHOP OWNER approaches GONZO)

Wait! What are you doing here? We can't just hang out like this.  Get those letters off your forehead, you’llmakeafoolofmyself!

SHOP OWNER

(Takes glasses off)

K… Well, let us know if you need anything!

(Approaches WAITRESS)

Wow! I want whatever donut you gave him!

WAITRESS

He hasn’t had any.

SHOP OWNER

What!? We need him to write a good review!  This decision to distribute through Safeway has been a PR nightmare! That crowd of protesters is growing every day!

PROTESTERS

(Offstage)

DOWN WITH CORPORATE GREED!

DOWN WITH UNFAIR WAGES!

PLUS, SAFEWAY DOESN’T TREAT THEIR EMPLOYEES WELL, SO IF YOU HAVE THEM SELL YOUR DONUTS THEN YOU ARE AN ACCOMPLICE TO INJUSTICE!

OWNER

Their chants are getting more and more convoluted, and they keep putting shit on the door. Go work your magic, get on his good side!

WAITRESS

I’m not sure I like the energy I’m getting from him!  I think he took a roll of our toilet paper… he’s creepy!

SHOP OWNER

He’s not creepy, he’s just… indie!  Go flirt with him!

(DEMON WAITRESS follows WAITRESS and mimics WAITRESS’ actions and repeats what she says in demonic monotone.  DEMON WAITRESS only repeats things that are flirtatious)

WAITRESS

(DEMON WAITRESS repeats)

I like your shirt.  You’re obviously very open-minded and confident in your… masculinity.  Would you like a menu?

GONZO

(Scared out of his mind)

Oh! Uh, OKifyouinsist. 

(Looks at laptop)

Why can't I get online?

WAITRESS

(DEMON WAITRESS repeats)

Oh, it’s that Occupy protest outside!  They’re “occupying” our free WiFi! Heh. Heh. Heh. They’ve also been “occupying” our bathroom.

(She leans in closely to place menu on table)

GONZO

Stop eating me!

WAITRESS

(DEMON WAITRESS repeats)

Hah hah hah, you’re funny!  Here, let me read you our specials.

We have banana glazed crendles, walnut raisinnnn sneaker panda-pads. Chocolate Kenilworth the layperson files. Sticky gender blocks.  Twenty nine-hotdogs, (pointing at him) Cheddar.  Enjehhh memr smems kibbeh? 

GONZO

Kibbeh?

WAITRESS

(DEMON repeat mockingly)

KIBBEHHHHHH tis!

SHOP OWNER

(Disappointed & peeved)

Kibbeh? Rumbut skumplebart.

(SHOP OWNER exits. WAITRESS and DEMON WAITRESS wander, and in the background do evil seductive dancing/motions.)

GONZO

How am I supposed to select a donut in these conditions?  Communication with the outside world is unfathomable! My only connection to reality is my own recorded thoughts and Samuel Adams at the door.  Samuel Adams at the... oh there he is now!

(Enter SAMUEL ADAMS, drunk as hell holding his eponymous beer) 

What do you think of the Occupy movement? Is this the sort of revolution you condone?

SAMUEL ADAMS

Well it seems to be a congregation of confused rebels chanting slanted facts and out of context statistics.  The American Revolution was a bit different… Or was it?  I could have been a passionate orator whose speeches incited a righteous and informed revolution… or maybe I was a propaganda spewing instigator, a manipulator of confused and angry mobs. What’s the difference?

GONZO

For some reason this is not how I imagined you at all.

SAMUEL ADAMS

Not so! You are imagining me right now!  Truth becomes a four-letter word when society forgets how to count.  This is what happens when people learn about you from beer bottles and Jeopardy questions.  The same thing will happen to you!

GONZO

You mean, most people are going to remember nothing of me other than my use of psychedelic drugs?

SAMUEL ADAMS

Frat boys will quote your work to sound smart, just like people offer Sam Adams lager at parties to look classy.  You have no choice so you should embrace it. Also, have you checked your toilet paper?

(SAMUEL ADAMS exits)

GONZO

Good idea, I need another hit.  Where is it?

WAITRESS

(DEMON WAITRESS repeating)

Aren’t you supposed to be writing a review?  We could really use the publicity.

GONZO

(Spastically looking around)

I could really use not being eaten! 

(Swings a fly swatter at WAITRESS until DEMON WAITRESS runs away)  

I think a toilet paper roll might have fallen out of my bag and rolled off somewhere, have you seen it?

WAITRESS

You mean our toilet paper that you stole? I put it back in our bathroom!

GONZO

What!? No, that was- Oh god! Has it been in use?

WAITRESS

You kidding me? With all these protesters coming in, not buying anything and using the bathroom… I put it back 45 minutes ago and it’s already gone.

(WAITRESS exits. While the protesters deliver their lines, GONZO takes mask out of his bag, looks at it for a second, puts it on, exits)

(Offstage)

PROTESTER 1

(Frightened)

Why is this water so far apart?

PROTESTER 2

(Accusingly)

Stop throwing those opinions at me, thought sprinkler!

PROTESTER 3

(Defensive)

Stop looking at me as though I’m sort of your construction site is ruining this neighborhood.com!

PROTESTER 4

Let’s all say “Rup!”

EVERYONE

“RUP!”

PROTESTER 4

Again!

EVERYONE

“RRRRUP!”

PROTESER 4

Thank you!

PROTESTER 5

(Announcement)

If I could. I would eat.  Sand!

End

Surface Tension

This town is full of misters
We scrawl our names on the
wrong side of frosty glasses
Season cycles of perspiration
Evaporated watermarks
recorded on my sleeve

Yeah, we're out again
Regular regulars
Your breath fogs my pane of thoughts
from across the table
I write backwards so you can read them

I must be so ugly
With my rash of condensation
Braille in beads of sweat say nothing
To this special brand of blind
I can only watch them convene
From the window I'm behind
I can only hope
So hard
That they stop falling apart
That they form a drop on
The forehead of your ocean
From where they'd like to start

The Moonburn Cycle

I. Nighttime Indulgence

One sugar-glazed moon gaze earns
Sunday sundae sunburns
Morning dew on a hollow creme brule skull
And the Godfish flops beneath
In search of something wet
Something tidal
An audience for
Its moonlit recital

Tonight's moon is a ray-gun,
turning moon gazers into the sun
Light and warmth trapped in my heart
nomadic, unstrapped, (forget) drift apart
Between my eyes and groin, they pass
I study me through a magnifying glass
Recycled repast for my glowing gains
Fledgling feelings flicker, growing pains
I burn create me

II. Landing

I drift home like snow
Ahead of behind myself
Each crystalline chip lurches forth
like a car with worn brakes,
driven by their very shape,
piled like busted glass pancakes
Melted by the time I arrive
Painstakingly reformed
So designed to be broken
Like a glowstick
Now I see it!









Now I see it!









Now I see it!

Salt Water Heals

I'm the forest, every damned tree
Thousands of miles a blanket of me
My face
terminates
at your rocky shore
Condensation - sap
to seal the gap-
running from an open sore
You are simply the ocean
As helplessly as
I toss timber doubloons
Into your high tide
Only to be promptly returned
With limpest lapping

Your foamy water reaches my roots
exactly
as involuntarily as they draw it in
and all I want to do is die
so my soul can retreat
Instead I grow
smaller
and
smaller
around
your
eroded
feet

Trees know what it is
I just know what it's called
but I can't speak to set my mind at ease
Of what makes me feel warm
as I sit and wait for the salt water to freeze

Second Handers

One day, I got stranded living in the present moment. It happened when I was reading a review of some book by Eckhart Tolle (1) on Amazon.com. I was reading on my bed, my laptop providing the light in my blanket tent. I hadn't slept for a few days due to a high victory of the mind over the body: I was going through a spell of beautiful, beautiful depression. A good book used to put me to sleep but I did not read books anymore, I merely experience and recreate them through other people's explanations. See, reality had long become too cumbersome, and the traditional escapism of internet role playing games held no appeal for me (due in part to the social stigma, but mostly the lingering precariousness of dependence on internet and other escapees/players), so I was on a mission to retreat entirely into my brain. My first step was to internalize sex, which was pretty easy, most people have already done this in one way or another. Food, or specifically, sustenance was the most difficult. I eventually lived on a diet of plain boiled unsalted rice and watch people cook on youtube and imagine what flavor I'd experience with their end product. I prefer youtube because unlike cooking shows on television, people on youtube sometimes end up preparing something awful, just like real life, and they must eat it regardless. Adherence to pleasing fantasies weakens the mind, but creating the nuanced damnation of pineapple-salmon with cream sauce nearly grants the imagination arms and legs to excuse itself from the "table of the body", so to speak. The final hurdle to complete self-immersion was to learn to breathe vicariously, thus conceding all biological functions to the power of my thoughts. I completed that as the oxygen ran out in my blanket tent at the same time I finished reading the book review, and when my Self saw it's polar opposite reflection, it surged out from my body, essentially like I sneezed my psyche inside out. The book review was like pepper in the nose of my brain, its mouth full (having consumed my Self), spewed its contents out into the astral plane where it vanished forever.

Having no Self is difficult. I now assume the moods and emotions of anybody around me, my mind merely a tool for perpetuating wretched reality. Some people go grocery shopping; I walk the streets trying to harvest a pleasant conversation that I can absorb and take home every single day. There's nothing more frustrating than capturing a happy moment that can echo through my empty head and ricochet around my nerveless body all night, only to encounter a downer just before I walk into my apartment, so I am stuck with their agony until I find someone who is at least mildly content. The worst part: if I accumulate pleasant conversations, I become a source of synthetic, nearly pure positivity, which is annoying and slightly depressing to others. My feelings mimic their annoyance and depression, which makes me even more annoying and depressing to be around. So people simply avoid me until my misery makes someone who is less miserable than I am happy that at least they aren't THAT miserable, and I can harness their happiness for myself. The only benefit to being marooned on this incarnate island without my Self is that I save money on rice.

(1) Which one is not important.

Bill Murray Haiku

Garfield devours lasagna

Nibbles at Bill’s

Credibility

What About Bob plus Saw

Baby steps cut off my leg

And get the key

My life is Groundhog

Day plus Momento:

Have we met? Does it matter?

I take my women

The way I take Bill Murray:

No Show? DVD.

Groundhog Day plus Saw:

I tear off my balls every day

‘Til I like it

Some friends and I

Crossed streams onto some marshmallows once

Worst. Smores. Ever.

Noone showed up at

The Dan Aykroyd Crashpad

He’s at my house crying

Jobot’s new crepe

The Royal Tannenbaum

So good, you’ll fuck your sister

Bill Murray is on

The Ghostbusters 3 set in

Apache Junction

Ghostbusters 3 will

Be filmed in my pants starring

My dick as “Slimer”

Crowd-pleasing haiku:

Ghostbusters 3 will take place

At a Chick-Fil-A

Nat'l Poetry Month Day 30: self-swimming

Blurring genres of here-now
What plays in my car?
In my head?
In my head in my car?
Drunk drove through my own windshield
Oh to quench the tap
Speaking of which,
The sky emptied itself
into my self-swimming pool
I am the bugs
Bloated, swirling in the filter
under the weight of their empty sky
Dreaming of what could be there

Nat'l Poetry Month Day 29: ReCurrent

Screen light heat fades in
2 phases
Moon, please
Grant me the ease
Of dry-erase clarity
Blue beyond my outline
Find the parity
gently Once captured freely
in a kiss
We thenwalked
thenstopped
Back and forth
And Back again
A Grasshopper,
You jumped forward
Then as ants,
crawled an hour back
We scratch and pretend
not to notice

Nat'l Poetry Month Day 27: Two Dead Bags in a Park

Is that a dead bird
Still in the grass?
I don't know, let's go find out
I think I'll pass,
At least 'til tonight
When the air is still
This side of the hill
Please consider my appetite
Perhaps the breeze will warn us
Crinkling bag or heaping decay
Let's just enjoy the weather
Surely the pleasant breeze
Will set our minds at ease

But why stall and stay instead
of seeking resolution, planning ahead?

Why must you on misfortune dwell?
Drop the subject, we'll be all the merrier!

You'll have us sit and suffer the smell
And blame that poor hobo's terrier

How does the same wind carry us away
Each in different directions?

Nat'l Poetry Month Day 25: As the Mirror Grows

As the mirror grows
You stay the same size

Perhaps it frightens you
I see you
Clutching a bucket of rocks
But you have to
Catch me first

The more you run
The more of you
Vanishes
When looking back
Nourishes the mirror

Nat'l Poetry Month Day 18: Like taking candy from a blender

Decontained
Possession unbound
Not touching, but
Coalescing around

This
Point

Days were abstract figures
Now their angles all add up
That number is still in a decanter
And our glasses are
Shaded

When the sound keys click
Or hum,
Sliding in from the doldrums
When my paws return one photon
Of borrowed light unscratched
And you finally read the note attached
Leave it open
Without asknowing
Without wheregoing

Nat'l Poetry Month Day 17: Fat n Smart & The Stickerman

Poetry inspired at a trade show.

Fat n' Smart

Oh we're fat n smart!
Noblest martyrs
At Noblemart!
Unfooled by your form fit faces,
I'm legitimate
You can't read me,
You're me illiterate!
My face never drew you
In or to conclusion
My constant feast
Is on your delusions
On them I daily grow
Smarter n fatter
I dip them in
The ego sauce splatter
Of the platter that we share
It doesn't matter what we wear
Come mealtime you're not there

You'll never fit in
With the smart n fat ones,
Your're too busy making fat puns


The Stickerman

The Stickerman
Stopped to consider me
Once.
Mired, flat tired
In the neighborhood of
Fronts
Awaiting repairs
Giving flat tire airs
Showing gaps where a sticker must fit,
He evaluated me on the dichotomous pit
Of "have you or have not?"

Showing gaps of my own
And gaps even of gaps
I pulled out an old stare
That asked "Join me perhaps?"
Staid, sober
And laid over
Sympathetic as a prawn
With exquisite taste
The Stickerman checked his phone
And moved on

Nat'l Poetry Month Day 10: Other Side of Mirror

I work the parking garage booth
A one-way pane of glass
Seperating me from
Heat and people.
Sidewalk passers
Stare in somehow
Right into my eyes
Beaming deep accusations,
Unfavorable assessments
They burn
Like the heat
Concentrated
The darkened glass
Deflects

Nat'l Poetry Month Day 9: Somewhere Being Shaped

Somewhere being shaped
In the smear I see through windows

Can your blue light be collected
For the nights when I'm rejected
(From your mother of pearl party)
Or possibly be reflected
And your image be projected-
And escape my personal gravity?
Doubtful.

I've been gathering ideas like
Cranberries
Floating in the tear bogs
They sink,
Crashing not a moment too soon
Chipping away all scabs which
Resemble not the moon
The speed of this madness
Can chip at nothing more
The speed of this madness
No clouds can obscure

Nat'l Poetry Month Day 8: Ode to Emperor James Wargwal

Every line of this is taken from a web of 4 unrelated simultaneous conversations that never intersected, blended to create as linear a perspective as possible.

I mean, we still talk
I can't say anything because
- ugh -
but we still talk.
He talks about it,
he's a lot like James
I thought it was his sister
This is my limit
If you found the right person,
and it's on a school night
he's gonna go back
Maybe he did,
you didn't catch it
If you found the right person

It's beginning to freak me out,
Every 4-6 months we have the same conversation
St. Elmo's Fire was not romantic
They were both cheating on each other
They never got back together at the end.

I was thinking about-
reverberate-
four-inch utopia.
His entire leg is a scythe
I've seen a lot of pictures on his forearm
It looks like it went through his neck
He was like the emperor Wargwal

I know I have a Lord
of the Rings tattoo
I don't live by it
Gandalf writes a letter
I don't live by it
I'm not gonna cast it and block it
That new one-drop devil
Gimmicks of ISI
In the first book
They do sacrifice
If you found the right person

Nat'l Poetry Month Day 7: Outerthoughts

The outerthoughts
food for the bees that drone
Capturing velocity-
like whipping cream-
They want to crack the bone.
The shielded shieldproof-
insulated from echoes-
The echoes are their own
Carrying stowaway vacancy-
hungry bees untethered-
They eat through the foam

Insects inter-tied,
Staid and stale
Buzzing somehow on days that'll pass
for days.

Insects inter-tied
Form dream catchers
Rotted, brittle
Makes for easy sleep
Should one of them fly away

Nat'l Poetry Month Day 6: It Happens Every Day

Certain words, phrases, expressions, etc have been rendered meaningless to me, whether by overuse or too frequent improper/loose use. These are words and phrases I have to spend an extra immeasurable fraction of a second to think hard about to consciously acknowledge them as meaning anything at all. I came up with a list of them off the top of my head (and with a little help from the blogs on the Phoenix New Times) and arranged them into a poem. These are by no means universal, so if you're looking at this as a fun list of overused words and phrases that we can all agree upon, you may be disappointed.

It Happens Every Day

Only the young
live every day to the
bank
You've just gotta feel it

Just the facts
made for tv

Live life
Live your life
Wasting time
Killing me

Whole life
90% perspiration
Killing me

Buy one get one
bella undocumented

Blast books
Dysfunctional
Rock opera

Darkly comedic vultures
transformation
Proactive urban street culture
Department of Transportation
I'll handle it
Leave me alone

Nat'l Poetry Month Day 5: Balance Sheet

Mining the past for inspiration a bit. This is about my earliest memory of exhibiting OCD behavior. Not surprisingly, it was right after I discovered Tetris for Gameboy in 4th grade.

Jostled between comforts by adult choices
My consequence-free mind swings
Chaos
out the window,
Harassment
within,
To escape rippling pavement and frantic voices
Not to repose, but reverie with wings
Jagged infinity
out the window,
Dissection
within,
I close my eyes and look down.

Toes are reverse-center, fanned
Assigned each a piano key
Keys begin to glide into entropy
I sit, standing guard at the helm
Baton glued to my hands
Fingers figure eight into oblivious

Now

The keys are assigned the wrong letter
I type in my diary anyway
And read it the next day

This was my first breeze felt between joints
My closest hunt for the weather-vane that points
From the gaping mouth whose pleasures
Demand Right and Left in equal measures

Nat'l Poetry Month Day 4: Wormlegs.

right here
quietly made for
were once marinated, flavored, accompanied.
All previous steps unseen
supposed to follow
But alone now.
could have experienced unknown shades of
hue makes independent and
Makes for re-full
replete with
On the menu.

Nat'l Poetry Month Days 1-3: Drifty Drift

II

When I can't hear your you
And your "you're you" sentences,
You
make sensen't
And I
make sensen'tces.
If only
The Innocence of Paper could exist
A farm of options optional boundaries,
And survivor of these alternatives foundries
Wearing those letters
Wouldn't be
Being those letters
Paper couldn't rob someone of their sincerity
And someone else of their meaning

I

Paper paid for paper's porous chorus.
Selfless absorbed, scorned
Printed
Branded
Blameless
Action-heavy, meaning thrift
Words are sudden drift

III

"Is this a record or
A toilet?"
Meaning approaches center
Why didn't I start listening
Before flipping side 2?

Glass World

Skipping rocks is one of Craig's favorite pastimes. Few other activities strike so perfect a balance of effort to reward for him. Cracking peanuts is another one. Simple things. He shied away from more convoluted effort-reward systems that leave too much room for complication and variability. The worst that can come of his rock skipping is a pulled shoulder, and the best is when the stone concludes a series of stochastic skips with a gratifying bout of hydroplaning. He saw the movie "Amelie" during his unremarkably awkward transition into adulthood. Having been conditioned to find women frightening, mysterious, and intimidating, it baffled him to behold a woman who he considered a sexual being and yet was so dedicated to rock skipping. He was by no means sexist; he did not believe that anybody enjoyed skipping rocks beyond adolescence. Everybody he knew participated primarily in productive activities that lead to a stronger Earthly presence and a greater sense of their identity. Sports, politics, art, yoga, drinking. Craig built a considerable sense of self by these means, but knew he was neglecting something inside of him that was weakening, and it made him both yearn for connection but reluctant to let anybody get close.

Years passed and Craig moved to the city and entered the corporate domain where his dreams were scrapped for sustenance and his childhood appeared in marketing, graffiti, t-shirts, social networking sites, and everywhere else that wasn't inside of him. His job restricted the internet access for employees, in fact the only web site not surf blocked was Google maps, so they could give customers directions to their offices. During down time he would zoom in on specific neighborhoods in the city and look at the business names and memorize the reviews. He was hoping to find somewhere to go and connect with people. Maybe even connect with... someone. One day he found a small blue blob in his searches. He zoomed in as close as he could and the name popped up. Chelsea's Pond. He tried to imagine the ambiance of a pond in this city. Then he thought about skipping rocks. The last time he skipped rocks was long before he moved into this city, and he does not know why he stopped aside from being busy. What was he doing this weekend? He had planned on seeing live music and talking to strangers about it afterwards in vague emotional terms. Then he remembered "Amelie". This seemed like the sort of pond her character may frequent since it is on the outskirts of downtown and, assuming the lack of obstructions, would thus offer an impressive panoramic view. Over the remainder of the week, the possibility of meeting Amelie at Chelsea's Pond moved slowly from a fanciful thought to an assumed inevitability for which he ought to prepare.

Come that Saturday, he cleaned his house, stocked his kitchen with local produce and quirky snack foods that may be shared on his stoop during bouts of people watching, did his laundry, and that afternoon hopped on his bike and headed to Chelsea's Pond. Here are his thoughts during this journey.

"She will be just like me: no direction or future plans, a very existential lifestyle conscious only of the temporary, completely unaware of even the moments to follow. Given our lack of purpose apart from stone skipping, we will find direction together and nothing will ever be the same. Or wait, am I this looming oppressive mass encroaching upon her free will? No doubt her loneliness could have driven her to the same hue of near madness that I experience; perhaps we will be exploiting each others weaknesses, two vines using one another for support to aimlessly climb only to choke one another and, without guidance, never find sunlight. Woah. No, it won't be like that, it will be esoteric conversations at cafes. It will be blankets strewn with dream journals, dvd cases, and condom wrappers. For once it won't be sadly revisited when I'm cleaning my room months later to find bobby pins on bureaus, in-jokes and incomplete verse scrawled across torn pages and crusty plates under the bed. When I see her at the pond I will abruptly start making dryly humorous observations until something happens. I'm not too old to do that, right? It's not creepy when I do that yet, is it? What sort of observations can be made about a pond? Oh god have I created a self-serving fantasy? Am I sabotaging myself by creating a standard of perfect imperfection that no real person could live up to? I need to have reasonable expectations. She will probably be one of those totally obnoxious scene girls with a hideous floral print dress that matches my couch and cowboy boots even though she's from Long Island, and I need to be fine with that."

Craig arrived to find a legion of other bicycles chained to freshly painted racks. The trees and shrubbery were plentiful and clearly under control, arranged with no small amount of symmetry. It would have felt like walking through a sterile dentist office painting if it weren't for the homeless people fucking in the clusters of shrubbery. He was delighted to see no shortage of young attractive strangers conversing at the shore of the pond. While searching for stones, he felt not the least bit self-conscious but rather like he was doing something as routine as public transit. In fact he was surrounded by people who were kicking the soil in search of something, though he found it odd that there were no rocks to be skipped. A man about Craig's age dressed sharply with a German sense of efficiency approaches and says, "Isn't this great? Are you here for Amelie, too?" Craig was so shocked that he responded in exactly the manner that would make him seem not at all shocked, "Where are all the stones?" "They've all been skipped man, you got here late!" The man laughed and walked off, and as Craig turned to look at the pond two women appeared next to him and talked loudly about how neither of them remembered that pond being there before. Craig caught this obvious invitation and agreed with them, at which point the more remote girl dispersed into the crowd, leaving Craig alone with Ursula. Craig says she is the first Ursula he has ever met, and she replies "Do you like sex?" Craig confirmed that he did, then tried to add some appropriate irony which she interrupted with, "Do you like 'Amelie'?" Craig said yes, but before he could elaborate she says, "Good! Let's go over there." She motions with her eyes towards a nearby patch of shrubbery and trees. Craig realizes that those weren't homeless people he heard fucking in the bushes a few minutes prior. They start to walk, but Craig stops and asks, "But don't you want to know why we're here? Where did all of this come from?" Ursula replies, "What difference would it make?" Craig's mind reluctantly follows his body into the bushes, the way it always does.

Pants-Free Light Rail Ride

I'm sitting (as usual) at Fair Trade Cafe watching the people gathered for the annual pants-free light rail ride at the station across the street. I have a complete panoramic view of the Roosevelt/Central Ave light rail platform, and there has formed one big congregation of people in their underwear either enthusiastically talking about how absurd and random they are being and what people who aren't aware of this annual tradition must be thinking, or they are enthusiastically intentionally avoiding the obvious subject to capitalize on the opportunity to add an extra layer to the random wackiness. About 5 yards from that large group of people is a girl, also in her underwear, standing by herself reading a book. Now, I am exceptionally bad at determining what women are thinking, but that has never stopped me from trying. There are two general scenarios that start as she arrived at the platform, which I will try to capture. From what I can gather about her appearance, she is around 21, at least in college if not graduated, and trapped between the parallel mirrors of spending money on clothes to make her look poor but not wanting to look actually poor so as to attract other people with enough money to want to look poor so they can look poor together. Blue-green underwear, evenly pasty complexion, good metabolism, walks a lot, but hasn't set foot in a gym since her Self-Esteem Crash of 2006. She approaches the platform and it is one of two scenarios.

She arrives with her pants off and observes the crowd:

"Ok good, I'm not the only one doing this. Shit, did I date that guy? Better stay away, that'd be so fucking awkward if that was him. I'll read this book to seem unavailable."

Or, she arrived with her pants on and observes the crowd:

"Wait... oh, that's today? Shit, I wanted to do that, too! I guess I still could. If I take out this book, I'd totally have enough room in my bag for these pants. Yeah! (She turns away from the platform and walks down a side street) Ok, I just need to find somewhere private to take off my pants and... wait, what am I talking about? I just need something to lean on, right? Though I don't want to attract attention... That car with the thumping bass would probably yell at me. Maybe I shouldn't do this. No, fuck that, I wussed out last year and regretted it. I'll just step into the double-doors of this office building and... why am I doing this? What good could possibly come of this? Is it a cool story? Will I make new friends? Get a date? I'm not doing this just for a Facebook status update, right? I guess it's just one of those bucket list things. This building looks empty, if I could just get through the door... it's Sunday, it's probably locked. What if there are cameras? Or people? Is it weird that I'm doing this alone? Fuck it, I'll just take off my pants on the platform and it won't be awkward. Ok. I gotta get psyched for this and make sure everyone sees! (approaches platform again and once there, removes pants in a bold grandiose gesture, takes a large book out of her bag and replaces it with the pants) I don't think anybody was paying attention. Shit. I was hoping someone would cheer me on and welcome me to the group. Maybe I was trying too hard. Dammit! Now I'm standing here. With no pants on. Holding this book that I'm not reading that no longer fits in my purse. (30 seconds go by) I feel weird standing here holding this large book in my hands. I don't want to read it, I finished reading it yesterday. I need something to do right now until the train arrives and I can sit down and feel less self-conscious. I guess I could read the last chapter over again, I kinda rushed it yesterday. (She opens the book and stares at the pages until the train arrives.) Wait... These seats are filthy.