A Downward Spiral

 

This is the stairwell that takes one from the end of the hallway where my apartment door is, down to the lobby. Built in 1933, a lot of the features in the building are ornate like these wrought iron balusters. 

On the Off Chance

 If you came here, thank you! No new posts but perhaps more to come soon. 

Thanks.

Meanwhile, here is a picture of the City Diner in Kansas City, Missouri. 

R.D.

One Afternoon in New Mexico

Driving alone on U.S. Route 66  through New Mexico in a car with no speedometer is problematic. There’s no way to gauge your speed except by the tune of the engine and the tires on the pavement, and the slow truck I passed half an hour ago just passed me. I sped back up, once again wishing the radio worked. 

The highway turned into the main drag of some small town. Baking under a merciless sun was an intersection with a stop sign, a two-pump gas station, and a small building floating in an empty sea of gravel with no cars in it. A sign said “open.” From the name, it looked like a Mexican restaurant, and it felt like it was about lunch time, so I pulled off the highway and parked by the entrance. It was a hot day and as I walked around the front of my old Chevy I heard the engine ticking as it started to cool down.

It was cooler and dark inside. There was a scattering of empty tables and chairs in the area in front of the kitchen. I took a seat. 

The waitress was probably the owner, and the cook. She appeared and set a glass of water down and looked at me. I set the menu down and said, “I’ll have a bowl of the chili.  And a coke.”

“Green or red?” 

It took me a second. If I was from around here, I’d probably have an opinion about that. “What’s the green chili?” I asked. 

Without skipping a beat she replied in her thick Mexican accent, “The green chilis are younger.” I was only eighteen. What did I know from green chili? A red flag way back in my subconscious started waving back and forth trying to get my attention. 

“I’ll take the red, I guess.” She smiled and nodded and disappeared into the back. A few minutes later she returned and set my glass of iced coke down as well as a thick, white ceramic bowl full of chili--red chili.

I ate some of it, and it was good--real good--maybe a little spicy for my taste, but bearable. I ate some more. Outside, another car pulled up next to mine, its tires crunching on the hot gravel, and four guys got out. They were about my age and demographic, wearing blue jeans and t-shirts and fooling around and laughing too loud as they got out of the car. The came inside and occupied a table near the door. 

As I finished my bowl I watched this little drama play out. There was laughing and joking that stopped only long enough for one of the boys to order. “Chili,” he said.

I waited. 

“Red or green?” More laughter and the guy said, with perhaps a tint of bravado in his voice, “Green.” A moment later the owner returned with the bowl and set it down. The boy picked up a spoon and ate him a big mouthful while his friends giggled. 

He stood abruptly. “God DAMN!” He bent over the table and grabbed a water glass and drank, and some water spilled onto the front of his t-shirt.  His friends laughed even more loudly. I figured this guy must have lost a bet. 

I got up and paid the lady. She was friendly and polite and paid no attention to the rowdy bunch at the table. I walked around them and went outside, got in my car and left. I pulled onto the highway and accelerated until the singing of the tires sounded about right, and wished again that the radio worked. 

Collin's Singular Day

 For the weekly Flash Fiction for the Purposeful Practitioner, inspired by the picture here. 

Collin was not his name, but its rough equivalent, which was "young one." One day he came upon something he had never seen before. He kept his facial expression neutral as he regarded the sphere that hovered in front of him. In his mind, Collin thought of the sphere using a short string of symbols which would roughly translate into English as "fruit without a tree." It really was puzzling. It was the wrong color for him to even think about eating it, but it was puzzling and Collin liked puzzles. 

Collin heard clicking noises that seemed to come from inside his head. He thought of them as "beetles inside Collin." He found the noises unpleasant but he moved closer to the sphere anyway, and the noises became louder. 

The puzzle of the fruit without a tree gnawed at Collin. He held out his hand and was able to grab it. When he did so, he felt pain in his hand that made him fall back onto the ground.  He did not have a symbol for that. It was a totally new thing and therefore would be its own symbol. When Collin looked up from his supine position, the fruit without a tree rose up into the sky and in a moment or two, ceased to exist. 

Collin rose and returned to the band. He found some fruit in the tree, where it properly belonged, and ate it. That night he dreamt about the fruit without a tree. 

Impotent Rant

Just wondering if we could all get by OK if all the headlines to news articles were just left off. They are never totally accurate, and are just designed to sound alarming. If all you read were the headlines, you'd think it was the end of the world--asteroids and all. 

For some reason, journalists and media outlets think that the ordinary rules of responsible journalism don't count when it comes to the headlines at the top of the article. Who says? 

The exception is articles about Marjorie Taylor Greene, because she actually says stupid, inflammatory and outrageous things all the time, and it would be hard to misrepresent her idiocy with creative headlines. But besides that, is there no way to hold journalism responsible for the abuse of headline content? 

OK.  Sorry. Impotent rant mode off. 

Five Things I Don't Want to See in 2022

This is in response to this blog entry way over there at Wordpress, where Salted Caramel asks the question, what five things would I love disappearing in 2022. The challenge here would be to keep such a list halfway down the single digits like that. I'll give it a try on 1.4 (approx.) cups of coffee. 

No. 1. The anonymous 7/8ths of the Internet.

Too many people (?) and too much information and too many opinions that are mostly irrelevant, misleading, or misguided. I'm just guessing, really, that the amount if about 7/8ths, discounting advertising. Instead, maybe to use the Internet should require some sort of controlled registration. Maybe then people would calm down and/or try harder to avoid embarrassing themselves and be held accountable, at least socially, for what they submit online. 

No. 2. All self-driving cars that might begin to show up this year or next year or soon, and "driver assistance" features. 

Who thought this was a good idea? Who thought it was a good idea to allow some software to control a ton of rolling metal with the only warning to the human occupant to "remain vigilant?"  Who are they trying to kid? 

No. 3.  The very idea that computers are best used to replace humans, rather than assist them. 

This is only slightly related to No. 2. I'm talking about the corporate use of computers that are being utilized mainly to allow the companies to hire less people. I mean when you call just about any company, like your insurance company, say, and get a robot voice that directs you to a "call-tree" to ostensibly route your call to the correct department. Typically it takes about ten to twenty minutes to get this accomplished, when a human operator could do it in about five seconds. And I'm being generous. Very often, a caller never gets to talk to a human, ever, and their question will remain unanswered, and they hang up and still have the original problem. This is not good service, and this puts people out of work. 

I add that it does not hurt my feelings to cause corporations to have to spend more money to conduct business. I don't buy the argument that money saved will be passed on to the consumer. Additionally, when a single human can have more money than Argentina, then something is wrong. 

No. 4. Bad driving.

That's such a huge category, it's tempting to pick one or two peeves, but I think all bad driving can be boiled down to one or two problems. But I'll start out by saying most humans must be pretty good drivers, because if you consider how many thousands, or millions, of cars drive through your town every day, and how few accidents there are, it speaks well of us. But when you do see bad driving--and it's frequent enough to cause stress--it's because either the other driver seems to be in a hurry, or the other driver is not actually paying enough attention to what they're doing. Let's make it three things: the natural tendency for humans to be self-serving, or just competitive. 

Once in awhile we are in a hurry. No denying that, but just a little thought will reveal that driving faster is not going to help that much, if at all. And if a person is in a hurry every single f*cking morning on the way to work, may I suggest to them that they set the alarm clock for, say, seven minutes earlier. They'll hardly notice. And then, most of the time, NONE OF US is in a hurry. C'mon. 

Paying attention while driving seems like such a no-brainer, right? Maybe we should reinstate Driver's Ed classes in school and go ahead and show the gory movies to demonstrate that what car manufacturers tell about how safe their cars are is just advertising BS, and there is no safer way to be than to NOT GET IN AN ACCIDENT. 

I don't know what to say about competitive driving. That refers to the idle non-thinking response of speeding up because it looks like someone is going to get ahead of you. Think about it. There are always cars ahead of you. Lots and lots of them. As far as the eye can see, quite literally. You can't get ahead of them all. There are lots of cars behind you all the time, too, if that makes you feel any better. Get a grip. Despite this being America, home of the self-sufficient, freedom loving, gun-toting cowboy, driving, especially on an Interstate, is a group activity. Most of us, if we square danced like we drove, we would be kicked out of the barn. 

No. 5. Mean people. 

Get some therapy. 

Out of the Frying Pan

 This is my take on the picture, below, offered by A Writer's Community as inspiration for flash fiction. 

It would have been the hottest summer on record. Plants withered, dried up and died, and wildfires cropped up seemingly out of nowhere. The west coast of North America had erupted in flames, and the smoke from the fires blocked the sunlight over much of the central part of the continent. Although small groups of people huddled here and there in relatively cool pockets--mostly in what was once Canada and Alaska--in truth, there was no one interested enough to record such a summer. Survival had become so difficult as to demand all the attention and time a person could afford to give. 

It was the same all over, and getting worse, but only one band of a few dozen humans from America had the resources to escape. The ship, named The Phoenix in one uninspired moment, rose from the flames, attained orbit in eight minutes, and from that lofty perch set out on a years long journey headed for the most likely exoplanet their astronomers could find. 

In another uninspired moment it was named “Planet B,” like, “Plan B.”  Get it? Only by definition plan A was always preferred, and this was the case here, for during the colonists’ first winter the temperature dropped to -143F, and the last survivor of the Planet B expedition was only barely able to look up at the sky and see the arm of the galaxy known as the Milky Way set behind the mountain. It contained billions of stars, old Sol among them, but there was no one out there.