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March 4, 2003
mark thomas it is 9 degrees outside and i have the windows wide open and the box fan blowing cold air all through this wretched hive of desolate humanity. i went over to the bar where i guess the bartender is a friend of mine, but he was busy and he doesn't talk to me any more since i told him i've been working what could roughly be described as a regular job. i don't know if i've been working but i've at least been making money for all of the last 12 months. but this bartender can not connect with people like me (stooges who hit lonely old-man bars at 2:00 in the morning) unless he thinks they are down and out. so if i talk to him at all and say something about how things nowadays are particularly good then he will cut me off in midsentence when my words meet his needs. last week i was left having said "it's the first job i've had in a long time..." and he cut me off right before "... that i feel really proud of." absent that critical piece of context he took my half-way sentence to be complete ("it's the first job i've had in a looooong time.") to satisfy his assumption that i've been sitting on this dreary barstool for a whole year waiting for the glorious ship of work to come in. and to him work is glorious because he works one day a week at most and he lived expense-free with his mother until he was 43 and from things he's said i gather he finally was able to move out using his dad's inheritance. i don't disrespect anybody for living at home into their 80s, but for the most part this person and i can not possibly connect on much of anything except the price of beer and the ban on smoking in new york city bars. so that and the weather are all we talk about. sometimes i wonder why i even talk to this guy, but then i remember that, unlike a lot of people, he is there. it reminds me of what a friend from high school once said about his neighbors who were drunk from the morning to the sunset but who invited him over for dinner as often as they could see straight enough to dial his damn telephone number. he always accepted their invitation. he said he couldn't stand them but he went over for dinner because "what the hell. they're people." i'm getting older and the wisdom of my high school friends is coming through. this one time another friend from high school was leaving a message on my answering machine and he was saying something like "so i fuckin' went over to the fuckin' parking lot and i fuckin' looked for my fuckin' car and i fuckin' said, fuckin'. 'why don't you fuckin'' ... " and that's where he caught himself and yelled "FUCKIN'! FUCKIN'! FUCKIN'! FUCKIN'! FUCKIN'! FUCKIN'! FUCKIN'! ........" until my answering machine ran out of tape. christ, it's cold in here.
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