1~19~00
I didn't have to suffer.  What more can be said?  Is there any other combination of five words that can mean so much and simultaneously impress with the air of near impossibility?  What did I do to be able to leave the house for a full forty five minutes and not have to at any moment experience excruciating pains and mental anguish akin only to what concentration camp survivors under Stalin and the Nazi holocaust had to endure. [You bastard, cheapening the holocaust because you're a weak little pansy that can't deal with the world. ~ed.]  I had to do next to nothing to avoid suffering.  I didn't even have to stand in line to buy a loaf of bread.  I understand that standing in line is part of what humans in cities do.  I see them doing it.  They laugh, smile, flirt, smoke and seem to have a generally good time standing in lines outside at clubs (Just let me the fuck in now!), inside at banks (give me my fucking money now!!), at grocery stores (why the fuck can't I just pick up my bread and get the fuck out without being harassed by magazine covers and arthritic check writing old cunts?!), video stores (Get an internet connection and you won't waste my fucking time renting wank flicks!), the post office (Yes!  The fucking stamps cost 33 cents and you can remember when they were only 20, so what bitch?  It doesn't change shit.  Lick the fucking stamp, part with those additional 13 g.d. cents and move that fat fucking ass out the door!), and fast food joints (Excuse me sir, but your at the Taco Bell.  Everything is made of the same five shitty ingredients.  Pick an item and go the fuck home with your Chalupa and choke on, eat, or fuck it, I don't care just get the fuck out of here!)
Standing in line is an endless fount of suffering for me, as you can probably tell.  That was avoided, thus making the 45 minute odyssey from home to post office (no line, just emptying the P.O. box), to the coffee shop (no line, they were just out of medium roast.  I said to pure me dark roast.  It's no big deal, and yes, I know, it is a very big deal but there was no wait for the dark roast.  If I had decided to wait for her to brew up a pot of medium then I would have been opting to perform a task equivocal to standing in line.) [Parenthetical asides are one thing, but they shouldn't be longer than what is non-parenthetical. ~ed.], to the grocery store (I vee-lined to the bread grabbed the first loaf I saw with the words "ground" and "wheat" on the bag and darted to the check out line where no one but the clerk stood.  I felt victorious and to celebrate took the form that i can fill out to get Big Ass savings on my next horror ridden visit.), and finally back home completing the 45 minute cycle of three things.
In the p.o. box was a copy of NO Cover magazine.  I glanced through it.  At the coffee shop on Lankershim I saw January's issue of No Cover magazine.  I glanced through it.  No Cover's editor is pushing to run one of my stories on the fiction page of this website in his magazine.  Sounds keen to me.  Hope it happens.  Even if it doesn't it made me realize that, shit, there are people out there who actually like the stupid whiny bullshit stories I write.  Okay, not a huge revelation since even John Grisham has a few admirers, but at least it's something like epiphinal insofar as I've decided that maybe I can submit my short stories to some magazines and stand the prospect of maybe even, sort of, kind of, in a way, getting published by those to whom I submit.  Hmmm.

 Next