Long Black Cars
Saturday. Alright, this is better. Up about eight, read the paper in bed, take an hour's nap around nine, take a bath, dress for the street, head downtown on the bus for an exotic coffee out at a table overlooking Broadway, a walk back most of the way home, now it's three in the afternoon and I'm feeling better. A good way to start a weekend, although I remember being confused yesterday for a moment: was it Friday or Saturday? A sign this retirement thing is kicking in? I crapped out yesterday on going into San Francisco with Mr. E and Mr. H to see the new Bourne movie, but then what else is new?
I now seem to be living in a time without immediate deadlines. What to do without the strain of arriving at an office by a certain hour? Some thoughts coming home today about this and that, this and that being ideas I've had in the past. Nothing too exciting, but I can feel the pressure building. Maybe by Christmas.
A letter from Honda when I got home saying I'd made my last payment, the DMV will be sending me a new title pretty soon showing I owned my Element. This is the third car I've ever financed in my entire life, the second new car I've ever owned and it will probably be the last (given the small number of miles I've put on it in the last three years), but it's more than nice to see the payments go.
Well, now it's time to go out and buy a nice new BMW with all the gizmos.
If I'd flipped or gotten a nasty diagnosis from the medicos, maybe, but we are all in a good mood this afternoon so why a BMW? Where'd that come from?
Black, with a long many cylinder engine and all the available gizmos. Phallic as all outdoors. But then you had that Jaguar when you were in your forties. Maybe you've gotten all of it out of your system.
Every slacker should have the car of his desires at least once in his life and I am happily in my (no longer owned by the bank) Element. I'm still not sure where this switching of subjects came from, perhaps a cry from the subconscious bemoaning our misfiring cylinders as mind and body grow older? Or have I switched into robo-writing here, the fingers typing, the spelling checker checking, but meaning just the pale split pea soup reflection of a man in a white hat with a camera, waiting for a bus at a stop on an Oakland afternoon.
That was truly awful.
You're the one who started with the long black cars.
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