I drove well north of the city today, involuntarily, to attend an authentic country-style traffic court with a complimentary scoop of unapologetic racism on the side… “Yes sir, the officer in question is a neg- Ahem, the officer is a black person but that is not him in the back of the room. They can look like different people.”
I also folded in my first ever interaction with a drive- thru ATM — not being a fattie or possessor of the bumper sticker, “My Other Car Is A Rascal Scooter”, I’d always assumed they weren’t meant for me; like handicapped parking spaces — and I then proceeded to speed away from a honking, fist-shaking yokel hovering behind me in one of them high-up cars, leaving my cash for the impatient pilot of this monster wheel pick-up to buy a new spangly trucker cap, I guess… Happy Channukah, Uncle Cracker!
Finally, I stopped in to buy a juice before the long slink back to the ‘big city’ and arrived at the counter to hear the 15 year-old girl working at the Booster Juice finish telling someone; “Toronto just makes freaks and faggots. From now on, I give it up to ‘real’ guys. (she turns to me) You want something?” Yes.. I’ll have a small ‘Mind Over Matcha’ to go, and a vasectomy.
Still, despite my Doc Hollywood-for-a-day ordeal, I managed to salvage something good with the following 5 step plan;
I listened to this episode of Bullseye with Jesse Thorn with Benedict Cumberbatch; after they’re done imploring stragglers to watch BBC’s Sherlock, Cumberbatch describes a defining experience wherein he was carjacked at gunpoint, blindfolded, thrown in a trunk and left at the side of a road in South Africa. (Or as Afrikaaners call it.. Wednesday.)
I listened to this Working Titles by Damien Jurado; this live clip is a spot-on simulation of experiencing a hit single as the opening act paraded out to be back-up singers;
I read this interview with Shearwater’s Jonathan Meiburg; you don’t gotta dig the band (I like ‘em), but goddamn if he didn’t make some sense of Malick’s The Tree of Life in this piece.
I watched this short doc catching up with baseball’s all-time leading hitter, Pete Rose; it’d be way too self-congratulatory to point to this as support for my claim that winning in sports and athletics requires a-holes and sociopaths but, to paraphrase Pete in this short, “1,972. That’s how many winning games I played in. That makes me the biggest winner in the history of sports.”..
Then, I listened to this Father John Misty track a few times in a row to soothe my soul for the afternoon traffic…
…. lastly, I remembered I could leave this life-draining backwater at any time. And lather, rinse, repeat.. as needed.
