You’re not the only one who doesn’t wanna anymore.

You’re not the only one who wakes up feeling like shit every morning.

You’re not the only one who feels sick in the subway A/C, wasn’t it Kerouac who said this country was an air conditioned nightmare? The Europeans don’t do that shit, they don’t try to scare the sweat off of people, they let the stink hang out. I’m hungry for stink, party people, I’m feelin all sorts of strange emotions coming over me as I look down at some chumps fucked-up toes hanging out of his fucked-up sandals while a numbness creeps across the right side of my body. It’s a stroke, it’s a joke, these ads for night school, I’ll sign up, get my check rubber stamped, become a secretary and take it up the ass like my mother.

You’re not the only one who wants to make it big, who’s sick of sitting around waiting for something to happen, feeling achy-breaky every time after sex, like a little girl only when you were a little girl you fucked and sucked like a champ, like it was your job. Now, DVDs are more fun, eating a piece of real pie or getting a deal on cigarettes, getting scared in the park by a tree branch waving behind you, going skinny dipping and discovering the inside of your shoes smell like ass. You drink two giant iced lattes in a row and take a long, uninterrupted shit with the paper and a joint, what we used to call a poor man’s vacation.

You’re not the only one saying it’s now or never.

You’re not the only one with one turntable, wishing for two so you can remix the soundtrack to the sequel of the story of your life, throwing on a second, no third rate Pavement album with sound effects culled from a Belgian beach holiday. Your body’s in the board room but your mind’s stepping like a giant crane between the bumpers in the traffic jam outside, the hot bus exhaust killing your pretensions. There’s the smell of salsa and roasted nuts, there are white undersides on the raised hands of the tourist tour group leaders, maple leaves on the backpacks, bobble heads in the shopping bags of the pretend homeboys from ohio.

…waiting for the city bus a woman beside you talks loudly into a phone about how this is the best day of my life, I don’t know about Sara, and you look down and eleven or twelve year old Sara is looking in the other direction, towards the spinning corporate glow of Times Square, her eyes full of a complicated hate.


kate brings it