Crescendo to an error
A certain private parking area near my brother‘s apartment includes fold-up pedestals that the spaces’ owners can upraise to defend them from other motorists. Each pedestal folds up into the middle of its parking space, where you lock it into place with a key. The distance between pedestals in adjacent spaces then becomes just one pedestal diameter less than the width of the space. Now instead of just blocking your space, the interloping vehicle blocks two spaces.
A SCANNER DARKLY
Dick, Philip K. (Doubleday, 1977, ISBN 0385016131)
My grandfather bought the Volkswagen in 1968. He imported it direct from Germany and shifted the steering column over to the right-hand side.
A year later man set foot on the moon. Continue reading
LOW DOWN
My brother saw an advertisement on late night TV for an onomantic service where for fifty cents you could SMS your partner’s name to their random number generator and it would tell you whether the partner remained faithful to you. What sort of misanthrope comes up with something like this? It seems like the social equivalent of starting a fire in a movie theatre.
WALTER
My brother travelled through Cambodia with a psychopathological German named Walter who always wore yellow and black bike shorts. Walter refused to take his shoes off at sacred sites. At the Killing Fields south of Phnom Penh, Walter rebuked a local tour guide for failing to stand up to the Khmer Rouge.
LEAVE IT TO BEAVER
Dir. Norman Tokar Perf. Jerry Mathers and Hugh Beaumont. Gomalco Productions 1957-1963
I hung this jacket on my clothesline in 2006 (photos below). Through that summer, the sun bleached it from black to grey. In autumn it faded to white at the high points, but you could still find some of the original black in the valleys of its folds.
Next spring a colony of weevils built a nest under one of the sleeves. But in summer, a competing colony of earwigs from the collar drove them from the jacket. Continue reading