(5:07 AM) Inkling Deficiencies Notwithstanding...

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[PART IV] 

I’ll go look out the window for the paper. If it’s there, at the mouth of the driveway—‘cause if it’s there, that’s always where you’ll find it—I’ll go grab it. 

I’ll slip the plastic sleeve off and lay the paper on the sofa. If I don’t put it on the sofa, or on the coffee table in front of the sofa, Pop’ll never find it. But then where else would I put it? He spends most of his waking hours sitting or lying on the sofa. 

Pop’ll spend several hours looking at the paper. He never mentions a thing about what he’s read. Perhaps it’s his impression that I don’t follow the news. Untrue. What’s true is that I’ve never cared for the feel of newsprint. But what is the point of reading the newspaper? Is it to pass judgement on the state of things? Most newsworthy things occur elsewhere. Those who make the news rarely have time to read it. A weather forecast is useful, but more so from any other medium. A newspaper is but a morbid and unfulfilling sort of entertainment. Admittedly, it serves as a diversion from the situation at hand. You read it and you say to yourself, “Sure things are bad for me, but worse for that poor bloke.” When you pull your shoes off at the end of the day, you can, at the very least, congratulate yourself for having not made the news. Perhaps you seek to review the sports scores. Allow me to enlighten you. Either they won or they lost. Really, it’d be newsworthy if they won when they usually lost, or lost when they usually won. 

Walking the paper back to the house, there’s the rear-end of my car, parked off to the side. Bits of [REDACTED] bumper-sticker glue cling in a visible rectangle. I peeled the thing off because leaving it on felt like driving around with a “kick-me” sign pinned to my back. 

I want you to know that, in keeping with tradition, I edit, correct, and/or revise, whilst you roll your eyes, ears, and/or nose, over the errors, redundancies, inconsistencies, and irrelevancies above, below, and/or otherwise herein. The tweaking never stops. Almost never. But some of it will be left uncorrected, redundant, inconsistent, irrelevant, and even possibly offensive, if not all of it. So, consider yourself… warned. 

Better yet, consider yourself a freshly picked Medjool date. They’re quite tasty. And in the end, it would be nice if most said of you, if nothing else, “Unlike so many others, that one was quite tasty.” To be sure, although Medjool dates have a long shelf life (insofar as the supermarkets are concerned), some Medjool dates are tastier than others. The ones that aren’t so tasty kinda-sorta remind my tongue of Twizzlers. Texturally, they remind me of Twizzlers. Kinda-sorta. 

Where I’m concerned, I’m always tweaking myself, always before leaving the house. Always, some hair requires razing, some nail requires clipping, some zit requires squeezing. Go to the gym, and those trimmed nails, you never know, they might strike the fancy of some lithesome treadmilling ballerina… who… moonlights as a manicurist. 

So far, doesn’t look like it’ll be a sunny morning. So far. 

In Southern California (at least, during the summer) there’s a mist, or a fog, or a haze, or maybe it’s a smog, that always hangs in the sky until mid-morning. Or, perhaps, it “burns off” earlier. Or, perhaps, a little later. In any case, that was something I loved about Southern California. 

When you’re awake this long you pay better attention to your breathing. At least, I do. It feels harder to breathe, like you’ve got to make more of an effort. 

15 June 2005

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