buckman's robots are winning

ontological insecurity

consumption equals happiness is the massage people receive in our culture.

i am never so alone as when i am waiting for the bus

JESUS FUCKIN' CHRIST ARE YA GONNA STOP FOR EVERY FUCKIN' PEDESTRIAN DUDE?!!! i look up. there is a person crossing the street, neatly traversing the marshmallow stripes. crosswalks always make me think of marshmallow fluff, which i haven't had since i was a kid. there is a minivan behind an SUV. there is an older woman with a leathery face and a brown ponytail who is gesticulating behind the wheel. she is the one who shrieked. i laugh out loud and turn to look at the young woman who is also waiting. she is wearing an olive drab jacket that looks vaguely military, a coarse sooty gray skirt, red rimmed black sunglasses, and cherry red lipstick. she is leaning against the belmont's puce colored brick, her earbuds black & in. her head tilts slightly in my direction but she does not smile, she does not grin. we won't be sharing this moment. it is warm & sunny. i can see my bus just up the street and i sigh with relief, for i am never so alone as when i am waiting for the bus. 

unzipped memory

there are so many new people at work. i was never particularly good at remembering names and it only seems to grow more challenging as i age. attractive woman with wavy brown hair says hi to me at the end of my day. when i was in college i was friends with a guy from maine who had also served in the military. he had a thick maine accent, which is similar to a boston accent, but don't tell them that. his trick for remembering names was to call everyone buddy in that thick maine accent. BUD-DAY! he was popular. everyone thought he liked them. sometimes i like to see how long i can maintain a relationship with someone without using their name. for some reason this amuses me. but i like this woman, i like her energy, and so i confessed that i had forgotten her name. sarah, she said. oh great, another sarah to add to the pile. we need to start giving people nicknames, i said and she agreed. that guy over there? she pointed at a round scruffy bookseller. i remember his name because his last name is zipper. zipper's a wonderful name, it's already a nickname! zipper. suddenly i remember playing with one of my brothers, jumping up & down on a bed, wrestling, when i knocked him off the bed and he cut his cheek on the corner of the iron bed frame. he had an inch long zipper scar on his cheek. he told me that when he would go out to play there was a teenaged guy who would sit on his porch learning the bass lines to police songs but whenever he would saw my brother he would yell out in a thick boston accent, which is nothing like a maine accent, every masshole knows that, he would yell out: ZIP-PAH!

quote from a poem by antjie krog

my werwels loop uit in lig

http://www.poetryinternationalweb.net/pi/site/poem/item/23650/auto/0/THE-LONELINESS-OF-SKIN

quote from antjie krog

"the different life he might have led, had he grown up in a different and more just society. what would he and many others have become if they were not schooled in racism, indoctrinated through religion and educated into violence to protect an unequal social order? and how much of this violence perpetrated by past generations has remained in today's young men?"

-antjie krog