Ten Strange Minutes in the Life of
I sat down to read Davy Rothbart’s, The Lone Surfer of Montana Kansas, and noticed my arm was bleeding. It didn’t hurt, but it was making a mess. If I wasn’t careful and didn’t act quickly I was going to bleed on a lot of things. Which was annoying cause the whole point of settling down for some lit time was to get my mind off the thickness of the day and retire to the fiction fortress of Rothbart’s Thug Life.
Just moments before breaking out the book, I had been on a mission to the corner store to get some of that Ice cream where they mix all the other flavors of ice cream together and create some cosmic new sugar swirl job. Man I love that stuff. The more items you can get in my ice cream the better. As I was walking home with my score, I thought about how sweet a job it must be to sit around a science kitchen all day and contemplate, earnestly, the creation of new and exciting ice creams for people to eat. I wonder what concoctions they attempt that never make it pass the first stage of ice cream recipe maneuvering – Chocolate Covered Skittles and Root Beer Swirl – Pineapple Cookie Dough Nerd Surprise – all tried and all failed.
As I was walking home with the frozen goodness and dreaming of my new job of flavor creator, I noticed the last sunbeams of dusk were being toyed with and twisted in the back window of a rusted out toyota corolla just a few meters ahead of me. The reflection of sun light was bouncing off in a concentrated ray of light somewhere just off to my left. The effect was like a Star Wars tractor beam on me. I followed the beam like I was pulling in the anchor off a ship. When I arrived at the car and moved left of the beam, I found myself staring at the torso of a well endowed female metallic mannequin. The sun was bouncing off of it just below the bottom left ribs. I was kinda shocked. It was a bizarre scene. It ruined my swell daydream of future flavor creator and now I was hunted with the scenarios that one concocts when left with the image of headless metallic mannequins lying in the back seats of bombed out cars on the avenue.
It was only when I got back home – confused and troubled, that I noticed the mysterious and painless bleeding from the back of by arm. It was like I had stumbled across some hazy x-files type event which left me marked – punished for witnessing something I wasn’t supposed to see.
I lay down on the bed to read the Surfer book but the position of the wound wasn’t allowing me to get comfortable cause I didn’t want to get any blood on the bedspread. I was too lazy to get a bandage. Instead, I set about contorting myself into silly arrangements, so that I might hold my book up and read it from a prone position but not have the back of my arm touch either the bed spread or my own clothes. This is more difficult that is seems. Seriously. Try it. It’s freaking next to impossible. The only good position is to lie on your back and hold both arms straight up with the book between them. But even in this position, your arms get tired quickly and the blood ends up running down your arm, which causes you to cuss voraciously and throw the damn book across the room. Later, when you pick up the book, you find that page 12 has a small blood stain on it and you cuss again. Fuck.