Various
A woman walks out of the ladies room the other day, and she says,"Nice to meet you," to someone else still in there.
Who meets co-workers in the bathroom? Can't there be some polite ignoring for the time being? I mean, you can always meet again later and say, "Oh yeah, you're the one from the bathroom , how 'bout that?" That works well enough, at least in my opinion.
It just seems so much simpler. Say these two women met at the sinks. While introducing, they've got match each other, cleanliness for cleanliness. Don't you forget to soap, or you blew it. And what about the towels? If two people go to get the towels at once, then you're all crammed up in a corner of the bathroom. That's no good.
I guess I'm looking for more coordination in the world. Right now, we do stuff and some of it comes out right and the rest comes out screwed up. Like those guys trying to fix the water main broken on my route to work. Been broken since Wednesday with the block still cut off from traffic. Maybe they're getting there, but I bet they're screwing up a lot along the way. Why else would it take that long?
Whatever it is, it's getting me lost. Every day I come home from work now, I get lost. And I don't even get lost the same way either. Different ways, every day. Too many one way streets in this city and too many u-turns needed to get back to the way you were going. That all might be symbolic if it weren't such a pain.
I called an answering machine the other day, or at least I thought I did. Turned out to be a beeper. All the talking was for nothing and even then I didn't type in any numbers, so nothing counted.
It was like the first time I tried to gas up my car here in Atlanta. Eight-thirty in the morning, already late for work. Pulled into the gas station, popped the unleaded nozzle in the tank, but the numbers didn't move. I go up to the store in the gas station. I try to open the door, and it doesn't budge. I look in the window — lights off, some stuff but nobody inside. It's an abandoned gas station.
I drive around for fifteen minutes and find one that's actually still a functioning gas station. I'm half an hour late to work that day, and for what? I wonder how long the gas station had been closed. Months? Years? I'd like to wonder how many suckers drive in there for a fill-up. I bet most figure it out before trying the door.
But that's me in Atlanta. People saying stuff to other people, and I talk to machines that aren't even listening. I drive around like a halfway-grown Family Circus kid, and even that doesn't matter because, tell me, where do I have be? Freedom's no good when you're living your life as the third person singular. Drive on by, folks, gas station's still closed. Glad I could confirm that for y'all.
