So i was watching Rocky II or III today, and i was thinking that no matter how bad my job gets, at least i don’t have to get hit in the face over and over until i can’t stand up any more…..for a living.

i liked the end, after the big fight where that guy in the America-shorts wins (’cause the guy with the America shorts always wins. everybody knows that.), and Rocky and what’s-his-fuck are sparing and they’re making small talk, like the movie was running a little short and they needed a little something to pad it out the end “so, ummm, you beat that guy. uh, you and Adrian gunna fire up the grill this weekend?” and then it ends in a mid-action freeze frame and melds into — get this — a impressionistic painting of the same freeze frame. i would kill man just to tell people i painted the painting they flashed for half a second at the end of Rocky: something or other.

i guess i could do that now without the killing, but hey — what’s done is done.

The downtown Sears and Roebuck in Oakland has its perfume testers on lock and key. that is, if you want to get a whiff of the stink-good juice before you buy it, you gotta roam across untold aces the linoleum — that ultra-pure oxygen they pump into those places invading your bloodstream making everything shiny and “buy-y” and turning you into a first class, soft pretzel-eating, Orange Julius-swilling space cadet — until you have the dumb luck to stumble onto one of the members of that elusive and surly breed: the retail worker. (my arch-enemy — me being a food service worker an’ all.) and then that retail worker has to find the one retail worker that the trust with all the keys to all the little separate locked cases where they keep all the tester bottles of Cologne. — and, uh, i don’t know if i gotta illustrate this point, but smelling is kinda essential to the whole perfume buying process. i mean, its not like buying tube socks.
so then they stand there and stare at you with impatience and obvious annoyance while you do that thing where you spray the little bottle in the air and then smell the air. and they shift their weight a lot and exhale loudly. and you feel really guilty about disturbing someone to use that stupid “locked case” system they came up in the first place with, and you begin to feel like you’re some sort of consumer aristocrat who gets her jollies making serf-peons jump through hoops for her sadistic amusement and purchasing pleasure. and you only get about to the second bottle until the overwhelming awkwardness of the whole procedure comes crushing over you like a some sort of uh, great awkward weight and you end up just buying the next thing you pick up just to get the hell out of there. that’s how elowsky ended up with Antonio Banderas: the fragrance.*
Well, thanks to the foresight of a scratch and sniff box (how’s that for technology?) i ended up buying Addia’s: Adrenalin for myself. Ain’t that sooo “turbo-charged, active lifestyle?” and i really like how, though the power of smell, it will give people the illusion that i…..do
anything.

at all

ever.
which i don’t. i make it a point to move as little as possible and i have a personal philosophy of only running when chased. i could care less about living longer as long as i don’t have to break a sweat at some point during life. it would be a pity to deny the world of my one true talent: taking up space. and, frankly,it would just be selfish. and i’m really fucking good at it. hell, i’m doing right now!

as fun as adventures in pneumonia can get, and as pleased as i am with the super-interesting hacking and rasping noises i make, now, when i cough, i suppose its a relief to feel — if not normal, then almost-not-quite on the road to normalcy once again. call me old fashioned, but i’ve always been a big fan of breathing, and i plan to start again real soon. in the mean time, i guess i should be thankful for the little things, like consciousness. this is the first day i haven’t spent comatosed — head buried in a trough of vile cold-medicine goo and orange juice — in EIGHT FUCKING DAYS! and in that time, i’ve had a maelstrom of wicked sweaty fever dreams in which i either made-out with or been chased and murdered by a pretty good cross section of the population.