My mind and life was in a brown paper bag with an empty bottle in it, so I’m off to get a fifth since I ran out..but honestly, I’d take a third of a fourth...that damned dog must of drank most of it again because there’s no way I finished that by myself already...either that or it evaporated overnight when I wasn’t watching...liquor has a way of doing that around my place...yeah, that’s it...it’s evaporating...I didn’t do good when I took chemistry, but there must be some formula that’s causing that to happen...my apartment smells like a distillery on double shifts...even the roaches wobble around the floor intoxicated by the odor...don’t even think of lighting a match to smoke or the whole place might go up...I’m on the sidewalk when I hear a loud and proud CLACK CLACK CLACK behind me...I’m thinking WTF?...is there some kind of mechanical thing from deep, dark space following me?...what is this clacking sound that is racking my brain and causing me to become discombobulated?...I turn around and it’s just one of my neighbors from the apartment complex that I’ve seen once or twice….just some old guy in his 60’s with gray hair...he looks at me sheepishly or defiantly...I’m not sure which...he’s wearing this bright as split the night neon orange baseball uniform complete with metal spikes that were making the clacking sound...he’s carrying a couple of baseball bats and a big glove...I look at him and don’t know if I should admire him for still being active at his age, or laugh at him for how ridiculous this guy looks...maybe life has passed this guy by if this softball thing is that important to him...I thought of that quote about Lenny Bruce... “There’s nothing sadder than an aging hipster”, but this guy stopped running in the hip circles generations ago and his main concern now is the broken hip which is the buzzard circling over the heads of the aged...I move to the side and let him pass and we both walk toward the parking lot...he gets into what else but a red Corvette ( a sure sign of his crisis)...CLACK CLACK CLACK...man, this guy must be in his second or third or fourth adolescence...I’m pretty sure he looked around to see if anybody was watching him and envying him as he got in...I was silently, ever so silently laughing at him and his whole machismo parade...I’m still walking to my car (definitely not a Corvette), and I see this super-hot blonde who I’ve been admiring for a while walking toward his car...she’s way too beautiful to be living in this rat hole of a complex but she does…at least temporarily until some rich guy swoops in to scoop her up...she lives several floors above all the low life guys like myself who live there and there ain’t no elevator to go up to her floor...she smiles at the old fella, which is kind of like giving him a kiss on the forehead, and then walks past the little red Corvette to this other sports car that’s low and lean and that is parked waiting for her... the guy in the car has thick, dark hair and sunglasses and looks like his name might be Marco or Antonio or something like that...he’s straight out of central casting...it’s a good thing she didn’t get into the car with the old guy or it would have been slit my wrists city.
