"And these words were brought to you by..."
Remember hearing that at the end of the six o'clock news? Elise wasn't sure if she were actually old enough to have heard it. Somehow though it had found its way into her vernacular. Wondering about paid endorsements seemed to be a much better topic then men lately. However the concept of the phrase was soon to bring on a revelation.
Later that night Elise met up with the girls to blow off some steam. After a few drinks a tall, gorgeous guy who went by, "Nick" approached. And as she half-heartedly...
Millions. It seemed like it anyway, the number of people that were lining California's streets in the 60s and 70s. "Making it" or trying to... Rebelling, singing, pan-handling, and trying to fit in. Half-clothed, non-clothed boys and girls (we couldn't call ourselves men and women, we were only 15 and 16 most of us). We were in a revolution. Haight/Ashbury was the center of it all, at least for us. The LSD had its hold on some of us, others were fine just being thousands of miles away from where they grew up, just to feel "free." San Francisco changed...
Lola. When I think of her my heart doesn't beat right. It doesn't go bathumpbathump like on television. It goes beep beep beep because I'm a robot.
Wait. It's more like a clock than a heart. They've placed me in front of the Barking Burger. I'm supposed to bark every hour. Tell people about the specials and deals and what delicious meat we have. Come taste our barky patties.
Instead every hour I call out Lola. Lola. She walks by the window and cocks her head as though she can hear me.
They talk about me being defective. A chip...
Whenever the mailperson knocks
They deliver to us a new box
I don't know from whom
But I wish for their doom
On all of their houses, a pox
You can count me out. Everybody knows he's not my favorite person. I'm not debating that.
Take the way he eats: He makes these noises. He SINGS the chewing. It sounds sort of charming right at this moment, but in point of fact it's gross. Nobody wants to hear a turkey dinner set to Ave Maria. Two weeks planning a meal, you want a moment of silence. Some good old-fashioned reverence. What's happened to that -- what is it -- an emotion? These days, it's gone.
As I said, I don't like the man. But I also don't like crows...
The elephant dragged its feet. Since they were made of rubber, this made the task all the more difficult, as she pulled herself by her front legs across the linoleum floor. The intermittent squeals of her back feet dragging, followed by the silence as she readied herself for another pull, created the slow and steady rhythm of her despair. Why had the toymaker failed to provide her with decent appendages? What child wanted to cuddle up with a stuffed animal with hard-soled rubber feet? Why had fate seen fit to give her creator a pragmatic bent which resulted in her...
It was inexplicable that two latino, hipster twenty-somethings from East Los Angeles would talk like 85-year-old Jewish retirees from Queens, yet that was how it was.
"Pull ovah and ask fuh direck-shuns," shouted Isabel.
"I know where I'm going!" Ricky replied with a Yiddish accent that seemed to come from nowhere. "You always do this! You always want to undermine my AUTHORITY!"
He exclaimed very loudly, mostly because he was hard of hearing and couldn't monitor his own pitch. Isabel was silent for a second, silently mouthing words to herself. Then, as if in an afterthought, she said, "You just...
The maple leaves will change and fall with a certain grace - November will begin.
Carla read that sentence in her Literature textbook over and over, and the thought that kept running through her mind was, 'Who edited this book?'
That wasn't entirely true, but her internal monogue ran along these lines. Was she the only tenth grader who knew that semicolons connected independant phrases? Older people complained about how texting was ruining the language, but what difference did that make when a text book author, in what she assumed was an edited textbook ILLUSTRATING the language, couldn't even catch...
The elephant dragged its feet. Meanwhile a man with a mustache spun in circles. A pink tutu hung limply around his waist, and the cigar held loosely in his mouth dropped ash onto the pavement. Olivia hated art movies, but she had agreed to join Richard. It was something about him wanting to impress his artsy friends. He didn't even know what all this meant. Olivia was sure that no one in the room did.
It was a little like placing a few blocks in a room and calling it art. She had gone to a museum with Emily recently....