Life Is Wonderful

Its 3:40 am and I'm in my office typing up words and listening to the cars rush by my open window. Huge trucks filled with garbage post across the street and their mechanized crunches whine into the dark morning. A black Lincoln, the standard vehicle in Brooklyn's curiously casual, yet entirely unique taxi service, waits in front of a four story walk up, letting its engine idle, playing the slow hum of urban silence. It doesn’t honk its horn, it just waits. Another car smashes by. There are voices. Someone laughs. I look outside my window but don’t see anybody on the street. The black Lincoln rolls away slowly, then speeds up and then is gone. I wonder what happened there? Maybe he was impatient. Maybe they took too long. Maybe he wasn’t waiting at all.

I roll up a cigarette and wonder where everyone is headed. Then I open another Newcastle beer and light a stick of incense. The cigarette is rolled tightly and the smoke curls up and drags in the air. The tail of it pokes my eye and I wince and cough and feel a tear swell up then fall. I take another pull. I wonder about one of the regulars at the bar who is writing a novel and likes to be bitter and mean. He acts as if he is the dead blade of grass beneath the huge pile of shit that is our very existence. As if he has figured out life, and found it not worth making a fuss over. I wonder if he is awake right now.

He is well read and has charming salt and pepper hair and he drinks Belgium wheat beer and prefers that it be poured like over there, with about an inch of head. He said, one night, while well sunk in jim beam shots and hoegaarden pints, that he would happily nuke the world, himself and five year old son included, if it would put an end to the catastrophe that is todays state. I wonder if he remembers that night and I wonder if he sees how stupid that idea was.

What an idiot.