Comfort Stop

A cold, crappy day. My feet are wet. A single screw has come loose on my umbrella, resulting in the entire oddly fragile, oddly ubiquitous, oddly beautiful contraption to function only with great difficulty. I dare not close it because it will be too hard to open again. But, repeatedly, I do close it, through force of habit, thus condemning me to the task of forcing it open whenever I need to use it to walk my middle-class arse a few metres under open, active sky.

The DVD in the AV library skips, often during montage sequences accompanied by music that I greatly enjoy. I don't get irritated but I am aware that it is happening. People near to me snort amusedly at audio-visual content that to me is neither audible nor visible. I think about how much I want a companion as I watch the based-on-a-true-story people on the screen have amazing relationships with willy-nilly ease; an illusion that they are possessive of prowess being provided by the fact that their life story has been condensed into two hours and, because many of them are homosexuals and probably because the directors are such people, seemingly placing emphasis on every successful relationship that they had ever had.

I stew about how the guy at the Saint James supposedly overcharged me by five dollars each in purchasing tickets to the last Th' Dudes, Hello Sailor and Hammond Gamble show for me and Mat. I stew about the fact that I had to pay for a ticket at all, but justify my purchase on the basis that it is a good bargain and that I thoroughly enjoyed it last time. I might not get drunk this time, particularly considering that I will, more than more than likely, not have any money. Borrow, borrow, borrow, I don't want to miss out on this bargain and that bargain and help me, I have driven too far afield for my bank account to allow, in other words Hamilton City, where I do not like being.

It costs a lot of money to live life, unfortunately, and as such I find myself boxed into the situation of having to decide whether I will sell my tomorrow to an air conditioning firm -- which will have me sweeping small shreds of steel off the floor, dressing differently and pretending to be a homophobe so as not to attract negative attention from companions in wage labour -- or spend it doing my two thousand five hundred word essay about a misogynistic Marxist and a homosexual libertarian, both of which I feel to be self-contradictory personality type identifications. I should be writing the essay right now. Nay, I should be in class. But what am I missing out on anyway?