Recently, I saw a man in the audience of a movie theater. A very tall person took a seat directly in front of the man. He affected a stern, pensive countenance when he realized the tall person was substantially obscuring his view of the film, which was soon to begin. The film started, and I saw the man and his companion leave their seats for a less obstructed vantage point in the theater. His sullenness seemed only to increase with this turn of events. I watched the man as he squeezed his cup of soda until it burst, then cast the icy remnants onto the back of the seat and floor at his feet. He then stood up and walked out of the theater. A few minutes later, his companion followed him.

Commerce

Yesterday I was, for the first time ever in my sordid life, forced to replace an entire set of tires for my automobile. Its cost: $268.00.

But the human cost was far more. The establishment I conscripted to raise the countenance of mine car was so bustling, so bursting at the seams with human activity of all kinds, that I was forced to take shelter at a nearby strip mall. The environs of said strip mall contained all manner of traps - movie theaters, bookstores, coffee shops...I could only hang my head in shame and shamble forth. For an hour in the multiple of three was my time frittered away staring down the maw of this raw, unfettered free market.

In hindsight, it could have been much worse. I came away from the experience with my wallet depleted only from tire necessity, and nothing more. I did find an interesting history book on the sovereign nation of faraway France that I felt very compelled to purchase, if only for my extreme ignorance of the history of all things French, other than that there was some kind of Revolution, and wine, and The 400 Blows.

Taking naps at the movie theater seems to be my new raison d'etre. I used to only do this during the occasional extreme late night movie outing. I remember falling asleep at a late showing of Hellboy, but nothing really much else until very recently. I missed 20 minutes of the Da Vinci Code (can you blame me?) and I just missed a chunk of The Break-Up earlier today due to another unannounced stealth nap attack. Neither was a late-night showing, though. I think my body just decided it needed rest, and the present was as good a time as any.

Woe is Deming

I could not resist the urge to write a review of the monument to post-modernity known as the Grand Motor Inn of Deming, New Mexico. Pity I didn't take a single picture of the Inn itself. It is known to locals and those who frequent it as The Grand, which is much more grandiloquent sounding than it deserves to be.

Bugs.

I report in to share that we appear to be under siege by members of the underground terrorist cell animalia arthropoda. You see, the temperature has suddenly shot up from being a consistent 65 degrees to a steamy 85 even at midnight.

And then the bugs came.

The first sign of the beast manifests itself as a multitude of tiny gnats frolicking in the moist bathroom sink-bowl. The second is a swarming of at least three different species of winged devils around any indoor light source. I counted the selfsame bathroom sink-gnats, a moth-like gnat of a more robust body (and a deep brown when all smashed up on a scrap of tissue, which is my preferred form of this beast), and what may or not be a distant cousin of the mosquito, which seems to suffer from dwarfism or some such malady.

This all came to a head about 45 minutes ago, when I was laying comfortably asleep in bed. I felt a pleasant tickling sensation along my thigh, as if a lover were tracing an unseen finger gently along my skin in the dark. Also, if this lover had eighty-six fingers, all 3 millimeters in thickness and covered with a fine hair-like covering. I reached my hand out in the night and rubbed my thigh...and something was there. I promptly elicited a sound unlike any loosed upon this earth since the long-ago days of the vikings, who I've heard lived in an exceedingly cold place and bore hammers of elkskin and møøse. Also, they had beards and bought bacon in bulk at Costco.

I leapt from the bed with an animal grace - if the animal were a duck-billed platypus. I turned on every light in the bedroom, and in spite of my bedmates protracted cries of mercy to spare her 4 AM eyes from my floodlight fury, I found a bug-creature in my bed. She killed it for me, because, really, I'm not touching those creepy bug-things, even if I had one of those cold-Viking møøse-hammers. Yuck.

And then to top it off, I walk out to the kitchen - keep in mind this is not a long walk in our 450 square foot closet-apartment - and I nearly step on a spider the size of a quarter. A freakin' quarter.

So yeah, now I'm wide awake and not going back to my bug-infested bed anytime soon.

Apocalypse Ir-rationale

One of the most content and stress-free times in my life was the two years I spent living in Santa Cruz while attending university. After hours of deliberation and mindless waving of divining rods, I have concluded that the reason for that was the infrequency of which I drove a car during that time. That town had buses that could take you anywhere.

I do not enjoy driving. I do not even enjoy coming along as a passenger while someone else is driving. My fervent wish is for each and every automobile in this world to simultaneously combust in a giant worldwide chain of de facto destruction. The only thing wrong with this scenario is that it nullifies the possibiity of a future where gangs of post-apocalyptic leather-clad humanfolk roam the deserts of the world in souped-up Dodge Chargers in a battle for control of the world's sparse remaining resources.