Sandwich People & Oil Burners

I almost wrote something about the Republicans whining about bringing an alleged terrorist to trial in New York...but I nipped it in the bud. In the view of Republicans, our judiciary system is adequate for sending scads of young black men into the cesspool of the Penal System of the USA ( PENSOTUS ).
This raises their fears immediately, because we can shove those men into the pipeline with little or no adequate legal representation, and often their trials look more like the local theater group's first run-through of The Pirates of Penzance than a regular forensic and judicial exercise.

If such charades occur at Sheik da Whoop's trial, even though he may enter the PENSOTUS - or the "slammer" - there would be appeals, and the business about confessions under torture might rear its ugly head...and who, really, wants a trial wherein confessions made under torture are - for the first time since King George III - accepted as probative?
I mean, 200 years of jurisprudence could go up in smoke...Oliver Wendell Holmes, and all that.

No. I shall ignore it, just as I continue to ignore Sarah Palin and Oprah Winfrey and Doctor Phil and all reality cable TV.


The Paranoid Archipelago stretches from the eastern coast of the USA ( EASTCOTUS ) to the western coast ( WESTCOTUS  ).
It is more properly the Asphalt Archipelago, but that sounds too much like The Asphalt Jungle, and that itself sounds too much like The Blackboard Jungle.

The Archipelago, an archipelago being a chain of islands connected within the great, blue sea, consists of mostly empty parking lots paved with asphalt that has not been seal-coated in at least 5 years. The most prominent flora and fauna are check cashing stores, abandoned UAW offices, $Dollar stores, Chinese take-out, dry cleaners, and food stores that state VALU on their signs, but are rather high priced once you walk into them.
These islands are spread across the landscape, tenuously connected by interstates and surface roads - a charm bracelet of bitumen, a web of disappearance tinkling with departed 401(k)s. This is where old people who are down on their luck go to add to their retirement money; this is Bleak House where the road-kill eating crows of our lives argue the law; this is today on the asphalt atoll:  the more cavernous empty buildings on the Archipelago are mutated into housing for temporary employment.

The People who work as the temporary hires drift across the highway-sea and anchor at these spots daily, living out of their automobiles like the boat people of Vietnam: sweating in the summer during the brief interlude of lunch, freezing in the winter...standing around in the spring, saying how unusually cold it was for spring...standing in the autumn fog and saying how the cold mist goes right through you...sleeping slouched in the front seat, and not enough breeze while a drop of sweat runs down your head... dreaming...dreaming...

Dreams with name tags of HI! My name is:Nostalgia and HI! My name is: Security;  verity, belief, and hope... comfort:  a cozy bed, long ago - remember? yes! in Truth, I feel it everywhere! It was so nice...
Bang! You wake up. You look around for those emotional name tags, figuring they must have been real, so real, they must have scattered around the car when you woke up, but they have gone. The name tags of Nostalgia and Security don't stick around the Archipelago; too many sharks in the waters - they just float in with the tide, stuck inside glass bottles, then they float back out.

People walk around on their breaks. They look like prisoners walking in the prison yard, only there is no fence with barbed wire to hem them in.
Actually, very often there is such a fence, or a monolithicly incongruous sound control wall stretched along the interstate in front of the mall-island where we are, looking like the wall at the city's edge in Dark City, or like all of those Pink Floyd record sleeves and CD covers. Walls not like Robert Frost's that make good neighbors; no, these walls only need a graffitti sneer painted on them, and all would be perfectly believable 1984.

I survey the parking lot's edge, where the tide of the concrete Service Drice comes in against the black asphalt. I stare at the wall.
I look at the We Cash Checks!! store and absent-mindedly caress the molotov cocktail I carry in my pocket, made out of an Absolut bottle and old underwear.
The rasping cough of escaped cigarette smoke reaches me, not volcanic, not sulfurous, but not tobaccic either: more like bitter herbs...bitter herbs laced with outrageous chemistry...
" Why, O, Lord" I cry, "is this day just like all the others!!"

My wife has packed a sandwich for me: 8 grain bread, turkey for protein without too much fat, lettuce for a vegetable serving, mustard...'cuz I like it!, but also for the turmeric which gives it that yellow color, and is so good for you that it is that wind at yer back of an Irish blessing.
I think of her love.
I think of my daughter, and what the future holds for her.
I think of the hours when so many people in my complex are up at 3:00 in the morning, on the internet, burning the midnight oil, looking for something better...or just something...just a shred of hope.
Oil burners.
I cry...just a tear or two.

But, I get over it and - lunch being done - I head back to the Big House.