thoughtjunkie

There’s people necking in the poolhouse. I imagine they stayed behind to count up the coins and ones from todays entries and hotdogs. They pretend to hate each other just a little too much, so everyone knows. They think they’re being clever, but everyone knows.
The pool is located on a vast hill of gravel. I try to imagine the gravel being covered in grass and trees; when it rains, the water runs through the grass in little rivers instead of forming the dust blisters it does now.
Inside the pool house, the couple doesn’t have sex, just the clicks of saliva and the nostrils of excited breath to tell each other how they feel.
The fair smells of sweat and manure and cherry flavoring. It’s an honest scent-- that is to say, it’s a smell made with no thought towards it whatsoever. It’s a smell that rings of activities rather than intents-- kid wants to ride a pony, so the fair smells of manure; there's oil on the food and in the machines, probably from different sources; it’s summer and there’s people, and that equals sweat.
The noise is maddening if you don’t know how to listen to it. People who grow up in cities do it automatically. For people in a Smalltown, USA, it takes focus and dedication. There’s bells and buzzers and screams and music. There’s machinery thrumming and pony hoof beats. Cars in the distance, conversations up close, and above it all, the grinding of cicadas. But then, see, I’m already doing it. Taking the Big Sound and slicing it into its parts, sense for the senses. You can’t write it on a page, it‘s too big. It’s the oppression and the exhilaration of having no control over your environment whatsoever. It’s sound waves you feel, reverberations that hit you in your eyejelly and throat. It can’t be written, and can‘t be read; I don’t even know why I tried.
There’s lights and movement and hairdos-- oh! The hairdos! (Buzzcuts and bobs and mullets, oh my!) The fair has two ferris wheels; the couple one and the lunatic one. Couples take the huge tall one, the one that puts out 70% of the fair’s light pollution. It towers above the other rides, high above the crest of the fair’s hill, and moves at a crawl. It’s like sitting in an Applebee’s booth that spins over the town.
The lunatic one is different. It has cages-- roll cages designed to withstand being dropped from it’s crest (not sure why, falling from that height would turn ribcage to chunky salsa anyways). There’s motors and pistons all over its exterior, trying to convince everyone that’s how it moves, but I talked to the carney who runs it for a bit, so I know better. In reality, there’s a huge underground hamster wheel that they put all the fair’s methheads on. “To load the Paying Customers,” he says, Paying Customers is like some zombie mantra to these people, passed down from corporate, “to load Paying Customers, we let the big hunk of meth drop from the ceiling and let them salivate all over it to soften it enough to scrape bits off with their teeth. Then when the Paying Customers are all settled in, we pull the meth up and off they go.” This makes sense to me. Fair week is the week all the methheads are conspicuously absent from the QuickShop.

Do you remember the economic crash? Yes. The one we're still in.

Okay, good. Now. Do you remember the one reason for it, that was like "CEOs and other corporate execs. started doing what was in their best interests and not what was in the best interest of the country"? And you remember how that was such an (apparently) outlandish and novel idea, that no one had thought to make laws protecting company shareholders from things like that?

Do you remember that?

Guess what: THAT'S THE SAME FUCKING THING KHAMENEI AND AHMADINEJAD ARE DOING NOW.

See how they're alienating their entire population? And see how they don't seem to give a shit, because they're chasing after the shiny ball of power? The EU is looking at imposing sanctions, visa restrictions, and witholding ambassadors (http://www.reuters.com/article/worldNews/idUSL366850620090703?feedType=RSS&feedName=worldNews), and Obama finds the whole human rights violations "deplorable", but you know who doesn't care? Khamenei and Ahmadinejad.

So they can't leave their country anymore: I don't see them crying about it. They're selfish old men and will be dying soon (not soon enough). They don't care about the long-term repercussions of their actions on the Iranian people (apparently, they don't care about the short-term ones either).

EU, do your worst. No trade, no ambassadors, no visas. Obama, be as politically savvy and tactful, or as strong-arm and hardline moral as you want. You'll only affect the people beneath them; not the two dudes with all the money and all the power. And they have proven, they don't give a goddamn what anybody thinks, says, or does.

Hiya folks,

My Peoplewatch Blogject's been on hiatus recently, mainly cuz 1) I wanted to spend as much time as possible with this one cool girl I know, and 2) I was in Ames livin with her and her folks.

I'll resume the blogject tomorrow, perhaps with a few changes to the format as it evolves.

-Christian

The Rules:
No location tags more specific than city.
No listening in on conversations.
No specific identification details beyond the visually observable.
No posting about people I know.
No posting about the same person repeatedly.
Observation and posting happens for a solid hour at a time, every day.

The point isn't to invade anyone's privacy, and it's certainly not to produce good writing. It's just to practice watching, and to write every day (even if it's bad).

Her glasses look like they were designed once upon a time to be tea saucers, but she’s long-since harnessed them and affixed them to her face. Bored face droops over the form she fills out on the back of her book. Her chin’s receded into her head, and grown a second jowlier one beneath and behind. She’s got pristine white Velcro-on shoes, and brown mat hair that looks like it was poured on and then kiln-dried.

There’s a woman in a pink shirt-- the kind that’s housewife-stylish, buttons to just beneath her breasts, with a smattering of embroidered daisies across the front. Her face is granite-textured, not form a history of pimples or traumas, but from the natural creases and lumps of her flesh. She gives everything a sleepy, skeptical glare. The paper she reads, she doesn’t believe. Nor the TV she watches. Nor the man across the room, flicking through real-estate ads. She casts around at every new movement from under her mane of hair, and reaches inside her sleeve to scratch her elbow.

The first thing I notice about her is the redness under her eyes. She’s got this desperate, but not unhappy look, a contradiction in terms she balances by sheer uncertainty. Her foot’s propped up at the ankle like she’s self-conscious about returning it to the ground. Frumpy, loud flower print in teals and blacks and whites is stretched over her abdomen, cuts it into sections. When she stands, her greasy bob shifts under her headband almost as a single unit. The rolls of her midsection disappear as her blouse shifts, and she waddles away.

Tan, black, white stripes on his polo. He’s got a fanny pack loose round his waist, and the bulk of it’s resting between his legs. His head’s rolled to the side, against the wall. His mouth hangs open (a fact his wife ignores as she needlepoints). Red flesh and wisps of hair, and a gently moving chest. His watch is mostly silver except for a perfect gold ‘O’ round its face. He squints beneath his glasses.

The way her bleached hair is giving way to her brown at the roots looks almost natural. Ultra-tan, but she’s aging well; she carries herself like she’s mid-forties, though she looks younger. Her face is manish, broad-jawed, flat nose, eyes wide-set. She dresses that way too, plaid button-down and straight-legged jeans. She stands up to get a beeper, and takes wide strides out of the room.

The woman’s face puffs out like anaphylaxis. Her hair looks accidental; a series of blonde sideswept waves, that curls away from her ears, at the tips. She squints through glasses thicker than they are wide, already gloriously engrossed in her book, not twenty pages in. Her dress goes up around her throat, like its designer was attempting homicide via dress-strangulation.

The Rules:
No time-posting.
No location tags more specific than city.
No listening in on conversations.
No specific identification details beyond the visually observable.
No posting about people I know.
No posting about the same person repeatedly.
Observation and posting happens for a solid hour at a time, every day.

The point isn't to invade anyone's privacy, and it's certainly not to produce good writing. It's just to practice watching, and to write every day (even if it's bad).

When the two of them leave, they step around a table and converge together. The girl sips her milky brown whatever, and hitches her thumb up inside the strap of her bright orange shoulderpurse. The boy lopes forward and tips toward her at the shoulders. And when they converge, it's in a tilt like a first-date kiss.

Brown braids down her shoulderblades, till she puts her hood up. She's got glasses, thick plastic rims that, from the front, seem to spike at the joints. Her face has a fair, earnest complexion, like she's avoided makeup for years in exchange for a natural resistance to blemishes. When the man comes and takes her spent espresso cup away, she thanks him and flicks her chewed pen round her fingers. She's techno'd out-- laptop with four or five open windows she cycles through; hooked up to that is a mini-computer, the kind that's half palm pilot, half netbook, and clamshells together; flashdrive in the laptop; and iPod too. She's got a giant steel water bottle resting under the lamp, and scratches research from her laptop on a pad, perpendicular to the paper's lines.

Asian girl and asian guy sit down, and she gets a call. She speaks emphatically into the phone, and her head bobs forward and backward when she does. shoulder-length hair follows the motion, behind the lag of air resistance. Her man grins at her, mouth open and toothy, till she goes to the bathroom.

Group of girls sipping drinks in to-go containers that are needlessly disposable. They're at a big five-person table, stabbing the slush in their cups with straws. A girl-- short hair, turqoise shirt under a white zipped-open hoody-- doesn't have a drink and cups her hands around her face and smiles like rain on a cloudless day. She sits across from a nervous girl with a bush of tightly waved hair. The second girl focuses on her drink mostly, and scratching her scalp. She wears a shapeless black hoody and only smiles enough to convince the other girls that she's having a good time.

There's a man in the corner whose goatee extends too far down his neck. It's just thick enough in some places, and too thin in others, but it matches his disheveled hair and intent focus on his work. His shirt is a patterned buttondown, with little splotches of earth tones over a solid redish brown. He reads more than he types, and when he does, his head dips close to the screen, like his glasses fail him on digital text.

The barista walks with a slight limp, black shirt, khaki shorts and sockless sneakers. His hair is so short his scalp shines through the little gelled spikes, even though it's thick enough. He smiles the vague smile of someone who is content with their job. Empty coffee cup in hand, he makes eye contact with each group as he tells us that they're closing in ten.

At this point in the session, the place I was in closed and I had to move. I took a gamble, and went someplace where people *might* have been. Unfortunately, it’s a gamble that didn’t pay off. So, instead, I shall describe the location I am situated in now, rather than any people.

There’s street lamps in a neat grid, along the pathways. Each one shines differently, some brighter, some whiter, some with gray and black shadows in the glass. The light fixtures are shaped like urns, and they rest on black steel columns with long vertical grooves. Trees litter the area, without particular pattern to their age. There are two enormous ones, that stretch high into the sky. Medium-sized trees are smattered around on the grass, and the city has deigned it necessary to install a handful of new ones, tiny little saplings, held straight by metal rods and wires. A semicircle of a basketball court reflects the orange from a bug light across the street. There’s a playground that’s dark and silent, its form casts weird shadows on the woodchips beneath. The slatted benches overlooking the playground are ergonomically dipped in the center, and the cracks are stuffed with woodchips from tired kids or bored parents. The shadows in the gazebo give it direction, like it’s an island of concrete that’s being spun roof-over-floor. Empty cups and newspapers, and grocery bags, and cigarette buts at my feet, and swept round the gazebo’s benches. It’s all constructed of dusty-brown unstained wood; the kind with long grooves that look like hellish splinters. The slabs that make up the pathways through the park are like the trees, mostly old and mat, some new and shining light back at the lamps. In between the slabs, grass forms little mounds, spaced evenly and gentle, like turf speedbumps. The playgrounds swing squeaks as a shadow sits and pumps its legs.