Big Ideas

Short stories rise here like dough, ready to knead and re-work, pregnant with that readiness, ripe, warm, fragrant, comforting.

Yesterday in the drugstore with Brick and Juanito I walked past the aisle of adult diapers and a man sprang into my mind, a young drunk, the kind we all know and pity when we are not despising him for wasting his promise. This man is so lazy he chooses to wear adult diapers so he doesn't have to get up and go to the bathroom. Which means, oddly, he still has the barest modicum of dignity left. If he hadn't, he would opt simply to go in his pants, uncaring. Perhaps he thinks the one thing keeping him from being a complete, total, desperate drunk is the absence of piss and shit on his clothes.

Today there was the store selling wholesale pantyhose. We walked by it coming home from the grocery. The sign was in English and Korean. I instantly thought of a woman—the owner's sister, perhaps, who receives a huge box of pantyhose for Xmas every year. She dreads it, tearing off the paper, opening the recycled cardboard box, raking her hands through the various shades of hosiery in faked excitement, the show she will have to continue to put on in response to her brother's generosity for gods know how many years. The worst part is, none of the pairs of pantyhose is in her size.

I'm alive and in love again with the city. Walking today through crazy cross-current updrafts that lifted my hair into a red funnel cloud, being coated with dirt and grime blowing at me from construction sites, I felt free and loose and dirty and real. You never get to the grit living in a suburban place—only in the wilds or in the city.