"Taut" is a superlative

1. Back in the day, when January hid the sun behind big gray Gothic buildings and the logic of walking through the packed snow of the park on the way home from an ebullient night prevailed over any instinctual self-regard that stemmed from wearing Vans and gold-toe socks that hugged ankles jealously, it seemed like it might not matter if Kleenex were available, because sleeves were, and the fact that you didn't own a brightly colored scarf was secondary to the fact that you couldn't feel your toes.
Subsequent periods lacked the clean reliance you glean from existing in a stable frame of reference. It became unfeasible, for reasons of being a thousand miles away, to climb into the window of that old abandoned church near Salonica's, which was done with the express intention of being scared shitless. For that matter, scaring myself shitless became less of an imperative and more of an accident, like locking your keys in the car. No one I knew huffed gas or slammed Tussin for fun and no one rode around in cars to kill time, so it wasn't like high school, which was a good thing; there were no bus rides to ethnic enclaves available and I didn't have access to comfortable chairs in a library for napping purposes, so it wasn't like college, which was a necessary step. Somewhere back there, the next placard flipped, as it always does - a qualitatively neutral observation, that, not sepia-toned Scorcesesque pining - and new oddities availed themselves before becoming assimilated back into the ordinary.
Eventually - always "eventually" - having friends who lived in double-wides with non-functioning fireplaces and eating mac and cheese with hot dogs for extra protein made an extraordinary amount of sense, as did sitting in the workplace bathroom with lights off for ten minutes because it seemed like those ten minutes made the rest of the day crawl less slowly by. I guess it's a matter of context, which isn't saying much but is more than saying nothing at all, and being open to the idea of context makes those random memories more tangibly explicable and strange at the same time.




2. There is still time to pay attention to the baseball. That is for certain.