There is no such thing as ghosts. Unless people completely failed their quantum frigging physics. If they got a C- or better, they should be right here with me about ghost-hood. Apparitions. Christmas spirits. Like the Christmas bastards in Charles Dickens 'A Christmas Carole.'
Last Christmas whispered past with a whole Yugo trunk full of Christmas ghost passengers. And every item and individual is made of sub-atomic particles. So's everything else. Ghosts. Nitwits where I happened to be working, one Christmas, late at night. Everything is caught up in some shitty misconception about the way matter operates. My desk set of ceramic ghosts appeared to me one Christmas night at an adult bookstore. 1992, while the dot com universe rolled like the Blue Streak on the other side of the continent, I spent that Christmas fielding demands for cigarettes and beer money.
Most nights there were vagrants and perverts flowing in and out of my then place of work. The part of my body most engaged was my right index finger, pecking up small ticket sales on the cash register, behind a discolored counter, surrounded with large dildos, video tapes, and glossy reprobate magazines. Christmas night was special because most of the perverts had family gatherings to attend, while the vagrants were consistent with their omnipresent norm.
One bum after another came in the store, begging for money or cigarettes. How sad life has become since smoking was banned everywhere. I always smoked a pack per shift, and the cash register was never off. And sadder, for just one sub-atomic particle of time, people would beg for cigs, like golden retrievers at Thanksgiving. The experience compares to getting beamed up on the Star Ship Enterprise, and the thing fucks up your atomic structure. That's how maddening it is to deal with. And then there comes the very anti-matter of the sleaze that was giving me a totally demoralizing pain in the ass.
He was a homeless fella'. Probably schizophrenia. Far as I know, he didn't smoke, and didn't beg for beer money. One could say, in that district, that a non-drinker foregoes forty ounce bottles of Midnight Dragon Malt Liquor. And a non-smoker, on Christmas night, at the smut shop, is a type of ghost. This one was at least as hip a Jacob Fucking Marley. His thing was the art of conversation. And he was just terrible at it.
As is often true of schizophrenics, his thinking was disorganized. He wanted in the worst way to have a conversation, with someone, anyone, me, about the arts and sciences, philosophy and the way the stars act upon the fates. He would have liked to comprehend quantum physics, and he truly gave it his best brain storm, that evening, as he pontificated to me, damn near nose to nose, gesticulating, imploring comprehension of all the things he needed to understand. In yet more pressing urgency, the man needed to communicate with the outside world, badly enough to drift into my smut emporium one snowy night. Christmas and all, I felt obliged to do my best imitation of someone who really wanted to talk to this scrambled seeker. And now his memory is one of my ceramic ghosts.
If it matters where that prim little smut shop was, it was located, in 1992, right across from where PNC Park is now. The shop is a ghost store front with some other type of business in it, something cleaner, and no one is allowed to smoke inside anywhere anymore. The city did a plum job of moving the vagrants to other environs. Most of them probably croaked since those halcyon, primitive, squalid evenings. My memory is long, and is filled with ghosts. Those people on Federal Street proved quantum physics to my satisfaction. For all the meanings people paste onto Christmas, the pricks were a prima fascia case.
Last Christmas whispered past with a whole Yugo trunk full of Christmas ghost passengers. And every item and individual is made of sub-atomic particles. So's everything else. Ghosts. Nitwits where I happened to be working, one Christmas, late at night. Everything is caught up in some shitty misconception about the way matter operates. My desk set of ceramic ghosts appeared to me one Christmas night at an adult bookstore. 1992, while the dot com universe rolled like the Blue Streak on the other side of the continent, I spent that Christmas fielding demands for cigarettes and beer money.
Most nights there were vagrants and perverts flowing in and out of my then place of work. The part of my body most engaged was my right index finger, pecking up small ticket sales on the cash register, behind a discolored counter, surrounded with large dildos, video tapes, and glossy reprobate magazines. Christmas night was special because most of the perverts had family gatherings to attend, while the vagrants were consistent with their omnipresent norm.
One bum after another came in the store, begging for money or cigarettes. How sad life has become since smoking was banned everywhere. I always smoked a pack per shift, and the cash register was never off. And sadder, for just one sub-atomic particle of time, people would beg for cigs, like golden retrievers at Thanksgiving. The experience compares to getting beamed up on the Star Ship Enterprise, and the thing fucks up your atomic structure. That's how maddening it is to deal with. And then there comes the very anti-matter of the sleaze that was giving me a totally demoralizing pain in the ass.
He was a homeless fella'. Probably schizophrenia. Far as I know, he didn't smoke, and didn't beg for beer money. One could say, in that district, that a non-drinker foregoes forty ounce bottles of Midnight Dragon Malt Liquor. And a non-smoker, on Christmas night, at the smut shop, is a type of ghost. This one was at least as hip a Jacob Fucking Marley. His thing was the art of conversation. And he was just terrible at it.
As is often true of schizophrenics, his thinking was disorganized. He wanted in the worst way to have a conversation, with someone, anyone, me, about the arts and sciences, philosophy and the way the stars act upon the fates. He would have liked to comprehend quantum physics, and he truly gave it his best brain storm, that evening, as he pontificated to me, damn near nose to nose, gesticulating, imploring comprehension of all the things he needed to understand. In yet more pressing urgency, the man needed to communicate with the outside world, badly enough to drift into my smut emporium one snowy night. Christmas and all, I felt obliged to do my best imitation of someone who really wanted to talk to this scrambled seeker. And now his memory is one of my ceramic ghosts.
If it matters where that prim little smut shop was, it was located, in 1992, right across from where PNC Park is now. The shop is a ghost store front with some other type of business in it, something cleaner, and no one is allowed to smoke inside anywhere anymore. The city did a plum job of moving the vagrants to other environs. Most of them probably croaked since those halcyon, primitive, squalid evenings. My memory is long, and is filled with ghosts. Those people on Federal Street proved quantum physics to my satisfaction. For all the meanings people paste onto Christmas, the pricks were a prima fascia case.
