I hate that terminology, but it is the best possible way to get the average person to understand what I mean by a moment where you’re struck by something you see and it makes you feel some inherent goodness running behind life itself. I’ll try to think up a better less cliche way to say it as soon as I can.
In the meantime, I’ve been sick for almost a week, hacking up technicolor phlegm (isn’t that a weird word, look at it again), but on Wednesday took a walk to Trader Joes to replenish my soy milk and eggs as well as finish pricing out the food items lost in my involuntary move. Anyway my new official Trader Joes is the one by Hynes Convention Center, instead of the far superior Coolidge Corner location, (larger, easier) and the trick to this Trader Joes is that it’s in the basement and you take an escalator down and then back up. So I do my pricing, then my shopping, and then head back out… but at the top of the escalator, someone’s cherry tomato has fallen out of its container and (new annoyingly smaller) shopping bag, and while I’m not sure where on the escalator it happened, now it was spinning happily at the very top where the floor re-eats the stairs, – where as a child you’re always worried your shoelace will get caught and you’ll be horrifically killed. Anyway here is this cherry tomato, rolling perfectly, gently enough that it doesn’t rupture, on this huge somewhat violent manmade mechanical contraption. And think about how big the “teeth” of an escalator are…. it was just amazing this little tomato was able to stay there, on its de-facto hamster wheel. Anyway it struck me, not about the inherent goodness in the universe, but about the tiny little things you simply have to stop and notice, laugh or smile about, and then, as you can read, tell people about. Should I have videotaped it, smoked some G13, and then gone over and screwed my insecure neighbor’s daughter? perhaps.. but I always feel like I am some rare kind of person that actually notices things, and that it must be a good kind of person to be. Thus, cherry tomato Vs. escalator. Random little shit is awesome.
In another funny little story, I saw on the always amazingly horrible Headline News yesterday, that some lady starting choking on a piece of apple, and with no one around to help her except her golden retriever, she fell down and starting hitting her chest – at which point the golden retriever starting jumping on her chest, until she spit the apple out.
The dog then ate the apple.
Cue Bob Saget circa early 90’s America’s Funniest Home Videos: “I’ve heard of dogs begging for food, but that is ridiculous”
I find that news much less horrifying than the “tsunami of sewage” that killed 4 people in Gaza. Remind me never to live downstream of a treatment plant. There’s a joke I want to make here, but will not.
SIDE STORY: I want to go into further detail about how Trader Joes keeps changing their paper bag design and it’s gets worse and worse every time, but instead will explain why I watch Headline News over breakfast. It’s because of Obama (oh wait this isn’t fox news, I mean Osama) and his 911 assholeness. Anyway I woke up late for work on 9/11/2001 and wolfed down something and ran outside to my car to rush to work. Normally I’d call but I just left that time. The night before the Sox had been meant to play the Yankees in NY but it had been rained out and so my car radio was on (usually I was CD only at this time) and it was tuned to 1080 AM which was news during the day and Sox games when they were on. Thus I get in my car, start driving, listening to what was on, and thus heard the following combinations of phrases: “attacked the United States” “Pentagon is burning” “World Trade Center” etc etc. Now of course I almost had a heart attack, and that’s not a great thing to have happen when you’re driving. I remembered yelling at the radio, something like “THEY #@#^%^%# BLEW IT UP?!!?” and raced to work at 100mph to get to the TVs there and see what was going on. There I was brought up to speed. Nobody seemed to care that I was late. (and the lunch crowd that day all drank entirely hard liquor for the first time I’d ever seen.) Anyway – I was so jarred by the way I found out about the attack, that I have tended to turn on some 24 hour news channel over breakfast every day since, just to make sure, that if the world is no longer there, I know about it before I head out the door. Even tho I hate the 24 hour news cycle and how it is slowly killing journalism, and my father’s attention span.