mimi smartypants
Seriously, though: what's with the penguins?

grab my shrimps

(NOT) LEAVING ON A GREYHOUND BUS

I am tired of the loud Brown Line panhandler with the massively long story. He is a fairly young dude with enormous hip-hop clothes and a backpack, and he shows up yelling about how his life is so messed up, he wants to kill himself, his dad is an asshole alcoholic who punched him in the face and kicked him out of the house, and all he needs is seventeen dollars for a bus ticket to Rockford, so if you could help him out blah blah blah.

Let me say that I have no doubt all of the above is true. This guy may have burn marks all over his hands from the crack or meth pipe, may be strung out as hell with eyes like glassy aquarium rocks, and may have oddly regular habits for someone who is supposedly in a desperate situation and only wants to get out of town—but drug addiction and a terrible family life go together like heroin and bent teaspoons.

This is my main complaint: I have seen this guy so many times, at approximately the same time in the afternoon. I have witnessed good-hearted suckers hand him as much as ten dollars at a time. He really should have his seventeen dollars by now. To be believable, he needs to switch up the story, switch trains, or switch times of day. Or at least he needs to not forget key details of the story, which is what happened yesterday when he on the train once again with the blah punching dad blah blah saddest dude in the world trying to get seventeen dollars for a bus ticket to Joliet and suddenly I perked up.

“I thought it was Rockford,” I said, in a polite, but loud and clear, way.

Of course, you can’t be a long-term drug addict without learning to lie like a champ, so Mr. Burny-Hands Chemical-Stank is very smooth and says, “Oh, my aunt, she’s moving and I can’t stay with her, so I’m gonna try to stay with my cousin” and that is like just the beginning of his explanation, it went on and on. I am sorry I ever engaged with you, Loudmouth Tweaker Man! Hush now!

RATIONAL OBJECTIVE HATEFUCK

I got really bored during a meeting and had a nonsexual fantasy about going back in time and having sex with a young Alan Greenspan. Wait, hear me out. Where are you going?

Young Alan Greenspan was one of those ridiculous Ayn Rand devotees. The market will figure it out! We don’t need to regulate things like FRAUD! The ubermensch shall prevail! I guess old Alan Greenspan is the same way, unless the market meltdown taught him anything, and I am not sure of that.

Back to the sexy time machine. I could jump in, set that dial for just before the Ford administration, and seduce Alan Greenspan. But instead of the creepy-ass Rand-style sex from her novels, where The Only Smart Man In A Room Full Of Idiots has borderline non-consensual sex with the Brilliant Slim Woman In A Devastatingly Simple Evening Gown, we’d do it all cuddly-playful style, with lots of rolling around and sappy utterances and gazing into each other’s eyes. Maybe that would have snapped him out of his stupid cult philosophy, changed his thinking on the role of government in economic affairs, and things would be different now.

Sorry. I am full of weird ideas lately. I blame the approaching full moon for my crazy brain and inappropriate outbursts. Just last night I saw a man on television wearing an awful abortion of a garment, it was like one of those Navajo blankets but fashioned into a white-guy shirt, and he had a turtleneck underneath which did not improve the look. I was all alone but still said, out loud, “What the hell kind of shirt is that?” and “GO AWAY, SHIRT!” rather than do anything rational like change the channel or just, you know, deal with it.

USE-LESS-PUNCTUATION

The frightening greasy burger joint near my office, which is not officially called The E. Coli Grill but should be, has many over-hyphenated signs in the window. TRY-OUR GYRO MELT. BURGER-FRIES AND SOFT-DRINK $5.99. Is the misused hyphen the new misused apostrophe?

—mimi smartypants is the one who knocks.