There are a lot of things.
Just got done with jury duty, thank god. It was real brief. I went in one day and got selected, and then I went in a second day and was told that the case was dismissed.
I’m not sure what I expected the Brooklyn Supreme Court to look like behind the scenes, but I didn’t expect it to look like a Greyhound bus station. Which is how it looked. You know, crummy graffiti done in a real hurry, such as “Ging + Lil Hab” or “Eat Dick” scrawled all over the bathroom, lousy little chairs that have had about a million asses sitting on them, bored people waiting for time to pass, announcements over loudspeakers, and a couple of muted televisions with close captioning. I sat around and read the Glass Menagerie, which I didn’t like as much as I thought I would.
This is going to sound stupid, but I always feel like I’m in the future when sitting in a public building like that. Maybe it’s just the fact that I’m a sloppy guy, but I always figure that the future is basically going to look like a locker room. Everyone will be really poor, all the clothing will be really shittily made, the air will be stale, there will be grime all over the place, and it will smell like disinfectant. Even in the courthouse, someone had take a shit on the toilet seat. I went into one of the stalls, and there was litereally someone’s shit on the seat, like they’d done it on purpose! Fucking disgusting, and I’ll bet it was that weird old Italian guy with the moustache and shifty eyes who did it, too. That the sort of thing that will be a common occurance in the future.
Television news reminds me of the future. If you watch MSNBC without any sound, you get a real sense of how shitty and banal television really is. It’s just two talking heads, and the text across the screen reads like this:
TODAY, KARL ROVE WENT IN TO DC COUNTY COURT FOR QUESTIONING. ROVE WOKE AT 6, AS IS CUSTOMARY FOR HIM, AND ARRIVED AT THE COURT AT NINE.
THE CENTER FOR DISEASE CONTROL IS LOOKING TO CONTAIN THE AVIAN FLU. IN CHINA, THEY ARE SCREENING POULTRY IN AN ATTEMPT TO STOP AN OUTBREAK OF THE DISEASE.
UP NEXT: HAVE YOU SEEN THE NEW JAMES BOND? WE’LL HAVE AN INTERVIEW WITH THE BLONDE BOND AFTER THIS. CINDY, DO YOU KNOW WHO HE IS?
HE’S A SCOTTISH ACTOR, I BELIEVE. AND FOR ALL OF YOU WHO ARE WONDERING WHAT REESE WITHERSPOON IS UP TO, STAY TUNED.
There’s a little crawl of news that’s even MORE banal than that going across the bottom of the screen. You know, everything is clearly going to be at the lowest common denominator in the future. And public architecture is going to be incredibly bad.
Some public buildings are really nice, like Grand Central and the main Brooklyn post office downtown. In fact, I saw Marky Ramone there, and it really flipped me out. He and his wife were FedExing something, and at first I saw him from behind. I didn’t know if was him, of course, it was just a skinny guy with that old guy slouch dressed like one of the Ramones. I turned to Sarah and said “It’s funny, in the city you really see all these old dudes who never grew up, like these fucking late seventies artifacts—” and then the guy turned around and it was Marky Ramone! I nearly lost my shit.
Later, Sarah asked me why I didn’t say anything to him. What do you say? “Hey Marky, you drum really fucking fast?” That’s all he did! The guy played one fucking drum beat for a couple of decades. But what a great beat. I also saw him parking his car in the neighborhood where I work, and sitting outside at this cafe in my neighborhood.
Anyway, no Marky Ramone at the courthouse. Have you ever been so fucking bored that you can’t read? I eventually got to that point. I began thinking about soul music, and trying to decide in my head whether it was the best kind of popular music ever or not. I think I ended up deciding that it was, although I’m not sure that I really mean that. Is it? It probably is
Now I’m just sitting around and putting the finishing touches on this story I wrote. It’s probably the best thing I wrote for some time. I’m glad it’s done.
