The titles do all of the work this week:
AQUAMAN, KING OF THE SEVEN SEAS, HAS FUCKING HAD IT WITH YOU, MAN.
And:
Haveagoodweek.jpg
Details here, then send ‘em in.
June 15, 9:55 a.m.
Q Train – 7th Avenue to Times Square
There’s a baby being changed: orange diaper, pink pants, green blouse. Let’s call her Sally. She’s producing a horrifying sound – like the screeching of the subway brakes disharmonizing with a dying animal.
Mom’s face does not change throughout the dirty process: she does not want to be doing this here, on the subway, but she must. No one gets off to board another car, though they could.
The deed done, she bounces Sally on her lap, then holds her over her left shoulder, patting her back all along. The crying finally stops; a pacifier is the solution. Now that the child has calmed, down the mother cannot take her eyes off Sally. For a few moments, the faintest of smiles crosses her lips.
A day late, for a good reason – the weekend in verse:
In the early morning hour,
just before dawn, the two lovers wake
and sip from the leftover Franzia box wine.She asks, “Do you love me or yourself more?
Please, tell the absolute truth.”He says, “Me.
But only because I have no clue who you are.”
More debaucherous quatrains here.
I’ve elaborated on the joys of Instapaper before, but the reality is that I rarely use it. Most of my reading on the subway, and elsewhere, is still done with hard copies of a handful of magazines (The New Yorker, Atlantic, Wired, Esquire, New York), or whatever book is on the top of my pile (currently, The Corrections). But where Instapaper earns its keep is in those moments when I finish the magazine and have nothing else to read. Or am stuck in a subway station on a Friday night, when carrying a book to a bar seems frowned upon.
Basically, Instapaper has eliminated any possibility of boredom in my life. In The Atlantic’s latest issue, all about “Ideas,” Walter Kirn writes about the extinction of boredom:
Thanks to Twitter, iPads, BlackBerrys, voice-activated in-dash navigation systems, and a hundred other technologies that offer distraction anywhere, anytime, boredom has loosened its grip on us at last—that once-crushing “weight” has become, for the most part, a memory. Even the worst blind dates don’t bore us now; we’re never more than a click away from freedom, from an instantaneous change of conversation partners.
He goes on to lament a potential loss in creativity, owing to a lack of daydreaming, or something. And it might be true. But this is one crutch I’m quite happy to have.