Checking the Pulse

It's time to get our shit together. 12 Americans died in the past two days during one of the deadliest stretches since the conflict began. This cannot stand. It's not unjust when military members die for noble causes in the protection of ideals or person, but it is unjust when they die for what they are now.

Nothing.

They are dying for nothing. We are gaining nothing by the deaths of these 12 and the 3500 (or so) that have died before them. We need to come to grips with that. Quick.

And it isn't as if these fighters are dying storming some murky hill or attacking deft battleships in an open ocean. They're dying like cattle; prodded and herded randomly around a bleak desert until the locals seize the chance to drop the axe with a random bomb. There's no effective way for us to avoid this type of battle. And they know it, and we know it.

Perhaps, though, the most disturbing aspect of all of it is what the American military has become. They've turned into nothing more than a large group of mercenaries to our brass. Those at the upper levels of government seem to think that we can just use them for whichever conflict is currently convenient. To hell with a cause. We can just make one up as we go along. They've turned into hollow bodies to be shuffled around between the gunfire in a pursuit that we can't really define.

Democrats aren't much better than Republicans. We send them to do a job and they fail consistently. We send a message, they receive it, and then proceed to get spanked by a lame-duck half-wit president with a 33% approval rating. Somewhere, somehow, Nixon is laughing hysterically and rubbing his evil callused hands together.

Maybe it's our fault. No…it is our fault. Sure we sent them, but did we send them. Did we tell them to get this done? And don't talk to us about anything else until you do. These Democratic leaders are disgusting. Harry Reid has the balls of six-year old. How does such a weak easily manipulated politician rise to such prominence? Only in the Democratic Party…

Back on topic. Men and women are dying. There is no longer time for talk. In reality, both sides of the what-the-fuck-do-we-do-with-this-disaster-we-created debate are correct. There's no good solution here. But we seem to be discussing possibilities, that could potentially happen, sometime in the future. It's the kind of debate and indecision you get when MBA's and academics run the Pentagon rather then Clint Eastwood's and Attila the Hun's. Everything's just a big game of meaningless chess and semantics for the military now.

Watch the new special on PBS (which is basically an unreal set of interviews with the geniuses that sculpted this dickless Michelangelo) and try not coming to that conclusion. It's like Heartbreak Ridge come to a horrifying fruition. The pencil-pushers have taken over the Pentagon, and they are led by a President who avoided the Vietnam War to spend a few summers doing blow and traded Sammy Sosa in his prime.

Ye Gods. We are doomed.

I wish Truman were still alive. He'd be a man who could get this rabid bull under control. And then he'd cut its head off with a large blade and his bare hands. The buck stopped with him. He'd shake off the cobwebs and ask this current Pentagon staff some rapid fire questions that would need immediate responses. Did you try bombing the shit out of them? Yes sir. That didn't work? No sir. Have you invaded and killed many? Yes sir. And that didn't work? No sir. But Americans are dying and there's no actual threat to the American public nor any of our concrete interests? Not really, sir. Than what the fuck are we doing!

Get out. Time to pack up.

It's a dismal situation that we and this president have gotten ourselves into. To leave is a failure, and it may devolve into an even bigger failure. No doubt. But it's time to find out. There's no sense in just dying over possibilities, projections, and our pride. And it's a time the American public got its shit together. Stand firm in the face of political rhetoric. Demand that this needless death ends. Over 3500 of our people have died for nothing. Come to grips with that reality. Deal with it. But if there is one thing that these lives may have been lost for, it may be that we'll finally look at that large number and decide not to add anymore ghosts to it.

Inside Your Head: Part II

"Well look at this, a rare site emerges from the ether," Ernie said. "And this rarity must now drink with us. It has no other choice."

Simon was standing in front of their little corner with his hands deep in his pockets and a small smile on his face.

"Evening Ernie, and Jefferson, interesting that you went with the orange bow-tie tonight," he said. And he patted Ernie's shoulder as he slithered between he and Jefferson to sit next to Mary on the red velvet corner bench. She looked somewhat pleased in that coy way of hers, and Simon thought he caught a quick blast of dark raspberry perfume.

"Simon I have to say that it's a shock to see you. You've haven't come in here in a while," she said.

"No, it's definatly me. I've been a bit lost lately."

"And Christ you're soaked. What happened to work?"

"The nuclear plant hasn't imploded has it?" Ernie blurted out with true fear in his glazed eyes.

"I work at the Blockbuster Ernie, you know that," Simon said calmly.

Ernie nodded slowly. "The Blockbuster imploded?"

Jefferson threw an ice cube at his egg shaped head.

"Keep drinking Ernie, calm the nerves a bit," he said.

And Ernie obliged. The air was simmering, and Simon felt a bit of a sting in how much he'd missed this place of coin flipped ideas and random interpretations. Mary even more so. He hadn't even stepped in these doors for a couple of months, but nothing had changed. Nothing ever did.

"What's everyone drinking?" Simon said.

A quick silence fell over them all. Blues beats pummeled the wooden mirrors and sprung sad leaks in helpless drywall. Simon stood up and eyed the nearly desolate bar.

"I'm going to grab a drink," he said.

"I'll join you," she said.

And Ernie quickly launched into what would undoubtedly be an epic speech on the state of the Russian economy and its implications.

Simon could feel Mary grab his soaked undershirt as they meandered over to the cracked corners of the well worn bar. Loners and pretenders were not filling the area as they usually would, and only a small group of diehards had managed to come out in the rain. Simon's shoes stuck relentlessly to the alcohol laced floor and the lumpy textures of peeling hardwood. They arrived at the front of the long bar in silence and Simon drank his first round without bothering to swallow.

"You know, I've missed you," he said.

Mary eyed him deeply.

"Strange way of showing it. Avoiding us all the time," she said.

"I know, I know. I've been pretty disjointed lately."

"Heard you dropped out of school."

"I did."

"And?"

"And I'm not going back."

He looked up at the decaying ceiling and took another swig of his gin and tonic.

"So what are you going to do?"

"Well, they say I'm one of the finer stockers in the history of Blockbuster 317. You should see me hit the Ernest aisle, poetry in motion."

She giggled and kicked him in the shin. A little hard too.

"So Blockbuster to the moon, eh?"

"To the top."

He was pretty sure she was rolling a small ice cube around in her mouth.

"No, I don't know what I'm going to do now. Does anyone know?"

"Yes," she said.

They sat in a quick vicious silence. Drinking faster and stronger. Simon felt no panic, and no thought of his sprawling plastic city down the block.

"Well, I'm not worried about them," he said. "How's your preschool class been going?"

She sighed.

"I killed one of the kids."

"That so?"

"Yeah, he kept on and on about his dog, and snap, I drowned him in a big tub of finger paint."

"Finger paint, huh? Heck of a way to go."

"Ironic too, he was never very good at them."

Simon laughed, a little too hard, and inched a bit closer.

"No, I don't know what I'm doing either Simon."

Eye contact was crisp and pure. Clairvoyant in a fading night, and fleeting in a lost bar with lost people.

"Having no direction is better than having a bad direction," he said.

"It's not purgatory?"

"Only if you let it be."

She finished off her drink in one giant gulp and mockingly slammed it down on the bar top. Simon was still sipping his second one as if there weren't anymore behind that dungeon of a bar.

"Simon, I remember a time when you knew how to drink."

Now he sighed.

"Sobriety's been reckless enough for me lately."

She nodded.

"That's too bad I suppose," she said.

"I've had other things on my mind."

"Are they plastic?"

Simon cringed, but she playfully (and drunkenly) swayed into him.

"I'm kidding, I like your little city."

"Sure you do."

"It makes you happy."

"There are other things that make me happy."

And they kept on like this, sipping their drinks and lingering along the bar. Catching up on time, forgetting about time, killing time. The bar completely emptied out as warm patrons hit the cool rain and amps were packed and shipped off. Lights were brightened and liquor bottles disappeared to live another day. Jefferson had long since ridden off into the night, and Ernie had managed to find a large brightly colored bicycle.

Rain drops popped on lampposts and parking meters blinked with anticipation. Simon wasn't entirely sure how they had ended up locked arm in arm, but they were. And they were the last ones remaining outside Lemmy's Shop as the slender overly-tattooed bartender shooed them out the door and locked it crisply behind them. The lights went dead and Lemmy's Shop fell asleep until the atrocity of another last call. Simon and Mary were alone on the curvy gothic street. An eerie silence floated above the vacant downtown and distant highways hummed a heartbeat. And Simon could feel Mary's heartbeat as she clung to his side outside that dive. His mind was as clear as it had been in months as they slowly started moving in the direction of his apartment, to play with melted wax and sleep for weeks, when she pinched his arm.

"What's that?" she said.

"What's what?" he said.

She pointed directly across the street.

"That."

And there, shining in the now breaking moonlight, was a large slick cylinder of plastic sitting lonely on a cobblestone sidewalk. Waiting to be contorted to variations it couldn't break.

"Looks like a bucket of Lego's to me," he said, and immediately regretted it. He could have said hand grenades or a bucket of severed body parts, and she probably would have lost interest. But Legos….

"They're yours aren't they?" she lit up with a mischievous smile.

"No I don't think they are. Not the type I use."

She giggled.

"Oh I see, so some other geek was wandering around with a bucket full of Legos in a rainstorm."

"Alright, alright, you got me. Now let's get out of here I'm freezing," and he tried to pull her gently down the sidewalk. She was as close to him as she'd ever been.

"Wait, you're just going to leave them there?"

"I don't want them, and you think it's a goofy hobby."

"Maybe, but they make you happy."

He was about to counter, about to say that she was the only thing that made him happy, when she slipped out of his grasp and spun teasingly into the street.

"I'll get them for you," she said.

She playfully danced across the street, kicking puddles and living as pure as anyone could. Simon couldn't help but hold back a small sly smile. And she reached the other side and picked up the cylinder, shaking it mockingly.

"Are you going to be an airport or a car garage," she yelled across the road with a grin.

Then she began dancing back across the street. Oblivious and distant. And Simon heard nothing but silence bouncing off the brick walls, and nothing but silence in his clear satisfied head. But there was a noise, close and menacing. Coming around the sharp downtown curve with fear and desperation. Pistons firing and retracting, gears shifting quickly and without care. And she was only halfway across the road when she finally heard it too. True and real in the moonlight night. And it was running.

And Simon and Mary made a sudden eye contact that would not be broken. For they were frozen in a moment, and they watched as reality suddenly broke headlong into their vision with only one working headlight. The car flew at her, and in a moment it slid viciously as its brakes finally locked up and the lost soul behind the wheel finally saw the silhouette of a girl who once swallowed a large beetle, by mistake, on a warm schoolyard day.

She just didn't have time, and they met in the middle of that slick road. Her head slammed brutally into the windshield and her body blasted towards the sidewalk without hope. The cylinder of plastic she was holding blew open on impact, and they sprayed unnaturally into the air over the desolate street. A violent confetti. And she rolled to a deadly stop along with them, as the car careened into a lamp post and spun out tremendously in a thick puddle. The driver regained control and kicked it back into gear before hurriedly sending the damaged machine into the twilight. The sound of it sputtering and squealing away was all Simon was left with on that suddenly desperate street corner.

He stood motionless. Trembling slightly at the sight before him. His mouth open, his hands clinched to the top of his soggy head, a long distance from the man that he was seconds before.

And he couldn't even feel himself as he ran up to her broken body in the dark sticky street, and he didn't hear himself yelling for help. No one could. He crashed down into a puddle next to her, nearly hyperventilating, and yelling back at Lemmy's Shop. But it was pitch black and empty, and it mimicked the street before him. He quickly searched the contents of the small bag that had mercifully clung to her through the crash in hopes of finding a cell phone. But he simply couldn't find it.

She was twitching on the ground in front of Simon and a steady line of blood was parading out of both sides of her mouth. Her body looked contorted, and her eyes were opening and closing randomly.

Simon was telling her to wake up or hold on. But all he could hear was a high pitched ringing in his ears. In a quiet night, with no one around, he scooped her damaged body off the street and she let out a small distant groan. Her arms dangled as thick columns of water dripped to the ground. Simon eyed the landscape of his apartment down the block and simply began pumping his already sore legs. Feeling no pain, and at a complete loss of what to do next, but just moving.

He was running at full speed, whispering for her to hold on, and yelling for someone to do something. And lights did go in the brick stone apartments as he flew by, but they could not possibly get outside before he passed with her in his arms. And he made it to the small front door of his complex in record time. He swung the front door open with his foot and pure uncut adrenaline. He pounded up the green stairs with her burning in his arms. He put an unusually hard shoulder into his old wooden door and cracked right through it. Breaking the hinges as an immediate but distant pain shot through his weak upper body. And he didn't think she had taken a breath since he'd lifted her broken body from the slick street.

Now he stood shaking in his apartment looking for a place to set her down. But he had no couch, he had no chairs, and he had locked the door to his only other room. And the floor before him was almost entirely covered by a large city of plastic. Airports and highways, fire stations and houses, schools and restaurants, hospitals and skyscrapers. It took up every place in the room where he could gently lay her down, and he hesitated. He hesitated at the pull of it, the time he'd put into it, and the chance that he wouldn't be able to reconstruct it.

But he couldn't get her back. It was the silence in the room that broke him, the roof shuddered with a new wind, and he stomped into his plastic city. Crushing buildings and kicking carefully designed cars. Pieces flew in every direction, filling the air with yet more chaos. He created a large swath in the center and he brushed huge heaps of pieces aside with sweeping kicks. And when the space he created was large enough he kneeled down and gently set her on the ground. Mary was not breathing.

He shot up anyway and ran to his retro phone. He pounded the numbers in. Sitting Bull watched in distress.

"911 emergency."

"There's been an accident, a bad one, cars, pieces of plastic-"

"Sir, calm down."

"And I told her they weren't important to me. And I tried to stop her-"

"Sir."

"And she went across anyway. Stubborn and perfect. And the car didn't have enough lighting-"

"Sir."

"And there wasn't anyone to help me and I needed help. And she needed help-"

"Sir."

He stopped talking. Breathing in and out rapidly, and spinning in circles. Blood and water flowed down every crease and bump on his body. His lungs burned as he gulped for air in the cool room, and then he spun around and looked at the Mary's motionless body. She lay as a fallen queen in the ruins of her destroyed city.

"Sir, we just need an apartment number, we'll be there in a moment."

He paused and took a deep breath in.

"There are still pieces in her hair," he said distantly.

"What? Sir-"

He dropped both the mouthpiece and the earpiece, and they clanged helplessly into the little wooden ledge he'd created for them. He walked up to Mary and sat down slowly next to her. And he closed two wide open eyes with his large un-callused hands. Very gently he picked pieces of perfect plastic out of her hair until he had a small handful. And he clicked two pieces together, and then another two. He looked at the death and destruction before him with small salty tears in eyes. And in the fading candlelight, with the fallen queen resting peacefully in her fallen city, he quietly began rebuilding.

Inside Your Head: Part I

The roof shifted with the hum of persistence, flailing and pushing mightily against the restraint of craftsmanship, and holding true all the same. A mechanism stuck in the mold it was created for, helplessly doing its job without care or pride, but struggling nonetheless to find its place in the wind with the clouds that mocked it and the birds that used it.

And he sat under it listening for wisdom like an old sage with a fetish for shelter. The storm strummed lines of power overhead and kicked dank seawater to the street below. Simon's Lego City was now growing under the flimsy light of cheap religious candles, and his sore eyes were having a harder and harder time identifying circles and color. The pieces fell into place mainly by the deft feel of his large un-callused hands and the subtle click he'd learned through tireless practice. Simon's single portrait of Sitting Bull stared down above him with amusement. He could feel it. He could feel the sharp green eyes burning behind him in the candle light. That warrior of lost summers still held a gaze even through recreation at the sweaty hands of a nervous but talented white man. Simon added another piece, carefully.

His phone rang out in the cold stillness of the numb loft. Simon got up, slowly, and gingerly stepped over his ever growing creation with the care of a true artist.

"Hello."

"Hey Simon," her voice was soft in the darkness.

"Hey you, I'm sitting alone in the candlelight. This storm is savage."

"And yet your phone's working?"

"It's one of the advantages of owning a retro phone from the 1930's. No power needed, you should get on the trolley darling."

She giggled.

"Come out with us tonight, Simon."

He glanced over to his structure thinking quickly for a reason not to leave it. It hurt him to do so, but there were pieces to add and plastic to contort. The prospect of avoiding her, again, was not the brightest. But for Simon it seemed entirely necessary on this crisp swift night.

"I have to go to work tonight."

She sighed. "Late on a Friday?"

"Yes, it's really just some awkward timing."

There was a pause. Quick, but pure and dangerous.

"Are you playing with those Lego's?"

"No, it definitely has nothing to do with that. I haven't been adding any pieces to the structure in a while."

The lie was almost certainly useless.

"Alright Simon. Well we'll be at the booth in Lemmy's Shop if you happen to miss work."

"Thanks for the heads up, and maybe I'll catch a cold with this weather."

"Maybe you will."

And she hung up. Simon placed the ear piece on the steel hook and placed the mouthpiece below it on a small wooden structure he'd designed himself.

He walked back over to the city of Lego and looked deep past his triangular rain- soaked window. His head was spinning with his common anxiety, and waves of cutting nerves rose and fell in the darkness. The carefully designed city before him was static and lonely sitting there on his oak wood floor. Still in the night and ungrateful to the care that it had been created with. A lingering panic that always seemed to hang just barely outside Simon's perception intensified with Mary's phone call, and his swift vertigo came and went with the waves of rain. Spinning isolation, short gulps of manufactured breath, a separation from pure reality.

Simon's hands were sweaty and shaking a little as he sat back down cross-legged, and he reached into his mustard-yellow tube of plastic pieces. He grasped only air and then frantically scratched at the corners hoping for a lone piece. But there were none. The panic intensified. Everything had been running out randomly on him lately, and it started with this damned structure. It was everything.

It took over his old two-room apartment and covered the bold and prestigious living room he'd purchased it for. Upon moving in, he'd added no furniture, and hung simply his portrait of Sitting Bull and a single light bulb. He knew he'd need the space. Yet never thought the space would end up causing him to leave that small architectural school he'd been taking classes at. Leaving him to instead spend his nights hovering above like a firefly inches from the floor. That space had become engulfed in an ever expanding plastic metropolis.

But one day he'd met Mary while on a Lego mission to Wal-Mart. She was picking out finger-paints, he'd later find out, for the preschool class she taught in her free time. Her green eyes were scanning the toy aisle like a professional, and she was the one, predictably, who had lightly elbowed him to ask if copper or bronze made a more noble color for the Aztec people. That particular afternoon he had actually decided not to purchase a Lego tub.

They had begun drinking together with a small artistic group of friends at a bar called Lemmy's Shop. She had come back to his apartment a few times, and Simon had covered up the structure with two large quilts. But she had uncovered it, of course, and at first Simon thought she seemed fascinated by the complexity of it. And yet recently they had begun to see each other less and they both knew why. The eccentric vulnerabilities that had kept Mary interested in the first place had eroded over time. And although she kept calling, and occasionally writing poetic letters with dark tones and crushing symphonies, the distance grew more complicated and difficult to overcome. Simon still felt that there could be something there, in the brief moments when he let honesty scream through the distractions of self-esteem and interpretation, but he knew exactly what was creating the distance.

Now he needed more pieces. Right now. The city would not grow anymore tonight without them, and this would simply not do.

Simon didn't own a watch but from the hours of darkness, he assumed it to be around midnight. The only choice at this hour would be the Wal-Mart on 15th street. That sprawling box filled with the only fluorescent lights in this small Atlantic Coast town. And he knew there were two routes he could take to get there on foot; the long way, which took him on a muddy overrun romp through an old cotton field, or the short way, which would ironically force him to walk by the painfully clear window of Lemmy's Shop. He looked up at Sitting Bull and sighed, and then he walked back into his bedroom, grabbed the oversized black raincoat he'd bought at an army surplus store, and locked the door behind him. He walked carefully to the stairs that led to the freshly paved street below, and began to take the long way.

As he stepped into the cold late summer rain he immediately wished he owned a car. Even a scooter would due. The downtown block before him was desolate and dark. It was an old post-industrial area that was still trying to re-attract residents, and the ones that did live here tended to be either hermits or lovely old ladies with small loud dogs. But Simon liked the strange piece of city isolation, even if it could fray nerves and turn wrinkled portraits into characters. Plus, he could almost see Lemmy's Shop from the front of the sparse apartment complex. Simon noticed that his old building was clearly the only one to have lost power.

Then he found himself trudging through a muddy field in a driving rain. The coat he'd grabbed now seemed a mere ornament as think herds of salty water cascaded down every crease and bump on his pale body. The rows of long-dead cotton decomposed under the crunch of his persistence. There was a certain acidity in the rain, and suddenly he began walking with a very child-like obliviousness. His mouth agape to the falling rain like a satisfied grey whale wadding for plankton in a deep sea. And he held this basic position until he could feel the pummeling push of cool air and the rough cut of florescent light.

"Welcome to Wal-Mart," she said as she slapped a small sticker on his coat. It slid immediately off him to the gum laced tile below.

Simon ignored her and directed his Lego march to aisle seventeen with the single mindedness of a torpedo. Dodging cold steel carts, avoiding dangerously low-priced chicken, finding his way in the soulless current of the new Americana. He stopped in the middle of the toy aisle to grab the last large yellow jug of plastic delights. He'd actually planned on buying two of them (just in case), but settled for the last remaining cylinder. At least it would get him through the night.

The cashier's eyes were distant and glazed. Her smock hung on valiantly under the burgeoning weight, but lipstick bounced off her lips, true and lonely on a scarred face. Simon dropped the bucket on the tar black conveyor and searched for a rain soaked twenty.

"It still raining?" she asked. A slight smirk cracked her fierce mouth.

"Yeah, but I ran out."

She eyed him oddly.

"It's 20.63"

"What?"

She rolled her eyes. "Cash can be exchanged for goods and services."

Crisp panic. Simon grappled at the bottom of his pockets desperate for a few quarters.

"Did the price go up?" Simon asked. His hands were shaking.

"Yeah, fortunately I've memorized every price in this store. We only have a few items."

"Look, all I have is a twenty. They must have raised the price on me. It's just sixty cents, could you bum me a few quarters?"

She took the yellow jug off the belt and set it defiantly next to her on the cashier counter.

"Yeah, and then I'll work for free for the next twenty minutes. Pass."

Simon sighed and optimistically brought out his wet twenty.

"Please, I walked a long way," he said.

She smiled mercilessly. "Maybe the next time you buy Legos you should consider building a real car."

Simon was at a painful loss of how to continue.

"You know," he said. "You're not being very this," and he tapped the large yellow smile attached to her breast pocket.

Her eyebrows shot up at the contact and the gum she had been chopping on turned into a projectile doomed to join the others on the tile supporting her. The spit seemed rather aggressive to Simon.

"You know what? I don't need this, I'm calling my damn manager," and she grabbed the large silver microphone. "Mr. McKay, Mr. McKay. We got an issue down here on six."

Simon felt that hot panic creeping in. This was his only hope for the night, and the next twenty-four hour box store was miles and miles away (although it did occur to him that he could hitchhike). He was so close to the millions of possibilities in that singular yellow cylinder that he could feel it. His fingers had been twitching slightly since he first walked into the store. Simon saw no reason to give up after coming this far.

And so he lunged across the register and grabbed the jug. Simultaneously putting it under his arm and throwing the wet twenty at the conveyor. The cashier let out a wail that sounded like a wounded elephant seal. Simon could distantly hear her squawking at Mr. McKay as he eyed the sliding doors to the street. He had the bin tucked under his right arm like a giant yellow football and he extended his left arm like The Juice in 1968 as he ran full on for the doors. Yelling a like a madman all the while, hoping to discourage any act of a bystander, and he made eye contact with the elderly women who had greeted him warmly and dared her to initiate physical contact. He wasn't sure that he'd actually run her over if she tried to stop him, but he wasn't sure that he wouldn't either. She made the decision for him and stepped far to the side as he flew by. Simon could feel a roll of stickers slap by his neck as he made it out the doors and into the starless night. The shrieks of the cashier could still be heard when he finally made it to the sidewalk near the street, still running at full speed.

And he kept this pace nearly up all the way through the short route home. He pumped his burning legs and sliced through the sidewalks of the sleepy downtown, and all the while he looked over his shoulder for the bright lights of the law. There were none. Lego theft seemed arbitrary in its importance at this time of the night, and he could argue that he did in fact pay. Overpaid, actually.

So Simon slowed to a walk, awkwardly gulping for oxygen as he slightly relaxed his grip on the prize. He was on a lightly used downtown block, about a block from his apartment and Sitting Bull, when an empty beer can thrown from a fast moving car skipped into his feet.

"It's raining dude…" he could hear the drunken young man yell as the car faded into the darkness. He was about to yell back, God knows what, but the distance had made him mute. But he looked up to glare at the car only to realize, oddly, that he was standing right across the street from Lemmy's Shop with a large bucket of plastic under his arm. He had been so distracted by his feat of obtaining the Lego’s that he’d forgotten entirely which direction he had been heading. Now there she was, Mary, sipping a gin and tonic and talking with their friend Jefferson right in front of the large clear window. Ernie was there too, with his black beanie and a heavy drink that he would have no chance of finishing. Simon could tell he was stoned from across the street in the rain. And yet even he had managed to get out of the house and mingle in the crisp air of a laid back bar and the tight mix of spirit.

But it was Mary, squirming in the bars window and looking up passively at the cobwebbed corners of Lemmy's. Curling her locks of black hair and swaying a little to the blues beat of a Friday night. She suddenly made the cold plastic box under his arm seem pathetic and tiresome. Standing out there on a sidewalk after midnight in an Atlantic storm thinking a lifeless child's toy was bringing him joy. As she sat inside, knowing he would never arrive and maybe no longer caring. The plastic in the jug wasn't exactly setting Simon at ease with her in view. It was a cop out, a habit of fear, but maybe a tedious one at this point.

Simon spun the yellow cylinder in his hands and looked at it with contempt. He sighed, and then without premeditation, he simply set it down and walked with a random confidence across the street. He didn't feel any remorse at leaving it there alone on the sidewalk as he slicked his soaked hair back and open Lemmy's hard steel door. A cool stinging blast of air pulled him in and filled his pores like a thick jelly.