Summer Travels #3

And there he was, on my bus once again, with all his glory. The old Mick took a seat in front of me, as if he wanted me to write a new blog about him. But what was this? He had a suitcase! Was I right to say he made it big off those tickets? Or was this just his house and everything of value, and his weathered appearance truly reflected his financial/housing status. While I write this blog, I would love to assume he found his calling and that the suitcase is for his travels down to a tropical island collecting retirement while sipping on margaritas. But he is just another old Mick from Boston, so that couldn't be farther from the truth.

As I sit on the bus I realize that this man is more of a mystery than I can deal with. As he sits down next to an African American woman (something he didn't look to certain of doing), he situates himself with his suitcase infront of him, and throws on a pair of reading glasses. What was it that he is going to perform you may ask? He takes out a huge stack of those crossword scratch tickets. O old Mick, if only you could kick this addiction. Unlike a child with a big bag of candy not knowing where to begin at mowing that bag down, he jumps into the stack of lottery tickets without hesitation. An elderly Hispanic woman watches him with an out most admiration, as if he is serving his country by scratching those puppies, with a stare as though she has now caught the crossword lotto ticket addiction. 

He reaches his glasses out infront of him, with a nice greasy glaze on the glass, as greasy as his appearance, he is unsatisfied. He unzipps a small pocket of his suitcase and retrieves another pair of reading glasses. Are these his crossword ticket glasses? Now this is getting serious. He gets a phone call, which he picks up his same 90s flip phone, of which he still has not mastered answering without having it on speaker phone. He does his same old horse and pony show, "yuuuup", "yuuuup". But this time it's a shorter conversation. This time she tells him she'll call him back later, and was only asking him if he's on the bus, the conversation is over after two yups. Where is he going this time? And how come his phone conversation isn't longer than the hour and a half bus trip? Did he do good last time and he got this mystery woman the coffee machine she desired? He must be going somewhere of importance and this time he doesn't have time for his wife's lip. Or he must have gotten the overly admired coffee machine and our Mick has done so good to the point of not being nagged.

We arrived at his usual stop, the Moody St. bus and train connection stop. He gets off and heads to the bus overhead and sits down with a woman who helps him with his coffee. As interesting as all of this was to me, my analyzing was put on hold as I noticed we were going the wrong way down Main st. I must have gotten on the 70A, though I'm almost certain it said 70 when I got on it at Cambridge (sometimes I swear they're fucking with me). After walking through the backroads of waltham in 90 degree sun shinning weather to get farther west on Main Street, I realized that maybe I was supposed to have taken the wrong bus to see this Mick again. Maybe I was supposed to find more out about him, slowly and discretely. I don't know if I will see this spectacle of Irish proportions in any more of my travels from and to work, but you can bet your bottom dollar I will write what I can from what I see. Until then I wish him luck and that he gets what he is looking for.

What's in store for this blog?..... I'm working on ideas, but school gets in the way. So bare with me. Hopefully I'll explain my take on introversion and why I'm so anal about what music I listen to. If you don't know what I'm talking about or you don't know what the definition of introversion is, stay tuned.

-Alex

Summer Travel #2

Apologies

The post before this, I promised you all (those who actually read this nonsense) that I would start to write about my travels to work from Boston to Waltham (not entirely sure I ever wrote where the travels took place). And this whole blogging thing is not as easy as it might seem. I currently allow my creativity to remain dim with the promotion of continuous practice with engineering theory. I will tell one more story that happened last week, that I should have uploaded in the moment. After this story I will bury this traveling fable like a child buries a small house pet, in a shoe box, next to a tree, in the back yard, next to all of the other animals that my younger fictional character is too busy to feed. I will occasionally dig up the rotting corpse to poke out new stories, but this is me pulling myself out of a committed relationship with you the reader (it's not you, its me).

 Due to me finding headphones for the train, my attention has been skewed. When I do see something worth investing my attention, I will listen, but too much of me in this moment has been hiding behind my introverted-music-loving-self. And at the same time I feel as though human nature is being comfortable keeping to ones-self, so sometimes I am not as lucky to find an interesting character on the 70 bus to Waltham. But this other day (sorry for just writing it now) I did find this short, weathered Mick sitting by himself on the bus, so I chose to sit with him. I feel that if I was anything but white, him being of a different generation, he would have been up in arms, but we were both of the same flavor, so he kept to his scratch tickets. I was never a fan of those contests that required you to count how many jelly beans were in a jar up on the counter in front of you, especially since every time I would partake, I was young and too short to even see the jar from underneath the counter. So I will make up a fictional but somewhat accurate number for how many scratch tickets he had. Based on his orientation and how he had a flip phone from the early 90's I would assume that he was out to win, not to buy a better phone, but to be able to add to that collection of paper he had on his lap, to only encourage that his loss could be turned around. He had maybe 30 to 40 of these fucking things that he was going through like he was working at a conveyer belt (which would benefit his salary more if he actually worked during this time of scratching). They were the crossword scratch cards and how they are played is unclear to me, but he looked like he should have skipped off the bus we were riding together, skipped down towards your local university and graduated for the art of crossword gambling, this guy knew what he was doing. He was doing three or four a minute, if he could he would be wearing down the quarter that was guiding his addiction (if material science worked like that). During this abuse of his paper crack, his 90's phone that I referenced went off like an alarm letting the troops know there was an airade. He fell out of his trance and answered the phone, put it on speaker phone (for the whole bus to hear) and put it in his lap. A woman, I am guessing his wife, was on the other end of this prehistoric phone line supported by his prehistoric cell phone. Though she seemed to have importance in her tone, he kept her on speaker phone to be able to continue scratching his way to success. Now the reason I reference this story is because of how little he cared for what she had to say, which wildly amused me. When I get married (which right now seems funnier than this story, which is honestly not that funny) I figure that I would listen to my wife and give more than a few shits about what she has to say. But this is where I am set apart from my characters on the bus, and this is why they are worth writing about. As he had her in his lap on the phone, she would go on and on..... about this woman she knew...... and what this woman had...... and how she had a coffee maker....... and how she herself wanted a coffee maker........ Stories would form upon stories and this phone call turned into a tale, a tall tale infact. She made this phone call turn into a real tragedy, with herself being the hero. And though this phone coversation was lasting an hour and then an hour and a half, turning into majorty of the bus ride, the only answer to come out of his mouth was "yeah". This was no normal "yeah" that one normally gives to a story. This was a smokers cough yeah. A real breathy yeah that shows how little he cared about who needed a coffee machine. She would stop after he said "yeah", and it had me pretty convinced she would nag the usual wife saying "are you even listening to me?", but no, she kept on talking about that coffee machine. She never once stopped and wondered if he was listening to her and her distress, as if, in this year of their marriage, she expected the old bastard to not to listen, and that she would benefit from nearly pretending he was listening. He would occasionally answer direct questions she had, but these answers never sparked him to have to give an answer other than yeah. Nearing Waltham the conversation ended, he got off the phone after his last "yeah" and a "bye", and went back to his scratching, like a kid with poison ivy.

Now, your probably asking yourself, did he ever get that coffee machine? Well fuck that, who cares, you should be asking yourself if he ever made it big off of those scratch tickets, if he did then he could have that desired coffee catered to him. Maybe that's his motive for the scratch tickets. That's the difference between engineers and muggles, you need to think about what someone else is thinking, and I figure, he thought he wouldn't need that old bag and her coffee talk if he won it big with those tickets. Well whatever happens to him, I figure he'll be fine, drunk at one of his cousins bars in downtown Boston, or winning it big and going down to a paradise island. Good luck old Mick.

Now that I finally got that story out, for those who actually read this shit, I will talk about TinyArcade. TinyArcade (against my will) is dead (for now). TinyArcade was Nik and I, and will not be otherwise. I will continue to write to this blog, if I have ideas. I will upload poems and short stories I have worked on. I will come up with impromptu ways to keep you the reader intrigued (I know that the only person who reads this is my "sole promoter" Mr. Kevin, but one can dream), but I will somehow come up with themes to keep writing. This will hopefully spark somewhat of a following, and bring Nik back to the cause, maybe I should start a freeNik contribution. But as for TinyArcade, with engineering and work bringing me down, I am more than willing to bring TinyArcade back (regardless of the large following **sarcasm**). Nik on the other hand, is under friend category #8, I have not heard from him or seen him (at least not who I know him to be) in months. He has found himself engulfed in a depression brought on by the job he works and the girl he wastes his time on. Time will takes it's tole and he will see that he needs to play a fucking video game and do what he knows he loves, he was the one that started TinyArcade. Like us and follow the shit out of us, maybe you can bring Nik back. 

Summer Travels #1

This segment that I will start will only last this summer, it's something to keep the reader on their toes since I have no material and am not particularly the best at writing blogs at a constant enough pace that someone who owns a blog should. This segment will entice you with a series of short stories. Short stories of my travels in and out of Boston as I work during college. 

Working part time during college is not a common task, as those who can have their parents shit out tuition tend to party instead of working part time to land a full time position that they have been working at for multiple coops. Not to say that the average person doesn't desire the party scene and not to say that there isn't a tiny part of me that would rather do what I want after classes and relax. Not all of us can pay for a college or housing, and not all of us attend a college that has such a reputation that allows you to be at the receiving end of a happy ending we call employment. And there are even those that either choose to not go to college or simply cannot afford to go to college, which leads us to today's episode of low class debauchery.

Being new to the idea of traveling outside of Boston without a car, I find everything that can happen in the public scene of public transportation refreshing and very entertaining (sometimes very humorous). The idea that two people, both males, bumping into each other after years of never seeing each other, and magically by the goodness of the transportation gods finding themselves in each other's embrace once more (one of them forgot the others name), wildly fascinates me. And even more fascinating is the topic of conversation after semi knowing each other and then finding each other once again. This topic that I speak of is the topic of incarceration.

I have friends, you have friends, the human race is incapable of not having some sort of companionship. Some people have more friends than others, some think that having a large of sum of friends on Facebook is equivalent to having more friends than others and some think their hand fits the need of having a friend, whatever the situation is, we all have friends, some closer than others. But in this situation, they came back together after years apart, knowing each-other from a "cookout" that one of them hosted. To me, the defintion of friend doesn't really apply to their situation, but that didn't stop them from comparing failures. Since I just thoroughly explained the duration of their friendship, you as the reader can understand the best part. The best part (which humored me entirely), is that they could pass the hour they had back together talking about something so degrading as jail time.

Now I've never been to jail, nor do I plan on it, but can this be a common topic of conversation? Does one normally bump into an aquatence and bring up stories of theft, recently having children and spending that time in jail instead of taking care of such children? The way that they had such similar stories to share made it clear that this must be a common instance in American life. This made it seem as though going to jail regularly has lost it's severity. Growing up, being taught to do good and behave was force fed. But this changed everything.

The other guy that wasn't previously in jail recapped to the one who was in jail about how he was recently shot and how the nerves in his leg no longer work and that he can no longer move his foot. He approached such topic with a full demonstration of his foot no longer pivots in it's joint. This topic also seemed as though being shot was not a big deal in the slightest.

Dinner conversation starters must not be my forte.

For today's episode, we addressed the negative and degrading culture that we call lower class America. Stay tooned for more bizarre stories

Friends?

My Opinion On Friends (Sometimes People in General):

 
In every placement, you find yourself with a group of friends, everyone is really close, and in the moment its really good shit. But life trends change; at the age of 19 and older you find that your friends develop common characteristics, as if breaking off into categories.

These categories are as follows:
1) they go away to school and join a frat or sorority and convince themselves that their brotherhood or sisterhood is infact their real group of friends and that drowning themselves in alcohol, drugs and whatever their school can grant from donations, with their "brothers" or "sisters" will last them forever. Conversations always reside in stories of the past, vacationing and time off would rather be spent back at school or continuing school culture where they reside and every aspect of life is wrapped in this aggressive lifestyle, like the impulse to wrap everything in bacon. When school is over, the idea of maturing is never met and becoming a bachelor while supporting your sufficed self-loving girlfriend with three small dogs and a purse makes up for no longer being able to shotgun beers with your brothers.
2) they stay home to doom themselves to a life that they burden onto their parents, they smoke the reefer like its a four course meal and when they're not indulging, theyre preparing a bowl to be smoked before working at your local super market as a professional produce bagger.
3) They are committed to an education, an education that is brought on by a hobby, a focus that they stumbled upon when they were in highschool, the career that to most would be convinced should just stay a hobby. They are so committed to this activity that sleep is drowned by coffee and fast paced drugs, leaving their life on permanent standby. The only contact is permited to the person they're fucking. This lifestyle leads them to convince themselves their career choice will land large sums of money, when in reality the time and materials needed bring them back to live in continuous poverty.
4) They are parents before they even reach the legal age of drinking, all luxuries and spare time gone, community college no longer a reach but a dream. They soak up any story they can from those who didn't produce an unwanted spawn.
5)They have the dream job, they didnt work for any of it but instead had their daddy shit out a job offer, sign the toilet paper and got them a job at his office of law. They are commited to this position, its fabrication and making sure people know how hard they didn't work for it by showing off its outcome. Social gathering only involve others that share in the wealth.
6)They are just successful, the ones that have a life goal, a family in mind, the ones that bought "Life for Dumies" and follow it to the t. No longer do they have time for existing friends. Those positions are given to their family and a salary paying job in the middle of the United States.
7) They were raised into a religion and the older they become, the larger a percent fills up their culture. They blindly follow,become consumed with the culture and social aspect that it brings, and agree to whatever is told, the sheep in a flock.

8) They find their significant "other" at the center of their spectrum and the only person that they have time for. Projects and events normally planned, halt and then seize to exist as they relocate their time to this person they've known for less than a year. This person, that is now in their life, becomes so important that they seem to forget who they've known longer, and your friendship vanishes faster than their genitals which normally housed their self respect. 

Of course it isn't all pessimism, and of course there are the friends that remain. But eventually they are consumed wholely into a culture based on glutton and your presence becomes time threatening. They develop touches of each subject if not all and grant themselves happiness where it shouldn't be found.

What about me, how can I talk so much shit and convince you all that Im not part of any of those groups? Id like to think its because I avoid all of that completely, I think in moderation and I try and satisfy every instance. But who knows, that sounds very egotistical.

I am the epitome of extroversion ("I am Jack's complete lack of surprise"), and view society from a far, intrigued by psychology in a practical sense. I don't get caught up in the bullshit of partying and religion but still admire it for it's causes and effects. I find this evident simply because life lacks purpose with a simple answer.

-Alex