Making a Mess Out of Order

I'm waiting in WECARE this afternoon.

I finished my book, Just Kids by Patti Smith, close it gingerly and rest it on my lap. I glance at my watch. I've been waiting for an hour. There is a wide screen television in front of the moderately packed waiting room, showing MS. DOUBTFIRE. Wow, how fast we age. Robin Williams and Sally Fields look so young. Fortunately for me, it's going off. I smile. Another movie comes on, MS. CONGENIALITY, with Sandra Bullock. A lot of Ms' today. I watch it. It comes on, it plays and then it goes off. I look at my watch. Over two hours in this waiting room. I look around and there are nothing but tired faces. Men, women, children, Black, White, Latin, old and young. Another movie comes on, but I don't pay it much mind.

"Mr. Hobobob?" I look at the reception desk. There is a young woman there waving me over. I stand and cross the room to her. She smiles: "Mr. Bob, please excuse me for the wait. I have another client and it will take me just twenty minutes. Okay?" I nod, sure. I return to my seat and try to watch another movie. About an hour later I hear my name called. I rise again and meet the young woman and together we go through a door and stroll through a rat's warren of cubicles to her desk. I sit down and we go over my data. It takes about twenty minutes to answer her questions, review WECARE's findings and re-schedule my return. It takes her twenty minutes with me, and an whole fucking hour with the person before me? What the fuck? Were they air-lifted in?

I gratefully walk out of the building and take the Way back home. The next day, I decide to go and see MACGRUBER at the local cinema about fifteen blocks from here. I get to the theater and MACGRUBER is gone. It was there for less than ten days! Was it that fucking bad? Now they had MARMADUKE. What the hell? You're telling me that more people will come to watch a cartoon dog over a naked man with a stalk of celery up his ass? Shit. I saw the other movies at this theater so I decide to head downtown another fifteen blocks to the next theater. I'm interested in nothing there, but there seems to be a little interest in me to watch KILLERS. I like gunfights and explosions. I really do. What good is a show without a little gunplay or bright, smokey, debris throwing explosions. I really like it when shit falls from the sky and lands on other shit, like cars, vending carts, movie marquees, shit like that.

The show will start in an hour and a half. What the fuck am I going to do for an hour and a half? I decide to walk back home and then to walk back, all the while staring at the plumage. I stroll home, and when I hit 79th street something caught my eye. Down the street going East stood a tall, brick reddish brown building, like an imposing behemoth on the horizon. What the fuck is that? I stop in the middle of the street and stare. Can that shit be the American Museum of Natural History? It just might be. I walk onto the sidewalk and stop to marshal my thoughts. I haven't been to the Museum of Natural History since I was a teen. I ABSOLUTELY LOVE that place. Fuck the movie. I'm going in.

I strike off in that direction, closing the distance between myself and the building. Upon entering the park surrounding the structure, I notice that it's nondescript. What building is this? I walk around, looking for clues and meet up with a tall, wide flight of stairs that I presumed went to the entrance. Nope. Instead it opened to a cement park with a water fountain to the right, creating a river on the left as it geyersed water. I walk the length of the river to the other side of the park to find myself trapped at the end of a high balcony, with the park grounds far below. Hmmm. There is a glass structure, a building, faceted with windows and people milling around inside. Not far is a door and I grab the handles and pull, but they do not budge.

On the other side of the man made river is another set of doors. I wonder if that's the entrance into the building. I think for a moment and then wade across the river to the other side, pulling up my pant legs and stepping gingerly across. I try the doors on the other end...no dice. I survey the cement park on this side of the river, and at a distance is another entrance. This one open and a woman striding through, meeting up with two security guards at the threshold. Wow. Did they see me swim the river? Am I going to catch shit if I go and ask them a question? What the Hell. I stride up to them. Hey, guys, is this the American Museum of Natural History? "Yeah, bub," one of the guards says. Is this the entrance? "Yeah, bub."

I stroll in and the other guard points down to a flight of descending stairs. I walk down, and around and enter into a high, wide atrium filled to the max with tiny, screaming humans. Midget people running amok with their teachers and parents running behind them. There must have been a million and a half of these noise makers. Hot damn. I cover my ears and approach a kiosk where you can buy a ticket. I press a few buttons on the screen and find out that the cost of an adult ticket is sixteen dollars. All I have on me is twenty. Sixteen fucking dollars. That's a fucking quart of vodka. Oh, just to let you know, I generally compare costs of anything to the amount of alcohol it buys. It helps me put things into perspective.

Fuck, the movie is only going to cost me six dollars. The popcorn, five. Both fucking less than one ticket to the museum. I frown. I really would have liked to have gone. What happened to those days of my youth where you walked in, and the tickets cost twelve bucks, and if you couldn't afford it, you paid what you could? I was thinking that I could get in today for six dollars. Obviously not going to happen. I gratefully leave the sound chamber of screeching children, glad that I never reproduced. Standing in the park outside of the museum, now what? The movie? Yeah. I look at my watch and notice that I have time to walk all the way back and make the film just before it starts.

Shit, popcorn in theaters now ain't what it used to be. I pay five fifty for the smallest size of stale, out of a bag, popcorn that's slightly warm. I remember back in the days where five dollars used to get you a fucking bucket of freshly popped popcorn. I mean, it was even hard talking to the counter person because the fucking popcorn machine was going nuts, popping popcorn. Now, they scoop the shit out of a heating troth and hand it to you. I pour butter over the popcorn to give it a taste other than that of toilet paper and salt it liberally. I like salt on my popcorn. What I hate is to sprinkle salt on top of it, and then after you eat through the initial salt layer, you're stuck with the rest....stale, salt-less popcorn. I can't stand that.

So, I take a napkin, open it, pour a liberal amount of salt into the center of it, and then fold the ends upon the center to make it a packet of salt. Then I stroll in and watch the movie. As I eat through layer after layer of popcorn, I salt it from the packet. Its a fun movie with Ashton Kutcher and Katherine Heigl. Two amazingly beautiful people living amazingly beautiful lives. I watch the movie, dreaming of their life, but really I enjoy the shootouts. Maybe others might like to get lost in the lifestyles of the rich and famous, but me? I like shooting at the lifestyles of the rich and famous. I nod, an explosion within the first fifteen minutes of the movie. I think I'm going to like this.

I leave the theater and head back home. It begins to drizzle. I really don't care. I do a little light food shopping and head upstairs. Coming out of the building is Igor. "Hey, Hobobob!" I wave at him, hey Igor. "Hey, Hobobob, do you have something for me?" Oh yeah, his hundred dollars. Nope. I have no money. He nods, obviously disappointed, but hell, he gets free Internet from me. If he leans on me for the money, I'll starve to get it to him, and go upstairs and lock out his laptop from my router. If he comes up to ask me to reconnect his Internet connection, I'm going to tell him that It'll cost him a hundred dollars to reconnect him.

I'm a bastard, I know. But I'm giving him something that he would otherwise have to pay for, for free. You can't find it in your heart to cut me some slack? I shake my head. I get my mail and once again Social Services has cut my benefits off, stating that I failed to make it to an alcohol abuse appointment on the second of June. I nod. I went to that appointment. I have my confirmation papers from the examiner, and the results of the review. How did Social Services screw this up? Now, to re-instate my benefits, I'll have to call them for a conference to explain their error. Nice.

Very nice.

The shadows creep across the walls, the sun gradually sets. My room dims, but I don't turn on the lights. I just sit there, on my bed, staring at a face on my laptop screen. The day is finished.

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