Originally Posted Sunday, February 17, 2013
I went to the athletic club yesterday to work on my youthfulness, then went to the diner to work on the other. There were very few customers when I came, and the waitresses were being lazy. One sat a few stools down from me hunched over a bowl of what looked to be beef stew eating like a prisoner. She is a dark haired, dusky-skinned hispanic girl who last year was young and thin and who now is young and plump. She has grown to look like the other, older waitresses whose stomachs strain against the buttons of their waistbands, whose legs are compressed by the legs of their pants. You can see an awareness of the fact in her face that is losing its softness with the strain of ignoring the awareness like the stretching of a flag. There are patrons, though, who flirt with her, working men with wives who are older or those with no wives at all. Her face comes back to life then, but at the counter, hunched over the bowl of stew, the face was dead.
After breakfast, I went next door to the CD shop and listened to some music. I was listening to a CD by Holly Williams when a man and a girl walked in. They were dressed somewhat alike in jeans and flannel shirts. Even their shoes were of the same hue. They looked like a father and a daughter, but something in the way they moved made me think that this was not so. She had hair like a dirty blond Joan Jett with some red spots on her face. She was thin in an un-atheletic way, her tight jeans revealing her small butt and knocked knees. From behind, I noticed the man's haircut was hiding some baldness, cut long on top and swept back, the sides and back cut very short in a strange old man hipster way. I watched them waiting for a clue, waiting for them to touch or look at one another in a tell-tale manner, but she kept glancing up at me so that I had to look away.
When this song came on, I felt like I was in a Sam Shepard short story, or rather, the vignettes he positions that way. It doesn't sound the same this morning, though. Perhaps you have to have been standing in a record store after breakfast in the diner wearing headphones while you watched a young girl in tight jeans picking through the jewel cases wondering what she was.
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