i should be more tired than this. sleepless night, not air conditioned, under the unpredictable drones of the BQE. a productive trip to the 181 yielded several new snoopy t-shirts, but a trip to another post office yielded a money-making transaction with some smart young girls who saw the long, slow-moving line at the post office and then saw that i had just bought 2 sheets of stamps from the automated postal center machine, and one of them offered me $5 for 10- stamps. i cleared 60 cents on the deal! but it was not about that. they just seemed like smart kids who saw that 60 cents was a small price to pay for avoiding the glacial USPS line. like a lot of people they are disenfranchised from buying stamps at a lot post offices now because, being young people, they do not have credit or debit cards. you can not buy stamps or other products at the automated postal centers with cash, only cards. and even if they accepted cash i sense that a lot of people fear these automated mahchines, or do not trust them, and if that is true then i can not say that i blame them. in fact, as i went through the motions of buying stamps at this machine i felt like an authority, a postal authority to whom others asked curious questions about what that thing could do. still, no one else touched it, and i rarely have to wait behind even one person when using that thing.

i had to hurry to the post office when i realized that i had to pay quarterly estimated taxes. duh. i am self-employed, and m supposed to pay quarterly on what i guess my tax liability will be at years end. i am lately choosing what word to use to describe my livelihood. “freelancer“ is not accurate, since i have no clients and i do not get hired and fired with the regularity of a contractor/freelance person. “slelf-employed“ is the irs designation but that sounds too boring, and evne a little sketchy. “business owner“ is close to score, while “entrepreneur“ is good for a laugh. i pay little mind to my “professional“ status or its implications. i have no title, no need for a title, i am just me, and this is what i do. this. and that.

Steak for dinner. steak, fries, and shrimp salad. ohyeah.

i had a fllow-up/addenda to add to something i posted to the /1 part of this site, and now i cna‘t remember. oh, right, regarding the man waiting for the q45 and how i thought i‘d never be able to take my eyes off him, take my stare away, and yet i did, as always, lifting him from the idle fascination of a passing character to where he belongs, into the lofty realm of my mental reflections, my assayings, my self-righteous dismissions. hah, that‘snot a word, is it? dismission. it is now. i have been noticing my body language, specifically my facial and cranial tics which erupt in congress with my haughty, ugly condescensions. i coined a new term for this sense of aboveness: Interview Mode. i do it, i have seen others do it, when a topic of conversation sounds like something from which i can draw upon my vast worldly experience to supplement and enrich those who ignorantly introduced the subject into conversation i simply being speaking, soliloquy-style, litany-like, as if Charlie Rose lobbed a discussion point my way, a quasi-question or questionoutright intended to make me look interesting, designed for me to respond with my fascinating best. there is no Charlie Rose here. ther eis only me, only the others i see do this, only those who make the conversatoin their own by assuming they had been asked interview-style questions and, calmly folding their hands and allowing others to gather ‘round, delivering introspective and penetrating replies to the imagined questions.

there‘s a scene from “The King of Comedy“ that comes to mind…

this weekend i noticed how similar bob schiefer‘s voice is to that of charlie rose. i never see either of these men any more, i only hear them on the radio. charlie rose lurches in my mind like a hairy-browed boomerang, while bob schiefer is but a crabby, mush-mouthed talking bobblehead from the epoch-in-a-soundbite gasbag era.

a drag-race type of vehicle just roared past and was followed, coincidentally I assume, by an ambulance with its sirens ablazing.