HIT IT
(I am hitting post more frequently today because I lost a (Pulitzer Prize winning I'm sure) post yesterday because my session had timed out.

Anyway, the plate itself had exploded all over the rotating glass plate and the bottom of the Wal-Mart bought microwave.

I was still really hungry, exploding soy nugget debacle and all, so I picked the slivers of blue plate off the soy nuggetts and ate them with some ranch dressing.

Earlier that day, at the MIT copy shop - my old work friend, slightly neaurotic, had called from St. Petersburg where he was staying in his Grandmother's apartment he had inherited.

"Dude, how many bedrooms you got now, one or twoooo"

"Uhhm, two"

"One car still?"

"Uh, C got a used Subaru so we have two now."

"Oh shit - you surpassing me - me living the life of a pathetic 21 year old, unable to get woman to marry me. Fuck dude, what is waiting for me when I return, fucking tell me that."

"Uhm, hold on a second D ........ That will be $1.67, cash or card"

My fingers danced over the cash register as I continued to hear his tales of woe. The woman he had been seeing for a year would not marry him. I thought about the 4 years (97-2000) that we had hung out almost 3 or 4 times a week, going to bars in Cambridge and Boston, screaming along to his rap music, or looking at motorcycles or 'keeping it low' while taking a hit from his owl screw together metal pipe - still hanging on to the college lifestyle for a few years after college. Or actually until I was 27. Or 28.

The years were not really good or bad - they were just sort of there. He would always ask me what to do about his strife with working and with women and I would say, "Get a good prescription and see a good counselor (half jokingly)"- but his pathologies were playing themselves out, across the Atlantic at .60 a minute 3 years later.