PJ Swift

Thanks Pop

Thanks Pop, for coming to our crappy side of town and going to the best restaurant that no one around here can afford, and bringing along your two young princess daughters and your young pampered wife and ordering everything from the menu that they thought they wanted but only picked at anyway as you chowed down several courses, washed with beer, before driving a couple hundred meters from the parking lot, through the closed pedestrian zone, nudging woman with baby carriages and the elderly leaning on their walking sticks and whoever else was walking in your way, with your ladies preciously buckled up in the shiny SUV, staring at their girly-bedazzled latest-edition smartphones, so that before you all sped off across the country to your weekend resort, you could ring me up on my clunky old fold-up to come running down to the sidewalk to pick up a plastic bag from that over-priced restaurant full of your leftovers so that I would not go hungry and actually have something to eat over the weekend. Thanks, Pop, and bon appetit.

Layer after layer

The city has layers upon layers and layers within layers. It is ancient but ever changing, as time and age keep changing. Each new phase of modernity doesn't just bring the new but a change in what is now old and revered and how it is viewed and preserved. The new may get a chance to grow old itself, or simply disappear, fading away forever in future iterations of modernity. Because the city is so old, it is the most reliable and constant city. Because the city is so old, it is the most changeable city, churning, mixing, evolving with layer after layer.

Yelling

In his dream S. was yelling so loudly at his neighbor that he woke himself up, finding himself mumbling in a rage. He paused to gather his senses and sat in silence save for his own heavy breathing. But now there was a pounding on his wall.  His neighbor was angry at the disturbance, yelling at S. to keep it down for f*'s sake. He was so distraught, he continued yelling, causing other neighbors to cry out as well.  At this point, S. woke up again, in a cold sweat, silent, trying to regain his bearings.  He cried out, yelling.