alfred im cold but you've sprung a leak

i drew a smile and two dot eyes on him and called him alfred, despite it being red

“You see the books, they are your best friend.”

What with the dank-must carpet and these pissed-upon trial rooms, with the rows of discarded garments from those rows of all the same tiny houses. So tightly packed that they fall off the hanger and do not reach the trod upon foul floor.
Nothing here reeks of its previous life, as the shoppers are mostly far too dull to think beyond their own. These once freshly pressed products purchased by people wanting to create themselves, as free agents (albeit unknowingly enslaved to the whims of their pathological consumption).
They cannot stop that their saturday soccor trophies will tarnish and that their poly-blend polar-fleece sloppy-joes will ball up.
They cannot stop to realize if ever there was value, the where and the why and the how of it.
But, if it’s no longer wanted (because it never was needed) then they can feel good about themselves by giving it to charity.

It’s different when I approach the bookshelves though. Yes, we have Foetal Attraction, the bibbles that Gideon keeps leaving in random places (hospital rooms, school rooms, waiting rooms, changing rooms) Bridget Jones’s own personal diary, celebrity gossip rags from the late nineties, microwave cooking guides, the Atkins diet revolution.

“You see the books, they are your best friend.”

But we have this boy.

The boy was chubby and his barely joined hare lip glistened with mucous. His father was dressed well, not sharply, but wisely, in browns of varying textures. His accent, as he said it, was thick, but his tone, so gentle.
The boy’s eyes, behind he coke bottle thick glasses, one was of the darkest brown, the other, not seeing, of grey pearlescence.

I saw him later in the store whimpering between the racks of clothes; the Kramer shirts and the Lad shirts, the women’s jumpers and the women’s skirts.

“Daddy, where are you?”

The post office at the university where I work is small and ad hoc, and for this I like it. I lament the morphing of Post Offices into Post Shops. In the latter you can buy novelty plaques, figurines and fold-up picnic tables, the kind of cheap ugly gifts that no one would ever treasure, and which surely break the first time they came in handy.

-Vanessa Berry

Baudrillard goes to Vegas

"
The secret affinity between gambling and the desert: the intensity of gambling reinforced by the presence of the desert surrounding the town. The air-conditioned freshness of the gaming rooms, as opposed to the radiant heat outside. The challenge of all the artificial lights to the violence of the sun rays. Night of gambling sunlit on all sides; the glittering darkness of these rooms in the middle of the desert. Gambling itself is a desert form, inhuman, uncultured, initiatory, a challenge to the natural economy of value, a crazed activity on the fringes of exchange. But it also has a strict limit and stops abruptly; its boundaries are exact, its passion knows no confusion. Neither the desert nor gambling are open areas; their spaces are finite and concentric, increasing in intensity toward the interior, toward a central point, be it the spirit of gambling or the heart of the desert - a privileged, immemorial space, where things lose their shadow, where money loses its value, and where the extreme rarity of traces of what signals to us there leads men to seek the instantaneity of wealth.
"