Odds And Ends.

I make love every time I enter the State. Street subway on the inbound redline. Every time I come back out I am born again. My most fervent wish right now is to be insane so that I can see demons screaming at me on the subway walls. I should have joined the Marines, gone to Iraq, and acidentially killed a pregnant teenager when I had the chance.

In North Platte there was this share-a-bike program. People would donate their old bikes to the program and they would be left in various racks around time. I used them a couple of times, terrible bikes mostly. The idea was based on similar programs in Boulder, Portaland, some Bay Area suburbs, etc. There were of course cases of permenent borrowing in these places and it was expected that the same would happen in North Platte. Well, you can say whatever you want to say about Boulder and Portland; they don't have the meth problem that North Platte does. There were never more than two bikes availible at any of the ten or so program racks set up around town. Share-a-bike lasted three weeks. Mind that these were the most bent-spoked, rusted-powder blue, brakeless recumbent tandem pieces of shit imaginible that people were stealing. The smooth talking ones got two eight balls.

"The Man who Stole from Tom Osborne."


I met Lynn Finney. He tried his "car broken down on the way to Columbus" hustle on me, told me he had been a Husker and all that. Added some flavors to it, like how he had walked to campus from Shoemaker's. He asked me for seventy five dollars as cooly as one asks a stranger for the time. Twice, once in December of 06 and again around October of 07. A couple months after that he tried to hit me up while I was in a moving car, my own, accelerating for the green light at 16th and R. Whether he even vaguely recognized my face I don't know. Dying of cancer and still can't quit the rock? Horribly pathetic. I really did like that guy.