News of the Week

Item: Area man "plots" world domination with $91 tax refund. Leonard Stift of Scituate, MA, assistant zamboni operator at the Wee Willy skating rink situated just outside Scituate, felt his entrepreneurial spirit soar as he softened the ice in decreasingly concentric circles in between periods of the raucous and tightly fought peewee hockey playoff game last saturday. Oblivious to the blood seeping onto the ice from the parents' booster section behind the home goal, Leonard dreamed of what he would do with the $91 dollars in tax rebates that the President of the United States himself had promised would be in his mailbox sometime within the next three years if The President felt like it. First, Leonard mused, he would buy his own zamboni and move to Mexico under a little-known NAFTA provision. There, he would tap into the heretofore unrealized hopes and desires of the indigenous peoples and lead an economic revival that would sweep south, as newly enfranchised zamboni operators rolled over coca fields in decreasingly concentric circles, inspiring everypeople to toil together for the everyweal. And that was just the beginning.... meanwhile, just as the 6-8 year olds glided out to cut fresh lines in the newly virgin rink, a continent away Virginia Smooth looked out over the Pacific and asked her billionaire husband what he would do with his tax rebate, and Mr. Smooth shrugged and replied, "I dunno. Rent some movies, go see a hockey game, whatever..."

crayons in the can

can

do anything

crayons in the hand

can

do something

Sometimes the non-tourist attractions, 

the ones that go unnamed and unnoticed, 

can be more entertaining than the ones people flock to see. 

Here's a sampling from the other side of town:

 Sun's Laundry Expo

Model Tobacco

Nice Crockery

Office Politics

that's me on the fortieth floor
second window from the left
peering out at nothing in particular 
I used my personal politcial power
to get a window office
to see the sun, see other buildings
see people scrambling below
people glad to finally see the sun, any sun
locked within a nippy, chilly, over cooled cubicle
worse than the blackest hole of Calcutta
(except for the cold)
worse than The Snake Pit. Remember the movie?
where Olivia de Havilland found herself 
in an insane asylum 
and couldn't remember how she got there
caught up in the bureaucracy of the institution
the regimentation of the staff
some brutal and ignorant
a few kindhearted
most just killing time
cubicle time