a hot drip on melting vinyl

It wasn't waking up in the bathtub that instigated the trauma the doctors would later tell me was considered "going into shock", or more technically that my blood pressure had suddenly plummeted like an oversized watermelon being launched out of a speeding vehicle rambling along a mountain highway at the precise moment it rounded the bend so that the trajectory of the melon would send it perfectly careening into the adjacent canyon to its tragic death. Liquified rind, seed, and splatter. A watermelon smoothie, action star style. No, it wasn't even the mound of ice that had melted just enough to lock me into the yellowing ceramic tub like Han Solo in carbonate that sent me to the state of paralyzed histeria. It wasn't even....wait I am completely rambling, let me back up.

It had been a relatively standard day in the urban metropolitan traffic capitol of the country. Okay fine its actually second, but sit on I-90 in mid July with five lanes of horn happy maniacs stretching East and West as far as the exhaust will allow you to see, and I guarantee you will swear that whomever the omnipotent "They" is that decided Chicago was second on the list of congestion culprits was huffing glue the day they performed that so-called study. So, to avoid the inherant frustration associated with the modern marvel of human transport that is the automobile, I had recently taken to riding my bike while reveling in the friendly confines of city life. Cars, my friends, are for the country and suburbs.

While pedaling down North Avenue admiring the way extremely large people liked to walk their extremely tiny dogs along the sidewalk, I suddenly found myself sailing face first over my handle bars into the driver side window of a 2005 black Jaguar XJ. The model of the vehicle I actually determined while peeling my now scraped and bleeding torso out from underneath the driver side door where I had sort of half rolled and half spilled under after my skull had reduced the window to miniscule shards just sharp enough to find themselves lodged all around my cranium. (The doctors were still pulling pieces out three months later, after the bathtub incident).

Surprisingly the crash didn't scramble all of the synapses bouncing about my brain, so I was at least able to stand and survey the damage I had just incurred, not only on myself, but on the poor unsuspecting Jaguar. Though I could already tell my body was going to have some significant black and blue marks, my head was obviously the greater of my concern. What started as a thin line of blood gave way to somewhat of a trickle running down my forehead, splitting into tributaries that banked around my eyes off my brow. Somehow my bleeding face didn't seem to strike the driver as anything less ordinary than a sneeze. She was just staring at me, a look of pure disgust adorning her smug features. The tightness of her chartruse painted lips and the blackness of her big bug-eyed sunglasses gave her the air of a pissed off wax replica of an even more pissed off top level executive who just had some dumbass kid smash into her brand new Jaguar head first. Or that just could have been the look she gave people when they had in fact sneezed on her. Well, I was definately guilty of the first offense.

While she stared at me through the glasses I tried to shake the cobwebs from my head and come to grips with the situation at hand. My first move was the wipe the blood out of my eyes, but as I did this I ended up splattering some into her freshly straightened, trimmed, and highlighted, blond hair. Now she looked like a pissed off wax replica of a pissed off lioness with chicken pocks ready to promptly tear me to pieces. As her internal rage finally bubbled over she shoved open the door. Unfortuantely my bike was still half lodged underneath the car, so the door flying open only further entagled my now mangled bike and her scratched and dented driver side door.

Psycho Bitch: "What the fuck is wrong with you? Couldn't you see me? I was already in the middle of the fucking road waiting to make a left, and you just run right the fuck into my car? Are you fucking retarded?"

Me: "Don't worry about me. I'm okay. I think my brain is bleeding, but I'll be just fine."

Psycho Bitch: "You're obviously not hurt enough to NOT be a smart-ass."

Me: "Look lady, I don't know what the fuck just happened. I was riding...and then I was under your car."

Psycho Bitch: "I'm calling the fuckin' cops."

Just then a cop sauntered up. Apparently in all the commotion a passer by had called.

Cop: "Calm down ma'am I am a police officer. Unit 20 to dispatch, we need an ambulance down at North and Clybourn. Son I need you to please sit down on the sidewalk over here while I ask you some questions."

...And so it went on like that for several hours. Cops asked each of us what happened, we gave our sides of the story, and then I was carted off in an ambulance to Children's Memorial Hospital where they treated me for a concussion and multiple lacerations from the window glass.

That, my friends, was how I was first introduced to Dr. Angeline Lazar...or as you know her ...Psycho Bitch.

wallet lojacks and older brothers with two-way television

read this and you might cry...but tis important nonetheless

we are but data

as seen by the pupils of the powerful

and though they "represent" us

they don't know us

and this is how they try to..........................................I See You!!!!!!!!

keyless cuffs and a loosened shackle

one less thought pile for stepping in. one less obligation. am obliged for the time though. and so it goes....

what it wasn't

it wasn't the sound of garlic breath, or even the whisper of a mosquito mumbling its last rites before being splattered on the skin of its victim (the agressor then become the agressed upon). it wasn't the sound of pregnant air or of overstuffed molecules. it wasn't even the sound of sound necessarily, but rather closer to maybe the sound of a well oiled bicycle pedal rotating under the pressure of synthetic rubber soles (could they also be rubber souls?). I don't really even think that that that that that is the elusive sound either. maybe it was actually closer to a wet sigh adhering itself to fly paper, or possibly the soundwaves elicited by the swallowing of underwater sea water at extreme depths (what would the wave then be in China?). but none of this is right...maybe it...maybe I just can't descibe it.