Embrace the Dull

My Day as Told By Mick Jagger

VERSE

Well I woke up this mo'ning,

After some moaning groaning,

An' I lept up from my knees,

(background singers: "Knees, knees")

I shook my head and stared,

At my clock it blared,

Lord save me from my job, please!

("Please, please")

VERSE

Oh, the pussies scratched the door,

Like some whores on the floor,

They were asking for a smack,

"smack"

So I gave 'em some meat,

All red and sweet,

They ate it like I soaked it in crack,

("crack")

CHORUS

Oh, I'm just a mid-day stapler,

I said I'm just a mid-day stapler,

Give me some syrup, honey, I don't mean mapler,

Yeah I'm just a mid-day stapler,

The devil he got me,

Paperclipped and box-weaved,

Makin' me feel like Marla Mapler,

VERSE

The black girls they breathe,

Causing me too seethe,

Watching their breath as it condences,

("steam, steam")

And the spanish girls like to fight,

Making my jeans feel tight,

I love 'em all except during menses,

("heavy days, heavy days")

(Guitar solo)

VERSE

The lady gave me coffee,

Babe, turn my head an' cough me,

I think there might be too much cream,

"Spunk"

But you don't do me no wrong,

You're in my song,

See you later, me and my friend Jim Beam,

"Drunk"

CHORUS

Oh, I'm just a mid-day stapler,

I said I'm just a mid-day stapler,

Give me some syrup, honey, I don't mean mapler,

Yeah I'm just a mid-day stapler,

The devil he got me,

Paperclipped and box-weaved,

Makin' me feel like Marla Mapler,

REPEAT 2X

My day as told by Tom Wolfe

Dave tucked his legs up to his chest, the 300-count sheets never felt particularly luxurious in the evening, but as Helios cruelly sliced through the hazy room, the Egyptian cotton was as close to amniotic fluid as he could remember. 7:15 mocked the clock, something had to be done. The dawn clutter knocked around inside his brain, like a beast swimming beneath icy water, slowly gaining visibility as it approaches the surface, then it rose above the breakers and gnashed into Dave's conciousness,

"Staple, I need to go staple things together. I need to find things that have been previously filed. I need to eat a bagel" Jake clawed at the door of the pre-war brownstone that Dave rented from a shadowy Cuban for $1600 per month. $1600 per month? What was he thinking? He sat on the edge of his bed, scratching what had been an award-winning behind and quickly tabulated his expenses: $120 for the Center Ice Package on cable, $800 for rent, $2.50 a day for coffee. Coffee! $1.25 for peanut M&Ms, $3.00 for pie, $.25 for guilty purchases of the Post, $8.00 for pashminas, $62.00 for student loans and about $360 a month for spider rolls.

He was  hemorrhaging money.

Dave stood up and tweezed his hula-girl boxer-shorts from the waxy folds of fat that formed his once-mighty hamstrings. Jake and Holly's impudent scratching at the door now proved too much to bear, Dave kicked the door and told them to shut up. Liz subsequently made a similar request of Dave. His feet stuck to the parquet, likely installed on the cheap by a building owner keen on avoiding a violation of the tacit East Village no-carpeting f'atwah, and the explicit rule of NYC Housing Code 4 Sec 2, paragraphs 7 and 8.

Cats fed, Liz kissed and Dave adorned from head to foot with Banana Republic, the official outfitter of middle-class white-Manhattan males aged 28 - 38: Black slacks and a print shirt, what they lacked in imagination they made up for in shapelessness.

Come ye, West Indies. Come ye Bengali, Mexicali. Come ye Ghana, Ivory Coast, Sierra Leone. Come to the East Village and wear a paper hat and sell coffee to the over-educated and under-skilled.

Dave, 6'2, slender build, slight almost. He had gained close to 40 pounds since high school and grown about 5 inches. Mercifully as by fourteen his nose, feet and eyebrows had achieved their current size and robustness while the rest of his physique was limited to about 5'3" 110 lbs.

"A carny," teachers suggested to his parents, "I mean, what else?" But it wasn't to be.

Subterranean Homesick Blues chugged into his ears via alabaster headphones connected to the ubiquitous white rectangle which connected to a 20 GB Toshiba hardrive that captured and cataloged the music that made a 4-stop 6 train ride slightly less soul-crushing.

Maggie comes fleet foot
Face full of black soot
Talkin’ that the heat put
Plants in the bed ....butt? bug? belt?

He could never figure out that lyric, Dave made a point to Google it when he got to work.

He turned left on 7th Street to Astor Place, "Crap." he thought to himself. He preferred to walk up 6th, not 7th. The sidewalks on 6th were wider and allowed for more distance between himself and other pedestrians, a width that came in handy when you had a swift gait and walking near people gave you gas. But the Rubicon was crossed, already past 6th he couldn't very well go back, he couldn't appear to have made a mistake and retrace steps in front of Moishe's bakery. Not past the Pomme Fritte stand and its swarthy deliverymen loading impossibly heavy bags of potatoes, not past the stylistically maladroit Kiev Russian restaurant, and certainly not passed the deli where he had once seen Margot Kidder

So it was 7th. He skipped his hand along the azure police stanchions placed outside of McSorley's to restrain the hordes of beer-mongers in town to swill it up in what is dubiously referred to as the oldest operating bar in the city of Manhattan. McSorley's dank fishiness wafted from the floor and walls, treating passersby to beer-stink that got its fetid, rotting start 30 years prior to the war of northern aggression.

Talkin’ that the heat put
Plants in the bed .... but! But with one "T!" Of course. He would confirm this with Google.

On the train to work he reflected on the grand fortune that comes a Boston education. The intellectual opulence from breathing the same air and sharing the same dust with the likes of Elie Wiesel, Saul Bellow, Alan Ricks, Mike Eruzione, Brad Dougherty and Jack Parker. Heavyweights? Obviously. Intellectual titans? Without question. Legends? Time will tell. Why is that Dave can not just alphabetize but do so alpha-numerically? Why can he attach documents to one-other with any one of a wide selection of utilities? Why can he check email with such aplomb?

Giants. He had studied with Giants.

Plants in the bed but. It seemed so obvious now.

My day as told by Ray Carver

Liz and me we woke up at around 8. Liz couldn't sleep on account she says of a dream she had where her heart stopped. That's rough I told her. I put my hand on her leg like I used to, before everything happened, before the accident and before Jake and Holly made everything all crazy. Jake and Holly, those are our cats.

You love those cats more than you love me, I would tease Liz. No I don't she says, and she'd laugh like she did the night we met, at that bar in Boston, the bar we went to when things were easy.

The ugly girl next door played her cello until 10:00. I never liked the cello, more a viola man, just give me a viola, a roof over my head and a glass of Makers with a little milk and a sliver of ice. That's what my dad and me used to drink when I came home from school and we'd shovel the stables and he'd tell me about how mom was before the plant closed down. I told him I wasn't going back to school. Oh yes you are he said. Dad could be as pleasant as a split lip - good enough dad though.

I never did go back to school.

I told Liz goodbye and my ipod and me we got on the train to work. Jake looked at me like a cat does when he knows you lied - Jake can smell it. I knew I told him I would throw the ball. He knew I told him. Since when does a guy have to throw a ball when he said he would throw it? Crazy cat.

The train was a tank of hot. Three black girls were loud and they talked loud and I looked at them out of the corner of my eye. I told myself I wasn't racist, but I just didn't like loud people. That's what I told myself.

Sometimes I wish the train would just head straight into the Hudson - sometimes I wish I had a mug of coffee with a little bourbon, three of those little onions and some Pepsi. Pepsi is what this 2-fingered cook drank that I worked with when I was in school. His fingers always looked like wieners - the little kind that rich people wrap up and eat at parties. Liz will sometimes say, two fingers? he only had one finger, she says, and one thumb. I never knew why she didn't think a thumb was a finger - sure looks likes a finger to me.

You pick your fights though, after what happened with the pony and the fat Chinese girl in Boise - I can't go talking sharp to Liz, cause she'll leave again, maybe this time for real.

I got home at 9 - Liz was drinking an old-fashioned, the sugared rim kind, with a cherry and an orange. She said it reminded her of her uncle Joe, the one who painted the cabin up in the Catskills. Me I had a strawberry malted, made it just like I used to, before the leg came off - I mixed the malted with Dewars and blue curacao and then put the whole darn thing in a pineapple that I had hollowed out on the way home. I put in an umbrella, too.

A pineapple she said, what the heck is with you? She didn't look at me when she said that, though, she was looking somewhere else.