through baker where we were filling up at chevron at two dollars and three cents a gallon. i was waiting for chris to come back from the mini market and waking up from a really tasty nap when i saw a little brown bird zip through the gale and then stop right on the top post of a chain link fence that slowly collected plastic bags and dirty tumbleweeds.
a few of his buddies hauled ass at him and landed within the fence and just as quickly they darted off, all three of them. maybe to florida.
if they were smart.
the crows weren’t doing as well, they were a much bigger target and not as nimble in the torrent of hate.
one found a lamp post, dirty from bird crap. the smooth aluminum top wasn’t much to get a good grab on with his claws, but he faced the wind and tucked his huge black wings behind him and just took it.
his pals glided over the desolate plains, trying to hover by simply allowing the wind to push its beleaguered open old wings, but after a few seconds it just blew the damn birds back a good twenty yards and the crows retreated into the dust where they fucking belonged.
chris came back with diet vanilla coke for her and a regular red label coke for me.
she also returned with a hersheys chocolate bar for me and several tootsie pops for her.
i believe she also had some now or laters tucked away, privately, but there are no secrets on the road, nor should there be.
we pulled out of the chevron and got back on the fifteen but some fucker rear ended a lexus so the traffic was backed up for miles on the two lane highway, the only road back to hollywood.
me and chris crept through the desert and plotted peoples deaths, not forgetting our own, of course.
chris is the glue that holds together one of the last dot coms in america.
perfect in nearly every way.
embarrassed that i couldn’t even get fourteen people last week to flow me ten bucks so i could buy a car, i tried to dazzle her with a money making scheme so that she’d lust me again.
i told her, it would be a magazine directed squarely at high school kids and it would be called
high
magazine. she said she didn’t like the name because it reminded her of high times and i said precisely.
i said teens don’t want anything that’s actually meant for them
what they want is something that’s underground, mysterious, and over their parents heads.
there would be columns on sex drugs and rock, of course, packaged sexy, but not dirty and accompanied with text that might be considered surprisingly conservative.
“high magazine does not condone sexual relations between teens. use high school to learn how to kiss, you filthy little tramps.”
written across the bare midriff of my girlfriend christina aguilera, who we were listening to off the hot hits radio station barely coming in.
but since teens have sex, and not even the coolest magazine could get in the way of a willing cheerleader and a pimply faced sophomore, each issue of high will come with a condom, ribbed, for her pleasure.
there would be a centerfold each month that would have a fold out of the student of the month.
now the student of the month, many months would be nerds who got to go to the dance with some hot piece of ass, or the kid who invented something ridiculously amazing. but sometimes it would have a picture of some big burnout who got the first B of his 6 year high school career.
those things should be celebrated.
there would be a big science fair special issue, and obviously one for prom, and a back to jail double issue. there would be columns like “sixteen books you should read before you turn sixteen” by brad pitt, and “why n*sync is evil” by courtney love.
there would be recipes on how to make homemade doritos, reasons that raving is really something you should wait to do till college (because maybe it might be dead by then), and pages and pages of tiny pictures of kids’ braces.
the condoms would stir up enough controversy to make it an overnight success but the snotty attitude and older brother tone of all-knowningness zero bullshit would distance it from the others.
oh, that’s right, there are no others.
theres tiger beat and teen beat or jane or us or people or teen people, but all of those are about celebs, not about the real kids.
and none of those talk about recycling, or teen pregnancy, or why weed should be legal (but illegal for teens), or why teenage girls who spend more than five minutes on makeup are wasting their time.
chris liked the idea of the magazine but still didn’t like the name.
i told her, kids need to have something that they can like so much they would want to buy the tshirt, a name that is optimistic and happy but a little bit naughty and defiant.
every person ends up having to go to blah blah high
finally theres something decent to read on the bus.