duck-shaped pain

I've found that if you stick to the regular brewed coffee there, you can't really go wrong. It's pretty decent. They also got some new couches � okay, cheap black futons, exactly like my Enormous Black Platform of yore. It's better than what they had before, though.

Late afternoon is a good time to go there � there's a lot of people there. Students from the college, some of them even attractive, people on their way home from work. While I am the latter, I still look like the former � three people asked me if I was studying, even though I was only writing in the journal and reading City of Night.

I didn't expect to see A., though. That was a big surprise.

Listen, my hometown has a lot of freaks. More so than usual � all that radioactive dirt strewn about tends to produce people with larger-than-usual heads and unexplainable urges to carry bricks back and forth over the Fifth Street Bridge, day in and day out. A. is a freak that came from somewhere else, though. We're not responsible for him.

A. was a student at the local college during my last year there, which was about six years ago. He was about 35 at the time, so you can do the math. Older students are not anomalous at all at this school � what made A. stick out was that he lived in the dorms. With the 18-year-old students. He liked to try and hang out with them and be their friends. People there turned suddenly friend-repellent whenever A. was around.

I knew about A. because one of the guys I worked with (he also worked with the two stupidest people ever) occasionally got sucked into hanging out with A.

All you need to know about A.:

- His dorm room was covered with little tiny cups into which he would spit his unwanted tobacco. He never threw any of these away, nor consolidated them into some larger spittoon so that there wouldn't be so many cups around. The room just kept filling up with more and more spit as the year progressed.

- One day in the spring, some girls in A.'s dorm decided to set up some big vats of dye on the lawn and let everyone dye themselves silly. The call went out � bring your dull white cotton garments down to the grass and give them some new life. So people -- normal people -- were out there with t-shirts galore. The came A., proudly bearing the garment he wants to dye. He was beaming, yet others were not. They were grimacing, or whatever the opposite of beaming could be. For A. had brought a big load of his dingy, barely-washed tighty-whitey underwear out to color happy colors. He threw it all into one vat, then another, and on down the line until it is all dyed a weird gray-green color. Then he laid them all out to dry, in such a manner that all the dorm residents, as well as many neighbors and people idly driving by, can see the lawn full of gray underwear. People were unhappy. Very unhappy.

It was weird � A. didn't look any different today than he did back then. I think he's still going to school. I tried not to think about the underwear, but yes, the thought did cross my mind.

[1] Why I Should Create A Glossary, Part Five: I never refer to things by their real names. I am overly euphemism-friendly. I'll think that I refer to something by my names for it a lot, but in actuality, I don't, so it's hard for Average Joe Reader to keep them straight. Horrible Coffee: generally bad coffee shop near the college in town. Tends to feature bad folk music and names some of its drinks after local geologic features (don't try the Uncompaghre Uplift, whatever you do) and the rest of the drinks are merely mispelled. "Americana," anyone? I think what they call "chia" is chai, but I'm frightened to ask, in case it isn't.

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