Lately, it's getting harder and harder for me not to feel the same way. I find myself walking through shopping malls three or four beats faster than the other mall-walkers, or more accurately, mall-dawdlers. I get caught behind people in traffic driving some fifteen miles below the limit, and it's all I can do not to turn into one of those road rage people you hear all about on the six o'clock news. Almost everyone speaks in monotones, cliches, obscenities--they just seem so goddamn trivial.
Yet I would like to think of myself as loving, caring, compassionate and good-hearted. I would like to think I am living up to my reputation as a decent, good man.
You know what set me off yesterday into perhaps the most acidic poem I have ever written? Sitting in Borders, looking around at everyone else in the little coffee bars. They seemed almost stuck in the same mold--in their late sixties and seventies, wearing Hawaiian shirts, golf caps, and their various infirmites like a second skin. Ordinarily I would not notice that so acutely. Yesterday, I shuddered. I could not conceive of such a fate waiting for me. That's why I wrote that poem. I was excited about it at the time. I felt a little like Jack Nicholson. ..
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