The Easy Casual Banter Of A Friday Afternoon

For a brief period in my life, I fulfilled my fantasy of girl reporter. I wasn't good at it -- I had an old-fashioned camera that gave me the prop of seriousness without any talent. I didn't weigh much in those days, but my heart had already grown burdened and weary, much like I imagined veteran reporters to be. Since I was the youngest staff member, my boss sent me to the places nobody else wanted to go and those places became me. To note, I dealt with each and every elderly person who barraged the newspaper with phone calls about a story they wanted to tell. I'd often find myself hostage in an airless houses nodding over yellowed newspaper clippings. I interviewed a felon who needed a kidney, a Pizza Hut employee who had been cheated out of a hundred dollars by a sleight of hand artist. The world, so full of treachery, had much need and not a lot of softness.

The guy who had my job before me had taken off for Alaska. Someone peeled his name off his work station with a flourish and said, Someday we'll be doing this to you. It wasn't a place that encouraged nostalgia. Still, I loved its strange particulars, the break room with its ancient vending machine and dinky window looking out at the parking lot, the time cards we'd stamp every morning and night, the easy casual banter of a Friday afternoon. Loved developing photographs late into the evening, bathed in the glow of red light and chemicals, pulling up negative after negative, curious as to what would appear, what I had captured, what had captured me.

Michelle's Spell of the Day
"When people say there is too much violence in my books, what they are saying is there is too much reality in life. " Joyce Carol Oates

Cocktail Hour
Drinking music suggestion: Add It Up Violent Femmes

Benedictions and Maledictions
Happy Friday!