Bruce’s Neighborhood

Occasionally in life, one is faced with the necessary reality of coping.  Coping with anything through any means.  The mechanism I prefer to utilize at the moment is coping through recognition of absurdity.  I work at a gift shop called SURPRISE!  Not an ideal job but certainly not torturous either.  Absurdity seems to surround me.  For example, I answer the telephone at work with the following, "Surprise! This is Megan!  How can I help you?"  miniMOVIES, specifically, have developed as an outlet for the expression of absurdity around me.  I have not solidified an "artist's statement" for this medium.  Nor do I give them much thought in preparation or post-production.  They are brief moments of absurdity.  And that is all.  I hope you can find as much joy in their existance as I have. 

If I were homeless, I would definitely sleep in the tube slide at Demon’s Landing.   The sandbox playground it rests within is set upon Tampa Bay.  Not the most spectacular Bay but a solid representative of one.  Gusty winds rustling the dried palm leaves overhead and whipping up the water around the rock jetty and the Pier.  Seagulls sit along the seawall, facing in the same direction, keeping their bodies streamlined in the wind.  The slide on the playground is a highlight of this setting.  Sit in the tube and the wind disappears.  Every color turns to yellow-orange.  The bright blue sky pokes out of the top, the sandy ground a fluffy white below, only seen in the brief glimpses outside the protective tube.  This is where I would sleep, if I were homeless. 

The wind just shut my door, forcefully upon me.  The definition of gusty revealed.

 I say, “I really like the sunbathing seagulls along the seawall in the summer sun.”  YEAH!  That was a tongue twister! 

I’m really lucky.  I need to remember that.  I am sitting in a beautiful park, doing whatever I want in the world, on a Tuesday around noon.  I could be sitting at a job worrying about the job, or I could be sitting right here.  I like it here over the alternative.  Now all I have to worry about is where to go next…nowhere for the moment. 

The seagulls are going to pester the couple sharing their lunch break on the water.  I think I just saw Santa on summer vacation: Hawaiian shirt, fat belly, camera dangling around the neck, big fluffy white beard.  If I were Santa, I would take a picture of this scene on my summer vacation.  I can see a sailboat gliding by in the distance.  The waves dramatically splash in the framed image. 

If this couple sitting in front of me on the seawall knew what kind of an image they were portraying to me merely by existing where they are in the moment, they might want me to record it for them so that they could share the memory of this moment for the future.  It’s picturesque. 

Wow, I can get surprisingly good internet here.  If I were a hobo, this is where I would get the best wifi connection. 

 I just saw Santa again; for a brief second.  He’s so elusive sometimes. 

The Pier is really colorful.  I think I’ve just figured out the key to their aesthetic marketing scheme.  It’s all about looking bright.  It glows and changes colored lights at night.  There are solid blocks of color around the 2^nd floor outside windows and even the bright blue porta-potties kind of fit into the color scheme. 

“Young people, Lord.  Do they still call it infatuation?  That magic ax that chops away the world in one blow, leaving only the couple standing there trembling?  Whatever they call it, it leaps over anything, takes the biggest chair, the largest slice, rules the ground wherever it walks, from a mansion to a swamp, and its selfishness is its beauty.  Before I was reduced to singsong, I saw all kinds of mating.  Most are two-night stands trying to last a season.  Some, the riptide ones, claim exclusive right to the real name, even though everybody drowns in its wake.  People with no imagination feed it with sex—the clown of love.  They don’t know the real kinds, the better kinds, where losses are cut and everybody benefits.  It takes a certain intelligence to love like that—softly, without props.  But the world is such a showpiece, maybe that’s why folks try to outdo it, put everything they feel onstage just to prove they can think up things too: handsome scary things like fights to the death, adultery, setting sheets afire.  They fail, of course.  The world outdoes them every time.  While they are busy showing off, digging other people’s graves, hanging themselves on a cross, running wild in the streets, cherries are quietly turning from greed to red, oysters are suffering pearls, and children are catching rain in their mouths expecting the drops to be cold but they’re not; they are warm and smell like pineapple before they get heavier and heavier, so heavy and fast they can’t be caught one at a time.  Poor swimmers head for shore while strong ones wait for lightning’s silver veins.  Bottle-green clouds sweep in, pushing the rain inland where palm trees pretend to be shocked by the wind.  Women scatter shielding their hair and men bend low holding the women’s shoulders against their chests.  I run too, finally.  I say finally because I do like a good storm.  I would be one of those people in the weather channel leaning into the wind while lawmen shout in megaphones: ‘Get moving!’”

-Love, Toni Morrison