I sit in a molded plastic adirondack chair in my driveway. The chair was a gift from my mother-in-law whom I don’t even like. But I’ll use her chair on the condition that from time to time, I fart lecherously on it and allow myself a smug smile. I stare at the street over the top of a smoldering corn-cob pipe. She wouldn’t approve of that either. My smile grows a little more evil.
All around me, A city that never sleeps dances in my ears and before my eyes. A dog barks in the distance. About this time every night, my neighbor across the street embarks on a complicated exercise of shuffling cars out of and into their garage so they may leave tomorrow for work in the right order. Once that dance is complete, he leans against his car and smokes a cigarette, a fellow tobacco user cast outside. We see, but never acknowledge each other.
Overhead jumbo jets execute wide graceful circles to bring themselves into alignment with one of the runways at the airport.
Someone is having an argument. The words are indistinguishable, but the emotions are as clear and as ancient as the institution of marriage.
A hundred years ago, this spot where I sit was nought but scorched desert outside an embryonic metropolis, the provence of desert flora and fauna. Perhaps a lizard or kangaroo rat sat in this spot and looked up at the stars, undiminished by streetlights and smog, and heard only a restless breeze in the leaves of the scrub brush.
The engine shatters the night like the echo of a shout from the industrial revolution. “Hey!” it roars, “I’m still here!”
I wonder, a hundred years from now, when I am dead, who might sit in this spot? What might they hear? What might they see when they look into the sky?
Crickets chirp with wild abandon, hoping to pass their DNA on to that distant future. Behind me in my house, my own two contributions to that future lie sleeping.
A souped-up car races through a major intersection about a quarter of a mile from my house. The engine shatters the night like the echo of a shout from the industrial revolution. “Hey!” it roars, “I’m still here!”
My pipe has burned down. I head back inside. Busy schedule at work tomorrow—my own humble contribution to the “Dance of the City”
About the Author
About the Author: Ian is a 3rd generation native of Southern Nevada, where he lives today in a quiet suburban neighborhood with his wife of twenty years and their two sons. Ian has earned his bread in a variety of occupations including stocking a beer freezer, mixing and pouring concrete, being a roadie for a synth punk band in San Francisco in the early 90's, being a not-very-well-known hard rock DJ, scenic carpentry, theatrical lighting design, theatrical sound design, playing Ku Klux Klan Member #5 in a professional production of "Grover", and writing for an virtually unknown, subversive, underground blog called Radio Free Las Vegas.
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