justnick's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- I just want to bang on the drum all day The mountain sat ominously above him, seeming to stare down, mocking him. Alone at the bottom of the endless peak, he grimaced resolutely. He took in the chaos before him as he grew closer, and the sheer redundancy of it all nearly overwhelmed him. He stared up at the mountain and sighed to himself. "I'm going to get blamed for this." The order of it made no sense in his mind, but he decided to wing it. He threw himself into the choas. He placed, one by one, every shoe on the shelf back into order, only to have the stack replaced as soon as he had finished with it. The entire thing was an excersize in frustration that threatened to overwhelm him. He squeezed his fists so tight that his knuckles went white. Minimum wage did not pay for prozac, he reminded himself, and breathed deeply. Finally, The mountain was gone. It was still in total disorder, and he was relatively certain it would be taken for his fault, but he had taken all he could endure. "Besides," he thought to himself, "Most of it is probably my fault anyway." He triumphantly turned the corner, and attempted to keep the small victory in the forefront of his thoughts. He bent over to sit on his chair, and just as he took his weight off of his feet, he heard the noise. "plak!" The sound of shoes dropping. Shoes, waiting to be put away. Put away so that some sailsman could take them out again and show them to a customer who wouldn't buy them. He attempted to sigh in concesion, but it sounded more to him like a growl. As he turned the corner, he saw a sailsman carrying 13 pairs of shoes. "Chuck, you decrepit old bastard, nobody needs to try on 13 motherfucking pairs of shoes! No one!" He said, gentle and compassionate as a summer's wind. "Go fuck yourself, you little prick. Scum of the Earth." Both knew neither meant anything by the insults. The boy was simply frustrated at his situation, and Chuck because he had done nothing in the last 40 years besides sell shoes and gamble. The boy resigned himself to his duty and set his way up the stairs, hitting his head on a metal pole on the way up, for the third time that week. Then he saw the mountain, grown yet again since he cut it down. New Balance. Nothing but New Balance, and never in the right order. "As long as I live, I swear I will never wear a New Balance shoe." As if to punctuate this, he heard the doorbell ring for the back door. A shipment was here. He ripped open the first box of many and saw that red 'N' staring back, smiling a wry smile at him. A pebble that carried the promise of an avalanche. His eye began to twitch. Suddenly, he heard a familiar voice. "Hey, Nick, what's up?" It was Stefano, the other stock boy here at Tony's shoe store, deathtrap since 1937. He smiled down at Nick, who wanted to kill him for not being as sweaty and dirty as he. "Oh, not too much," he replied, "Got a new shimpent in. More New Balance." At the look on Stefano's face, which must have matched his own a few seconds earlier, Nick went on. "I'm done for the day. have fun with that." "It's a five o'clock world when the whistle blows, and no one owns a piece of my time." Excelsior. 11:12 p.m. - 2003-07-24 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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