Vignette City 13.

*** ‘Vignette City’ is an ongoing project of daily writing and urban photography ***

“I am a comma splice,” I said. Then I told the Yoda-looking lady at the bodega that I was thinking about buying a Subaru Outback. She rang up my coffee and had nothing to say about my future Subaru. Her bodega did not sell auto parts, only air fresheners shaped like trees that smell like strawberries. “Because it seems like a reliable and good all-around car,” I told her, “All-wheel drive, you know?” She unfurled her reptilian alien finger and her yellowed nail pointed toward the air freshener aisle as if to say that was all she had to offer me.

I join independent thoughts, often incorrectly.

I could sleep in the back of a Subaru Outback, after I buy it and drive it out of the city headed east where the sky gets so big and blue and endless that it just rolls along like that story of the one long endless sheet of paper on which Kerouac wrote On the Road while on a three week bender in 1951. The sky just unfurling like that above me as I’ll cross deserts and sleep on the sides of the roads in the back of my Outback out there in Utah or Wyoming or the Dakotas maybe even. The American outback out there and its wide smattering of stars that are just waiting for me to see them.
I fight back the imposed loneliness of the city by pulling down on myself the voluntary loneliness of the empty roads that will open up wide when I drive east.

I jam together those things which are incongruent.

I can’t possibly afford a Subaru. I paid for that coffee that day using change. I went back to that bodega the other day to ask Yoda how much the air fresheners cost, but I didn’t buy one. I just felt the cellophane between my fingertips, hoping to get a little strawberry smell off of them for free, but that didn’t work. And anyway, trees don’t smell like strawberries. Those are completely incongruous concepts. Each idea is a whole on its own, but they don’t belong together. I couldn’t make them go together. Maybe I could have but Yoda yelled at me that I had to stop touching them if I wasn’t going to buy one. So I left.




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