flava of love

Um, so I am writing a blog now. I never saw this coming. I wonder if anyone will ever read it... If you do you must tell me. Fan mail may be sent to me care of Kathleen Keefe of the Lowell Keefes. Well, where shall I begin, MySpace minions? How was my day, you ask? It was a pleasure and a delight, thank you.

I began my day by drinking a large iced coffee and proceeded to waste over two hours watching Flava Flav's reality show. This turned out to be not a waste of time, but rather an alarming insight into the ethnography of a really fucked-up household. A grad student in the social sciences, in my opinion, must never take a break from learning about the human condition. I went for a walk in the state park and cleared my head. Flava had given me a lot to think about and I really needed some time alone, away from the troubles of the material world. There was an amazing mist over the swamps and all the baby pine trees are starting to grow.

On the way home I was listening to Simon and Garfunkel's "Only Living Boy in New York" and had one of those "I fucking love LOWELL" moments. I was stopped at a traffc light forEVER and I had a perfect view of a construction worker returning to the site from across the street with a brown paper bag. He walked over to the guardrail along the river,hopped over, sat on the guardrail, and looked around about 15 times to make sure no one could see him. This seemed a little silly to me as he was clearly the only construction worker there, but there were cars everywhere. Who was he looking for? He was in the middle of the city traffic... Anyhow he opened his brown bag and took what seemed like a full 45-second swig. I couldn't even drink water like that, but apparently this guy's first 5 hours at work (it was 2pm) were pretty stressful. Then he lit a cigarette, took another sip, and looked contentedly out at the river. The traffic finally moved, so I drove away, having shared this weird secret moment with some guy I'll never meet. I felt all conflicted, because on one hand I felt bad for him being an alcoholic, but at the same time he seemed so free and peaceful. I couldn't stop smilig, it literally made me happy to be alive and to be in Lowell. There's nothing like a third-tier city to get the voyeuristic juices flowing.