Excerpt: Hues

Oh, look! How cute and kitschy it is to be alive. The girl stepped up to the exit doors of the bus, grabbed a bar to brace herself, and turned forward to face the front, blowing and subsequently popping a big, juicy pink Bubblicious bubble of gum halfheartedly. She was probably in high school, maybe 16 or 17, still with concealer globs attempting to mask acne around the chin. But she appeared to be in her 20s, dressed to elicit sex or a coke binge at a rave in the 80s. Remind me not to go out anymore at 4pm, jesus.

The bus approached the next stop and started to swing to a halt, the momentum of its mass inevitably providing a small surge of force forward even after it had stopped. Kind of like when a jug of milk is about a third full, if you give it a hefty shove across a table top, it will slide gingerly for a space, with a constant deceleration due to inertia and in accordance with all of the simplest, most fixed variable representations of Newton's laws. But then, as if by magic, just as it appears it is going to stop, the milk inside the jug slams against its side, and pushes the jug forward in an awkward and abrupt flourish at the end of its race. The resulting phenomenon is quite fascinating, as the surprise, strangeness of velocity, and jerk of motion is so unlike any natural or mechanical movements that it is immediately jarring to the senses. The bus stopping is kind of like that, except without all the magic; instead, just the nauseating whiplash we experience as we sense the space-time continuum bend and bow on a quark's dime.

Wow, if I had a daughter, I'd never let her leave the house looking like such a whore. Maybe that's an inappropriate thing to say about a teenager, but man, is she advertising. Not that I'm biting, of course, that would be wrong to even contemplate. What is it about growing up middle class that makes looking cheap seem exotic?