pretty much, in not so many words, i have heard the following quite often lately: a.)i'm an asshole b.)i don't care about anyone or anything but myself c.)i think i'm better than everyone else d.)various other unpleasant qualities then i am forced to wonder what, if any, redeemable traits i am actually comprised of. there's gotta be something buried in there somewhere, i should think. but what do i care anyway? i'm a narcissistic asshole. moving on. sorry, pretty little 18 or 19 year old girl with a cross around your neck--putting the pregnancy test face down on the counter is not going to prevent me from noticing that it is, in fact, a test in which to see if a little gremlin is growing inside you. furthermore, as embarrassing as it may seem to you to be buying such a product, your action also assumes that i actually care about your purchase, which, unsurprisingly, i do not. the past few days i have been eating these certain tv dinners with a certain religiousness. on the package is a smiling african-american grandmother who's name is aunt jerimiah, or aunt jerome, or maybe even aunt jeffery. anyway, the exact name escapes me and beside her is a small clock type diagram boasting, "cooks in 3 minutes!" i usually put them in for three minutes and 30 seconds. they are breakfast tv dinners, so the ones i have had are pancakes and sausages, and another with eggs, bacon, and this potato/hash brown hybrid thingy. the black woman's smiling face and big, white round eyes almost suggests to me that this tv dinner has been cooked, packaged, and sent to my local grocery store all by herself from her tiny kitchen somewhere in the deep south, possibly arkansas or louisianna. her expression seems to imply that this ideal, happy grandmother is personally glad that i, a hungry boy in minnesota, is consuming her neat little concoction with a satisfactory pleasure. but then i come to my senses and think she must represent something far more simpler than that. basically, what i'm getting at is that these tv dinners are fucking great. 3:33 in the a.m. should i talk to her? is that what she wants? or is it that i am the car, the shocked drivers, the police, the orange tape, the glass, the lights, the questions, the cameras, and is it that she is just on the highway driving to some place, but slowing down, slowing down, slowing down, and speeding up? shit, we all go fast. sometimes too fast, probably. gorgeous background music can make the most terrifying rants sound absolutely delightful. i noticed that just right now. not in this, i don't mean that, but in these sounds i was listening to now. 3:56 in the a.m. most of the time i've been sitting here just kind of wondering what goes through someone's head whenever they're reading what i have wrote. like, it's hard looking at something of your own subjectively. and then, i know what i am to myself, but i don't know what i am to anyone else. shit though, that's how it goes i guess. i'm gonna go see what aunt j. made me now.