I'd Like to Run A Food Truck

I'd like to run a food truck, though I cannot cook. My greatest culinary achievement to this date is an omelet that I managed to flip with only a slight crack in its structural integrity. It was a damn good omelet too. Still, I'd like to run a food truck. I'd like to drive through each and every major city, watch as the people there get fat off my delicious cuisine, smile and come back for more, then move on so that I can experience it all again. Now, I don't know what I'd serve, but I know the local papers would rave about it. I know the reviews on Yelp would be too flattering to even read. I know my truck would become a national sensation. Cities would desperately anticipate its arrival. The McRib. My truck would be the McRib of food trucks.

I'd like to have a family too. An average family--a wife, a daughter, a son, two dogs, a cat and three fish. We would try not to travel when the kids were in school. They would make friends. They would lead normal lives. They would have a home base. Then, come winter or summer break, they would set sail onto the metaphorical seven seas. They would see parts of America most kids only read about in Geography courses. They would be contributing members of the best damn food truck in the world. And I would be there father.

I'd like to ride horses into the sunset. I'd like to be the hero. Like in the movies. I call myself The Man with No Name; I snarl like Clint Eastwood. It's sad, yes, but in the funniest way possible.

I sing songs to myself. I pretend I'm on the stage. There are audiences everywhere I go. You are in the crowd ... and you and you and you and, yes, even you. I interview myself. Ask the most intuitive of questions and respond with the wittiest of retorts. There are people, imaginary people, who kill for my autographs. You can have one. At the moment, they are free.

I'd like to run a food truck. I'd like to drive into the sea.

Basketball for the Heavy Set

He had this dream, this beautiful dream. In it, he and Dirk Nowitzki were paired in a 2v2 game against Mark Burrows, the boy who used to throw mashed potatoes at him during freshman lunch, and Michael West, the boy who used to supply Mark with the potato ammunition. The rules were simple: the first to twenty-one points won, and the winning team got to watch as the losers groveled at their feet before ritually committing suicide with the blade of their choice (this being a civilized society). Even in his dreams, he played the role of sidekick, choosing to take the backseat as Dirk leveled point after point onto the opposition. He could pass well enough that he felt his contribution adequate, though he wished he could nail a jump shot, could drive to the rim, could shoot threes with the confidence of a young Larry Bird, but that would never be the case, not even when his imagination was unhindered. Still, he delighted in the demise of his enemies. He took a devious sort of pleasure in watching Dirk do his bidding and even darker brand of pleasure in watching the blades protrude from the backs of those, to him, perpetually thirteen year old monstrosities.

The Heavenly Affairs of Tyler Patton

  Tyler Patton was black, or African-American, or a nigger, or what have you. He did not know when he ceased to be black, but when they spoke of him now, they used the past tense and not only in regards to his ethnicity. Yes, he was black, but he also was an honor student, he was on the track and field team, he was a bassist, he was alive. Supposedly, all of those aspects of his character ceased to be. He was no longer black; he simply was.

            Of course, he never considered himself black anyway—not in the sense that society considered one black. For one, he had never set foot in a ghetto, and all black men, all black men of merit, hailed from the ghetto. Eazy E, the man he had idealized since he had been capable of such a fixation, came from the ghetto. Died there, too. But Tyler's mother begat her son in a Presbyterian hospital, in close proximity to at least two coffee shops where seldom an NWA track was heard. 
            Tell them where you’re from, Tyler:
            “Straight out of Plano.”
            A suburb of Dallas … doesn’t have quite the same ring to it, does it?   He possessed no gold teeth though he had had a couple of fillings, he did not drive a Cadillac, he did not own rims for his non-existent Cadillac, he did not play nor did he enjoy watching basketball, he had no aspirations to rise from rags to riches, he believed most fried chicken was too greasy, and he had never met a watermelon he enjoyed. Now, he did not simplify those qualities into a prototypical black man. He would not even consider that portrayal a stereotypical black man, but somewhere in his sub-conscious, he figured he should have been that person, should have crafted a more suave and seventies-soul-brother persona. In his thoughts he sounded smooth, hearing the voice of a middle aged Barry White rather than the scrawny teenager who actually spoke and earnestly believing that smoothness to accurately speak on behalf of his character, but that man--that negro Casanova--existed only in his father. He was not his father, a man as black as society defined black, and now, and not only because of the condition of his deadness, he would never be his father. With surgery, he could have been his mother, and without it, he still possessed the nerdy suburban mentality she held. However, as much love as he had for his mother, he did not want to be that person. He wanted the “Black Power,” television negro, character—the black men who made records, made money, impressed women.
         Yet he was no better or worse for not being that person. And now, he was nothing at all. He simply was.