I asked my mom for socks this year. Jenni asked hers for a toothbrush.

Yep.

Ooh, it's getting late. Time for bed.

Gosh my back hurts. Lower but upper too, between the shoulder blades.

But at least it's not too cold out.

The weather's kind of nice.

I wonder if I'll get my socks. I can't wait for morning.


Tom    December 25, 2006    1:22am
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This is how Medawar Trophies came to sell ladies' footwear.

Hiring Sun was Hank Medawar's first mistake. Up until that point his trophy shop was a relatively smooth and predictable business in the small heart of a town outside Pembroke, North Carolina. He didn't have the business of the local high school (they got their trophies shipped from the principal's brother's trophy shop in Fairfax), but Hank had a few counties' Special Olympics business, and they were ordering trophies all the time.

Hank's pregnant wife normally handled the secretarial duties of Medawar Trophies but started staying at home the day she entered her third trimester. Hank thought he could manage without a secretary, but he couldn't, so he put an ad in the paper and Sun applied.

Sun looked, Hank thought, like an Asian version of his wife, who, Hank joked, had been eight months pregnant for the past seven months. Hank, Jr. if it was a boy; Jenny if it was a girl.

Anyhow, Sun liked shoes. She didn't like trophies and she didn't like working at a place that sold them. She wanted to sell shoes. Hank liked selling trophies, but he liked feeling like he had a chance with Sun more. So Hank cleared away a section in the front of his shop and set up a display of ladies' footwear.

This made Sun happy and she really took to selling the shoes. The women of the town considered Sun's oriental fashion senses better than their own and before long Hank was sold out of shoes.

So he bought more and more and more and a couple months went by and soon Medawar Trophies was turned into a ladies' footwear store first and a trophy shop second. Then Sun had to go. College was starting. Hank told her the shoe-selling job would be there if she wanted it next summer. She said she'd keep it in mind.

Jenny was born a week later. Hank gave his wife a plaque with "1st Place Mom" engraved on it. It was the last trophy Medawar's ever made.


Tom    December 24, 2006    5:32pm
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I'm on a train, on my way home. The first five hours were alright.

I'm antsy now though.

Pennsylvania might be expanding.


Tom    December 24, 2006    3:38pm
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Tom    December 22, 2006    8:22pm
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Trying to decide what my last post of the year should be. Thinking this might be it.


Tom    December 21, 2006    7:42pm
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A woman with an IQ in the low 70s sits on a train that's been slowed to a crawl on account of the snow. In her hands is an old Sony Walkman, she turns over the tape and begins to listen. She begins to sing. Softly, but her volume's growing. Something opera-ish. Slightly out of tune and at a little too high a pitch. On paper it's charming. But only on paper.

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Rick, 27

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There's a—a county? a city?—if it's a city it's by definition only—called Lyndora—it's part of my hometown. It's where my dad grew up. And where my sister took dance lessons. Apparently, it's seedy. I always knew it was a little shabby, but from what my dad told me last time I was home, there's a bar there that you can't even go in without getting your ass kicked. And after the patrons drag you out into the parking lot and kick your skull in, they'll go to their trucks to get their hunting rifles. There's the Lyndora Hotel, whose first floor serves good chicken wings (the big kind) and whose top two floors charge $30 a week for drunks to hide from the law. Bars open at 9am in Lyndora. And back when there was an elementary school there, sixth grade boys were made to do hundreds of push-ups. To prepare themselves for the bar fights later in life. I just finished a book of Bertolt Brecht short stories and in order to make them more interesting, I pretended I was reading about Lyndora. It has now become hard to separate one set of stories from the other. Did my dad tell me about the poor bastard who had so much good luck playing poker that he won all his buddies' money, shirts and girlfriends, only to be drowned when it came time to collect, or did Brecht write that? Either way, I find Lyndora more interesting now than I used to. The guy who founded it named it after his daughter. Do people still do that? Found towns?


Tom    December 12, 2006    8:17pm
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Clean & Nasty - Ain't No Meaning




Best Song of 2006.
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december - DoF

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