Win On Diagonals

I went to Home Depot last night to get that stuff that feels like cheese cloth to put under a rug so it won’t move too much. I go to this Jamaican guy and ask him where I might find that stuff that looks like thick cheese cloth that you put under a rug so it won’t move.  He told me to look in an aisle where all the paint was. I re-explained what I needed, emphasizing the carpet moving and all that again.  He just said: “paint.”
Then there is this sudden pause where he stares me down and tells me that ‘I’m misleading him.’
I felt that we had been dating for two weeks and I was just trying to play with his hair for the first time, and he shut me down instead of helping me find some fucking Carpet Mate for a 5×8.  He then gave me a new aisle number, and accosted what may have been an ex-girlfriend to show me various products for what I needed.  She did not like me either, very possibly stepping on my ‘skips’ intentionally. A look of passing contempt and cavernous ennui shone through Jamaican guy’s gesticulations and motionlessness. Later, I ran across the chilly Elmont parking lot to ‘Office Max.’ I was in need of an external hard drive, and unable to get a song called “Carpet Man,” by The 5^th Dimension out of my peeling lattice of a head. As I am at register slipping my duckets to the cute Latina lady at the checkout, and she is explaining the virtues of the Office Max Extended no-co-pay two year warranty for 21.99, I notice two large and friendly folks eating a cheese snack I was fond of as a lad called ‘Bugles.’ 
As my instructions were lovingly told to me regarding registering for my warranty, I ask these two amiable chubbies if perhaps they were snacking on Bugles? They said: “fuck, yeah, these Bugles, ummm…..(made trumpet slur noise too.) I didn’t blame them a bit for being less than articulate in response to my question.  We all started laughing with an ease I had not felt since boyhood. I then proceeded to lie to them about my Bugle eating Past. My innocence was sold as casually as ‘La-La licks’ in some strumpet alley. I told them that I use to eat Pepper-corn Bugles while as a security guard at a Castle in Dover, De. I explained that I like my bugles hot, because it was funnier when you pretended to blow on them as if breaking into a cheese-snack solo when they singed you’re lips a bit with that savory burn-burn-crunch.  The whole experience made me ­­­_______?

“Let Justice roll down like waters in a mighty stream,” said the Prophet Amos. He was seeking not consensus but the cleansing action of revolutionary change. America has made progress toward freedom, but measured against the goal the road ahead is still long and hard. This could be the worst possible moment for slowing down.A consensus orientation is understandably attractive to a political leader. His task is measurably easier if he is merely to give shape to widely accepted programs. He becomes a technician rather than an innovator. Past Presidents have often sought such a function. President Kennedy promised in his campaign an executive order banning discrimination in housing. This substantial progressive step, he declared, required only “a stroke of the pen.” Nevertheless, he delayed execution of the order long after his election on the ground that he awaited a “national consensus.” President Roosevelt, facing the holocaust of an economic crisis in the early thirties, attempted to base himself on a consensus with the N.R.A.; and generations earlier, Abraham Lincoln temporized and hesitated through years of civil war, seeking a consensus before issuing the Emancipation Proclamation.

In the end, however, none of these Presidents fashioned the program which was to mark him as historically great by patiently awaiting a consensus. Instead, each was propelled into action by a mass movement which did not necessarily reflect an overwhelming majority.