Established Marvel : a Monk by Abbreviation

111. ELM TREES ACROSS FROM CITY HALL:

So why orchestrate the matter ? why try to make sense ? for "Theodore is not a hobo a vagabond or a dirty hitchhiker he is instead a jobless graphic designer who has no work nor prospects because computer skills (which he also doesn't have) have pretty much replaced his version of T-square and art-pen graphic design HE having become OUTMODED and every morning before going job hunting he still bends down over his sleeping wife's head and twirls a piece of her hair around his index finger as he whispers into her ear 'Nan I'm leaving' and she in turn rustles a bit and mutters something and then finds herself wondering if he means for the day or forever and she never knows when she'll come home to nothing to the empty apartment to his absence and the lack of his warmth in the hallway or the muffled sound of TV in the other room or that smell in the place like a person has been there before her" and someone was apparently attempting to describe some domestic scene or something - recounting some story he'd heard or been privy to and as I sat there I found myself too listening to the words flow forth and I realized I too was part of the scene - able to be described as much as anyone else in the telling or the saying for each and every human episode is at base the same - something of emotion and heart or solace or envy any of the hundred things which go into the make of EITHER harmony or conflict and that's the human condition no matter what else anyone tries to tell you and it's all like some old black and white engraving of say Fiorello LaGuardia pugilistically intoning about something in front of some pinball machines painted evil or whatever and he attacks them with a hatchet - making emotion out of some passive rite some mental state of material - all really a NOTHING - but like anyone else he imbues it with something and thereby it lives forever and we still see him whacking the machines over and over a million newsreel minutes of ephemeral time over all these elapsed years the very selfsame things - elm trees across from City Hall a few old boats sagging in the East River harbor and the tired old sullen bell at the Seaman's Church clanging away for something for nothing for some other death PERHAPS at sea - and no one ever knows the difference nor cares yet life goes on in its stagy way and we the AUDIENCE are still trained to clap and applaud at the varied and prescribed times - as we dutifully do en masse for whatever reason it all may be.