Extract from "The Shift Manager"

More mirth, reversing Ramses more than a tad: "So it has been promised, so shall it be written."

Below is opening from my yet unpublished opus. What's with the hardware pictured on right? "Good writing is more pruning than inspiration or alliteration", I heard a longtime ago from a very talented man who used such insights to somehow not become anything more notable than preeminent poster-child for the New York Tri-State's 'Squandering One's Own Potential' squad.

Chapter One
Welcome to the Land of Enchantment

Mercifully descending at last on his Buddy Holly connecting flight, Jimmy’s first image of the place was not good. Endless rows of partially decapitated jumbo jets, their essential parts jettisoned long ago, lined the landing strip like an aviation leper squadron turned out for final review. This premature intimation of decay was buttressed, moments later, when the high altitude New Mexico air in the cabin vanished upon approach to the gas station-size control tower. Jimmy didn’t know if they were going to de-plane so much as fill-up and grab a bag of chips instead.

Hitting the sunburnt white tarmac – "It’s a dry heat", he told himself almost reflexively – Jimmy’s bubbling angst was not sufficiently allayed until he caught sight of the luggage handler’s supervisor. Some generic mook, of course, did the actual hefting of the bags, but the Mexican lass at the helm of the souped-up golf cart - to transport cargo the good forty feet from where the plane nearly backed into the terminal - was a poster child for the possibility that awaited him in this - per the license plates - Land of Enchantment.

As ample and round from the back as the smooth curve of a Freightliner’s hood on the highway’s horizon, she embodied the arc that Jimmy hugged to every chance he got. No mainlining of motion sickness blandishments could have remedied his condition so thoroughly as the sight of those cotton/polyester blend britches bunching up so deliciously between her womanhood’s two main traffic intersections. Seeing in his mind’s eye nothing but green lights ahead, Jimmy now was suitably adjusted to suffer the experience of obtaining his rental car.

This particular psychological gauntlet was, from his experience, one of the true stations of the cross that hung around any traveler’s neck. Only the dregs of the intelligent quotient in the employment barrel, after all, would succumb to working the odd hours at the dimly lit counter of sycophancy that is the auto loaning business’ combination check-in plus confessional.

Jimmy’s particular specimen, that early evening, was relatively benign in the same sort of way that Mormonism can be compared to mainstream Christianity. Devoid of any overt personality ticks, this mid-fifties house frau carried out her duties in as short order as possible, but which still allowed her ample time to hone her FBI field agent-in-training skills to ascertain definitively Jimmy’s planned movements for the next several days in the greater Las Cruces environs. Meeting sufficient muster that Jimmy was not planning to firebomb the local Tasty Freeze, Madame Counter Agent let down her guard enough to emphatically assure him that above all else this town was somewhere good to raise a family. Seeing that Jimmy knew a day would come when his primary ambition was to hide and/or scatter the remnants of the various seeds he had sown already, these words were not exactly the soothing balm that the key master to Jimmy’s mid-size sedan probably hoped they would be. Not that Jimmy intimated any such reaction to the lady wearing the industrial mustard yellow blazer. To her Jimmy nodded rhythmically, much like the Pope listening to a foreign children’s choir praising the purity of the Mother Church in a tongue several trunks away from the Indo-European branch upon which the Vulgate squats so proudly.

Guess that Betty Friedan, Bishop Sheen and/or Brigham Young writer-in-residence grant(s) might not be such a sure shot after all? Damn.

Continuing our tradition from the original (and only other) post, below is offered as a sunny blandishment on this dreary February afternoon and an aspiration, wrought by my own talents (such as they are) , to something that flies at least in the same radar vector as beauty or grace.