Overthunk

It seemed like New York, but on Dream, it could've been any other grotty conclave of run down shops and restaurants and tenement houses, dirty, with big windows, swirling painted letterforms of old, damp, grimy streets, but the sun was shining. I walked along, seemingly lost, past one window and another, until I reached a bike shop. From the front, it looked closed , so I continued walking, around a round corner. The back was open and inside stood a bald man, Gandhi-esque but gruff, in a dingy white shirt, white Van Dyke bristling slightly, skin like creased umber leather, maybe a cigarette burning somewhere in the background.  Somehow I convinced him (though it was closed? I don't really know) to let me clean the tires of a red bicycle. He let me borrow it, take it for a spin. I rode, freedom on wheels, through the dingy alleys, wind fanning my hair out behind me, lost in the fun of it, the remembrance of being a kid and doing just this thing, but in some suburban settin...

During my tenure of nearly a decade spent in the Crimson Limbo above Walmart and K-Mart and below, say, Macy's, I worked most of my time at the customer service desk. Working every single holiday of my life was de rigeur during that time, as was donning the horrid color combo of red shirt and khaki pants -- there's nothing like a pair of khaki pants to make me run (slowly) screaming, even now -- only black pants can camouflage flab effectively, which is why it is now de mon rigeur to wear black pants 99.4% of the time. To this day, you will never catch me, even if all my other clothes have been burned up in a fire, wearing red and khaki together. Ugh. At Tar-zhay in the 90's, there was a "no-hassle" return policy -- we accepted virtually any item we had ever sold at any time in the past as a return, as long as we could string a few numbers together to make that identifying number and some semblance of a selling price. I have personally refunded money on leaking ...