Head Rattle

I.
Someone who frequently sits next to me has a talking shoe and likes to make little mouse noises with it in a semi-conscious way while engaged in some sort of absorbing business. It doesn't happen constantly, and it's such a little (yet torturous) squeak.... Should I break my wall of silence and tell her to oil her damn shoe? I guess I'll have to before my brain congeals.


II.
At the 4th Street Music Festival last weekend, I took refuge in one of the vendor's tents when a monsoon-like downpour suddenly started. It was a fellow who sells blow-up images from smutty old paperbacks on framed canvases -- covers from the type of trash literature that isn't published anymore but that decades ago one might find in an "adult" bookstore. (Do those even exist anymore?) He also has images from wacky old sci-fi novels, and a few that combine elements of both. He gave me his business card, which on one side depicts the cover for a scholarly tome entitled The Oversexed Astronauts, by (ha ha) M. Coxe. The cover depicts two guys wearing only the bottom haves of their spacesuits and having their way with a couple of naked astronettes. Under the title it says "Three glowing specimens of male virility with plenty of staying power in a round-the-clock orgy that was outasite." There's an upright rocket in the background. Subtle.