How utterly preposterous, and mournfully tragic! It begins the moment one tosses humility aside, assumes he knows the unknowable, and employs the force of the State against peaceful individuals.
It can be very local indeed. They should stop for a few moments and learn a little humility from a lowly writing implement. This essay is truly one for the ages. I am a lead pencil—the ordinary wooden pencil familiar to all boys and girls and adults who can read and write.
You may wonder why I should write a genealogy. Well, to begin with, my story is interesting. And, next, I am a mystery —more so than a tree or a sunset or even a flash of lightning. But, sadly, I am taken for granted by those who use me, as if I were a mere incident and without background. This supercilious attitude relegates me to the level of the commonplace. This is a species of the grievous error in which mankind cannot too long persist without peril. For, the wise G.
I, Pencil, simple though I appear to be, merit your wonder and awe, a claim I shall attempt to prove. I have a profound lesson to teach. And I can teach this lesson better than can an automobile or an airplane or a mechanical dishwasher because—well, because I am seemingly so simple.
Yet, not a single person on the face of this earth knows how to make me. Especially when it is realized that there are about one and one-half billion of my kind produced in the U. Pick me up and look me over. What do you see? Just as you cannot trace your family tree back very far, so is it impossible for me to name and explain all my antecedents.
But I would like to suggest enough of them to impress upon you the richness and complexity of my background. My family tree begins with what in fact is a tree, a cedar of straight grain that grows in Northern California and Oregon. Now contemplate all the saws and trucks and rope and the countless other gear used in harvesting and carting the cedar logs to the railroad siding. Think of all the persons and the numberless skills that went into their fabrication: the mining of ore, the making of steel and its refinement into saws, axes, motors; the growing of hemp and bringing it through all the stages to heavy and strong rope; the logging camps with their beds and mess halls, the cookery and the raising of all the foods.
Why, untold thousands of persons had a hand in every cup of coffee the loggers drink! The logs are shipped to a mill in San Leandro, California. Can you imagine the individuals who make flat cars and rails and railroad engines and who construct and install the communication systems incidental thereto? These legions are among my antecedents. Consider the millwork in San Leandro.
The cedar logs are cut into small, pencil-length slats less than one-fourth of an inch in thickness. These are kiln dried and then tinted for the same reason women put rouge on their faces. People prefer that I look pretty, not a pallid white. The slats are waxed and kiln dried again.
Children can accompany the voices with various percussion instruments. Select your preferred currency. Add on School licence what's this? See school licence for additional rights. Please purchase song pack separately. Teachers say…. Keep up the good work. You're making my job a lot easier! Your compositions are age-appropriate, inspiring, singable, and loved by my students.
The children love the combination of your rap song style. Thank you from a grateful music teacher. My choir just love this song and so do I! I can hardly stop from shedding a tear at my enthusiastic singers. This song is a real audience pleaser. A fabulous way to develop part singing. Good luck to him. I mean it. Marv with cigar. Ritchie half smiling. Audrey laughing. And me holding my cards, still looking at the most shit hand in Christmas history.
I cook. I eat. I wash but I rarely iron. I live in the past and believe that Cindy Crawford is by far the best supermodel. I have dark hair, half-tanned skin, coffee brown eyes. My muscles are hugely normal. I stand with my hands in my pockets. My boots are falling apart, but I still wear them because I love and cherish them.
Quite often, I pull my boots on and go out. Sometimes I go to the river that runs through town, or I go for a walk to the cemetery to see my father. I always picture us from behind. Just weak, too. Then I pull into town and the Vacant Taxis lot. Sometimes I hate the sound of a car door slamming. The other one always laughed when I tried something on her.
Personally, I think sex should be like math. At school. They even proclaim it. Especially men. I should also explain that I honestly think my kissing leaves a lot to be desired as well.
One of those girlfriends tried to teach me once, but I think she gave up in the end. My tongue work is particularly bad, I feel, but what can I do? I lie a lot. If she ever gets down or depressed, I can make out the figure of her shadow through the front window of the shack. She comes in and we drink cheap beer or wine or watch a movie or all three. Something old and long like Ben-Hur that stretches into the night. I kiss her cheek. I stroke her hair. I think of how she lives alone, just like me, and how she never had any real family, and how she only has sex with people.
She never lets any love get in the way. I think she had a family once, but it was one of those beat-the-crap-out-of-each-other situations.
I think she loved them, and all they ever did was hurt her. I guess she feels better off that way, and who can blame her?
When she sleeps on my couch, I think about all that. Every time. I cover her up, then go to bed and dream. With my eyes open. There have been a few articles about the bank robbery in the local papers. They talk about how I wrestled the gun from the thief after chasing him down. Quite typical, really. I go through some of them at my kitchen table, and the Doorman just looks at me like always.
My ma comes over, and I give her a beer. According to her, all her kids have done quite well except me, but now she at least has a glimmer of pride in me to glimmer in her eye, if only for a day or two. Even Audrey pays me a visit with a newspaper tucked under her arm. When you lie once, you have to make it uniform. We all know that. My bewildered face is plastered all over the front pages, and even a guy from a radio show shows up and tapes a conversation with me in my lounge room.
I have coffee with him, but we have to drink it without milk. I throw it down on the table with everything else and forget about it. Constantly, I forget. I feel it. Feel something. I shiver. I see my reflection in the TV screen and in the photo of my family. The Doorman snores. The breeze outside steps closer. The fridge buzzes. For a moment, it feels like everything stops to watch as I reach in and pull out an old playing card. In the echoes of light in my lounge room, I let my fingers hold the card gently, as if it might break or crease in my hands.
Three addresses are written on it in the same writing as on the envelope. I read them slowly, watchfully.
It makes its way inside me and travels, quietly gnawing at my thoughts. I read: 45 Edgar Street, midnight 13 Harrison Avenue, 6 p. I open the curtain to look outside. I get past the Doorman and stand on the front porch. I know the roads but not the actual houses.
Who would send me something like this? I ask myself. What have I done to get an old playing card in my letter box with strange addresses scrawled on it? I go back in and sit at the kitchen table. The visions of many faces reach me. Could it be Audrey? I ask. I have no idea. Yet, I also feel pangs of guilt even for thinking of discarding it like that.
The Doorman wanders over and sniffs the card. Damn it, I can see him thinking. I thought it might be something to eat. As always, he shuffles back to the door, turns half a circle, and lies down. He gets comfortable in his suit of black and gold fur. His big eyes glow, but they also fall deep with darkness.
His paws stretch out on the crusty old carpet. He stares at me. I stare back. I see him think. What the hell do you want? And we leave it at that. Call someone, I tell myself. The phone beats me to it. It rings. I pick it up and shove it to my ear. It hurts, but I listen hard. That, and this woman shouts into the phone, every time, without fail. No thoughts or memories arrive. All I can see is the card as I turn it in my hands. Aggravated, to say the least.
She blames it on my brother, Tommy, and me, of course. She says we used to swear our heads off when we were kids, playing soccer in the backyard. The worst thing about it is the sheer emphasis she swears with.
Whenever she calls me something like that, she spits it from her mouth, practically hurling it at me. I tune back in. Faulkner turns up for morning tea, Ed? Should I just get her to put her mug on the floor? I hate it when she calls me that. It sparkles in my hand. I touch it. Hold it.
I smile. Into it. Not to Dickhead Ed. To me— the real Ed Kennedy. The future Ed Kennedy. No longer simply a cab-driving hopeless case. What will I do with it? Who will I be? A lot of work in the city. She comes back. About the card. I may as well start with Ma. I let the words out, each one tugging and pulling at my lips as they fight to stay in. I have to say it.
The feeling reaches a hand through the phone line and shakes me. Is it the card? But then, yes, I do know. Too pathetically calm for my own good. I should just tell the old cow to shut up, but I never have and never will. Just me. That bloody coffee table.
I knew I was forgetting something when I walked home from the Vacant Taxis lot. Tomorrow old Mrs. I force myself to stop thinking about it. Which should make it either Marv, Audrey, or Ritchie. For sure. It could never be him. He could never be that imaginative. Then Ritchie. Highly unlikely. Hundreds of people might have walked past and seen us. So it could be anyone. Only think. In the morning I get up earlier than normal and walk around town with the Doorman and a street directory, finding each house.
The one on Edgar Street is a real wreck of a joint, right at the bottom of the street. It has a rose bed in the front yard, though the grass is yellow and stale. The Macedoni place is up in the hilly part of town. The richer part. I leave for work and think about it. I tell them. All at once. I shake my head. Before I went to bed last night, I placed it in the top drawer of the cabinet in my bedroom. Nothing touches it. Nothing breathes on it. The drawer is empty but for that card.
Argumentative, as usual. We all look at him. He jerks a thumb over at Marv. I spend half my days at the betting shop. I still live with my mum and dad…. We call him Ritchie because he has a tattoo of Jimi Hendrix on his right arm but everyone reckons it looks more like Richard Pryor. Thus, Ritchie. They were a dynamic duo if ever there was one.
His hair is curly and the color of mud, and his eyes are black but friendly. You can always hear him coming because he rides a bike. A Kawasaki something or other. He wears plain T-shirts or unfashionable shirts that he shares with his old man. It makes him nervous, and he turns his head now, with all of us, to Audrey. I nod. I do, however, have a theory on how and why it ended up in your letter box.
She continues. Ed Kennedy. I speak. What if there are people kicking the crap out of each other and I have to go in and stop it? For the rest of the night, I push thoughts of the card away, and Marv wins three games in a row. As usual, he lets us know it.
A real bastard of a gloater, puffing on his cigar. Like Ritchie, he still lives at home. He works with his father as a carpenter. Even those cigars. He steals them from his old man. The prince of penny-pinchers. He has thick blond hair that stands up almost in knots, wears old suit pants for comfort, and jangles his keys in his pockets with his hands. The first is that he plays soccer in winter and has mates from there. The second and main reason is that he carries on like an idiot.
Have you ever noticed that idiots have a lot of friends? None of that helps me, though. It always sidles up to me and makes me recognize it. I come to a conclusion. I tell myself, You have to start soon, Ed. The moon leans down on me as I sit on my front porch with the Doorman. I look at her and wish we could go inside and make love on the couch. Dive inside each other. Take each other. Make each other. Nothing happens, though. We sit there, drinking some suburban cheap-shit passion-pop alcohol she brought, and I rub my feet on the Doorman.
I watch them a moment. She looks at the moon as it holds itself up in the sky. As for me, I hold the card again in my hand. I read it and get ready. You never know, I tell myself. And at nineteen, Ed Kennedy found that first card in the mail. My next lovely surprise is a nice subpoena. I have to go to the local courthouse and tell my version of what happened in the bank. This has happened sooner than I thought. When the day arrives, I show up in my uniform and they make me wait outside the courtroom.
When I go in to give the evidence, the chambers are spread out before me. The first person I see is the gunman. The only difference now is that he looks angrier. I guess a week or so in custody will do that to you. He wears a suit. A cheap suit. Once he sees me, I look immediately away because his eyes attempt to gun me down.
The judge greets me. The lawyers ask me questions, and I answer them faithfully. Kennedy—how can you be so positive about that? Kennedy, but we need to ask these questions in order to cover everything that needs to be covered, by the book. Kennedy, could you please refrain from casting such aspersions? I pause and look at him. You just wait…. Remember it every day when you look in the mirror. God, I pray, give him life. The courtroom doors shut behind me, and I walk out into the foyer.
I like her. He spent all morning crying. I allow some relief to filter through me, but I doubt it will last very long. I hear his voice again, and I see the words on my face when I get back in the cab and look in the rearview mirror. It makes me think of my life, my nonexistent accomplishments and my overall abilities in incompetence. A dead man, I think. And I pull out of the parking lot. Six months. He got six months. Typical of the leniency these days.
The only good fortune is that early parole was denied. I sit like normal in my kitchen with the Doorman and the Ace of Diamonds. All I can see are his eyes. Days pass, and gradually it works. I forget about him. It makes more sense to look forward, and I slowly work my way toward the addresses on the card.
First up is 45 Edgar Street. On Wednesday, however, I actually make it out onto the street and head across town. Only one survives, and even that one winks at me. I know this neighborhood quite well because Marv used to come here a lot. He had a girl here, on one of these slummy streets. Her name was Suzanne Boyd, and Marv was with her back in school. Toca Life World follows the same basic mechanics common in the free-to-play games. One example is the solid reward system that provides players with weekly bonuses.
Not to mention, the various gifts that are scattered throughout the map. Thus, make sure to collect various items, costumes, tools, equipment, and other knick-knacks that you can use as props in telling your stories in Toca World.
Your imagination is only the limit. Toca Life World combines every known element in the Toca Universe. The best part is that you can now experience this iconic storytelling app on a bigger screen with your PC.
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