WEEKEND SURVIVORS

The city had survived its annual Insect Fear festival, a two celebration consisting of wandering drunkenness and random vandalism visited upon plastic lawn flamingos stuck in crab grassy front yards barely within the county limits, when a whole new thing emerged that caused the muddle- browed population to squint, squat and search their pocket for a quarter. It was a lovely sound, really, experimental music, a town of three million people,six million hands sixty million fingers crammed into every pocket of whatever the citizens might happen to be wearing, stubby, stocky, skinny fingers, long ones and short ones, reaching to the bottom seams of all those pants, jackets, skirts, shirts, blouses, some of them tearing through a casual set of loose threads and making a hole large enough for some creepy acne farm youth to stick his member through before asking his date to reach into the pocket and retrieve a can opener or a pack of Xerb Cigarettes or a plastic writing pen emblazoned with the name of Texas Liquor sequestered somewhere in a plateau strip mall just off a Rose Canyon access road, all those fingernails scraping for coin, quarters, pennies bright and rusty, an awful zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxvacating filled the air, a dull , droning grind as if the  twelve tiers of angels had all been issued velcro jackets and none of them could resist opening and closing again, the drag of dddddddddddddddddddddddddrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzp! continuing until the new thing of panic emerged over a neighborhood famous for the quality of elm tree disease .

"Man, this sucks" was all I could say about this whole deal, "Two dimes and three pennies."

"Suck it in , buster" said Jill, "we got ourselves a whole new set of dinner guests

to abuse..."