Vanity + Disgust = Ugg Boots

I am suffering in an early morning shock of vanity. I rarely go on tirades about these sorts of useless, shallow atrocities, but I am trying to exorcise my hatred for those Ugg Boots. Before I worked on a college campus I never really noticed them. I live in an urban setting where these pampered sophomoric adults who typify the Ugg Boots donned population dare not roameth, unless they’re too drunk to realize where they are. Even then, Ugg Boots rarely make an appearance, luckily, without a safe radius of my home.

I’m willing to make a compromise with the Ugg Boots Wearers. Please, for the sake of a very mildly stylish lady, do not wear those damned fur boats with sweat pants. This trend is like a zombie factory. Everyday it gets grimmer, everyday the style of sloppy sweats tucked into the tops of bunchy Ugg Boots grows more dominate, and I get grumpier.

So, you’re all wearing these psychotically ugly clodhoppers because they’re comfortable? I know there are better options, even considering the Merino Wool lined on the insides of this apocalyptically terrifying shoe make. Just try harder, try not following Jessica Simpson, also. She really does not know what she’s doing.

Why Even Try?

Biography of Spring

A ceiling of thorny branches obscure milky gray skies, tufts of new wild grass shoot indiscriminately here and there. A sooty ground is slowly turning into a playground for robins and squirrels. Blackbirds caw atop the roof of an old unused church. The tools from last summer’s painting project are stacked against the building’s back wall, covered in crusty leaves. The three-legged grill is rusted into one spot.

The sun rests wearily in Pisces. It’s a trans-figurative influence, traipsing with difficulty in a zone of monotony and death, purging cesspools of forgotten hope, ripe with an unsurprising mood. Nothing is disturbed, everything is stagnant with memories of first Aquarius, then Capricorn, Sagittarius, Scorpio, Libra, Virgo, Leo, Cancer, Gemini, Taurus, Aries. Pisces awaits its final day, to put the memories into their cubbies, to let the energy completely break itself down. All rest in their bunkers, like Aphrodite and Eros, waiting for the safety of spring’s dawning.

Underneath these heavy somber layers is some unsettled urgent chaos that cannot break from the Piscean cloak. The desire for peace is never matched, security always beyond grasp. The cycle perpetuates. Not until Spring’s equinox can a deliverance occur. Fields barren, minds drained, bellies sagging, lips unquenched. All under the Piscean guise march drearily to a death, a funeral song. The apex approaches. It will always happen this way.

The vines growing along the tree turn from fragile veins to supple toadstool covered fingers, crawling and reaching upward. Little violet flowers peep out along the sidewalk’s edge. Trees lining the street begin to burst with trembling green buds. Birds swoon to one another in glorious, fluting cadence. Honeysuckle creeps in along every fence and border, bounteous with unrelenting steadfast, the eve to the coming influence. The air is saturated, dense with perspiration that has built since November. The earth’s body odor creates reactionary fits.

The sun bursts from its melancholy into a vibrant position honed only by Aries. A spirit of unique newness spawns and awakens the rust, the fragility, the oldness. A daring bet to survive the cycle again is placed by the Aries sunrises, with a bouncy, clean, childish grin. Activity once solemn becomes seemingly abruptly refreshed. And so again, it will go.

Work and the Diminishing Priorities

One of my first encounters this morning was with a man whose eyes were bloody red, the pupils a milky black. His skin and hair were the same hue as his white thick cotton tee. His faded black Fubu pants were held somewhere indiscriminate of what the actual essence for which pants are traditionally worn. Barely was there time to turn on the public catalogue monitor before my perceptions of the morning were jostled. I was chanting internally that by 11 I would be able to sit down with a cup of coffee from the cafe and get to the busy work my job revolves around, but it was already too late. Everything became clear that my morning was not to be a good one, not until the people with issues had their complaints resolved.

And this gentleman with the worrisome eyes, eventually sitting with his buddies from one of the local homeless shelters, he was young, seemingly already influenced by one thing or another, approached me before I could view the catastrophe that the book-drop always is, before I could check on the holds list, putting his face close to mine as I leaned over the public pc to say “hello” interrogatively. He stared at me coolly, waiting for a flinch or a remark, but I could only say “hi” back and turned away without further inquiry. Walking towards the corner of seats he watched me with a maniac fluttering of one of his black eyes. I brushed it off, but couldn’t help wondering what else might come when I was at the front desk.

Before my supervisor and I, who were manning the front desk together, had a moment to collect ourselves for the shift, we heard shouting close by. A second young man was yelling obscenities at an older raggedy man whose words were softer, but growing urgent. Soon the older man approached the front desk, in a dingy flannel shirt with a bulging turquoise backpack in his hands and a tragic, watery look in his eyes. A young, possessive man had accused the elder of stealing his backpack. Given the younger man’s hostile tone and immediate usage of inflammatory language, which, no doubt, was perused to convince the sad elder to hand over the rather sodden pack.  Regardless of the foul language and depth of rage, most of which I fail to repeat here due to its racial slurrage, the old man refused to give up the backpack.  Secretly, I applauded the old gent because he maintained a quiet calm that outweighed his apparent fright.

Neither myself nor my supervisor needed to dial for security, as our omnipresent guard was already dashing down the stairs to dissolve the problem, as he has done reliably throughout his tenure. The young man was running on more than adrenaline, we found, so the police were summoned. Being that our facility is located directly next to the police headquarters, the event would diffuse in only moments. Things like this happen all the time at public libraries, perhaps even in the smallest of provinces, so I moved about my morning duties while the police investigated the minor details of the younger and the elder. Upon the police arriving, however, the younger man began to quibble in a shy tone, remarking that he simply asked the elder whose pack he carried and where he found it.  My eyes rolled involuntarily.  The police were not amused and asked the younger to perhaps take a walk with them.

And, surprisingly, I finished my work with little more interruption, though it did look like a possible romper.