The Case Against Randolph Dixon-Hertz - Entry 7

Sitting in front of me, sticking to the seemingly-honey-glazed tabletop, was a cup of mean-spirited though disappointing coffee, fifteen yellowed-newspapers, and a book on genealogy that was as powerful in its thickness as it was devoid of tight writing...I had been in this position before, meandering through a stack of boredom so unequivocally uninteresting that visions of using a can-opener to pull my own eyes out became a horrifyingly relevant proposition, so I knew that perseverance and total control were at the very top of the list entitled "Necessary".

Randy was born Randolph Dixon-Hertz, for a reason hard to surmise considering that his parents' full-names both ended "Bloomquist"; being that there were no "adoption" notations, Randy's family-tree was otherwise as benign as the writing in the book of family-trees that had me tearing up my insides with an astonishing apathy....a disinterest so compelling, so commanding, that I committed myself, fully, to setting the book on fire, lest it harm another living being with its indefatigable banality.

Setting a massive, laminate-covered book ablaze in this coffee-shop's back-alley takes exactly the comparable amount of effort that one routinely puts into finding a reasonable place to have breakfast: if you're on your own schedule, then you can take the time to really look into a place to enjoy yourself...but if you haven't eaten in four days, anywhere will do.

This book had to go; even as the flames licked the bottom of the dented air-conditioner-unit hanging laboriously from the crumbling-brick of the coffee-shop's back window-hole, my functionality rested with this book being reduced to the charred ash that things dead became once their value, if value was indeed the right word, was no longer apparent.

My next step was obvious, even to me and my matchstick-filled head: I had to find a coffee-shop that didn't inherently bring out my latent pyromania...preferably one with some decent coffee, for that matter.

Entry 8