Thoughts from a parking lot

I'm sat here in the parking lot behind the wheel of my car. Its a 1994 Camry but really its like any other car in this parking lot. Mechanical universes that transport their occupants from one location to the next. A Raven sits squat on the corner of the roof of the building before me. It cocks its head to the left and suddenly flies off.

I'm sitting in my car in front of the "Academic Center". It stands tall and proud. The pale hazel facade is marked with tall black windows which reflect the murderous white sun into all the mechanical death traps before them. The scorching rays turn these death traps and suicide machines into ovens and scalding anvils until their occupants move them and cool winds quench the heat.

I sit in my car and watch the world go by. My radio is on point as Tom Ashbrook and Yoko Ono converse about the life an times of the Japanese Avant Gardist. Students come and go from the building before me almost as if it were breathing. Inhale, exhale. Some students are late, others leaving early. Others like me, just sit in their cars. Sticking out oddly on the building is a red fire alarm that hearkens back to elementary school fire drills preformed in September and October in preparation for the Southern California fire season.

There I sit in my white mechanical universe in a black, flat ocean full of mechanical universes which make up only a fraction of the cars in the vicinity, which again hardly are a percentage of those in the county, much less the region or the state. Mind blowingly tiny am I, in my white 1994 Camry who has served me so well. Sat here in the back parking lot of this community college campus. Staring at the Academic center in front of me, eating leftover Mongolian barbeque and listening to National Public Radio, waiting until my next class.

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