PriorBlog

The best thing about this little site is seeing how it ranks on search engines for specific phrases.  It’s become a little lesson in search engine optimization for me.  Well, not really, but one thing I like about it is how far up in google it has gotten my name.  It’s not that I want to be famous, I just want to be the most well known David Prior.  Some of the other David Priors I am up against: a preacher, an avant-garde composer, the guy that took Robert Gates’ place at Texas A&M when Gates became Secretary of Defense, some lawyer in Philadelphia, an embattled British pol, and some guy who works in films.  The flip side of this is that the more visible this site gets, the less likely I will ever be able to land another job.  In light of this, I would just like to send a message to any future employer who might be reading this, I have been working my balls off lately, staying up late on four different projects, plus my day job.  Consider what is more important to you: your hurt feelings over my calling the Dalai Lama a CIA backed fraud or having somebody who is such a hard worker he barely has time for his poor blog?  Good.  I’d like to start at $800k.

Last night Clark came over for dinner.  As usual, he also brought a bunch of stuff for me to read.  Most notably, the latest Tom Wolfe book I am Charlotte Simmons I think it’s called.  From what I recall, the book got lukewarm reviews at best, and after reading the reviews I pretty much decided I would never read the book.  But… Having the book in my hand reminded me of what it was like reading Man in Full.  It was damn fun!  That fun that I had, the sudden memory of it in the unexpected presence of Charlotte Simmons, came bullying itself into my mind, shoving aside all of those reviewers with their appetite for LITERATURE, and informed me that yes, I could in fact love the book if I wanted to.  So then I got it into my head that I would read it, only when, who knows.  I am still chipping away at Proust, halfway through Cities on the Plain.  Estimated time of completion for the series looks like June, and who knows what sort of whims I’ll be entertaining then.  Plus, there is no time, especially not since pretty soon, I am late starting already, I will be riding my bike into work, which means that my reading time on the 34E will be literally, if you think about it, out the window.
 
Speaking of the 34E, last night while we were on Washington Street my fellow passengers and I were witnesses to a man who was supposedly shot.  He was lying on the street, the traffic behind him stopped as a woman had halted them lest he get hit by another car.  Yes, he was hit by a car and shot.  We heard all about it from a kid who ran onto the bus and breathlessly gave us the details of the incident.  As best I can make out they went something like this.  They were crossing the street when a car hit his friend, who was the man prone in the middle of the street.  Somebody inside the car got upset for some reason, maybe the hit guy said something nasty to him after being hit.  Then, the storyteller said, there were gunshots from the occupants of the vehicle, and he ran away.  Somebody said to him, you mean you left your friend all alone, to which he responded (as if responding to his friend) “I ain’t gonna stick around and get shot which you.”  Despite the severity of the situation, this comment elicited a fair amount of laughs.  The kid then told about how after escaping from the gunfire he turned around to see that the bus was approaching, which he considered really bad luck, because the reason they were crossing the street in the first place was to get the 34E.  More laughs, a real comedy show at this point.  Luckily, the gunman’s car sped off just in time for him to run back to the stop and get on to tell us everything that happened before he got off about a half mile down the road.  I’ve been checking the police blotter for an explanation.  None yet.