Copy Shop Episode 2

Previously on the Copy Shop: Our hero sees a girl crying in a copy shop. He asks her what is wrong. She thinks that he is a perv, after all he's 40. She breaks down and tells him about the scraps in the bin that the lawyers leave every morning after they make copies.

Are they supposed to do this? Leave these what … errors? Leave them in the trash can for any angry, repressed coed to find and read and get emotional about? I don't think it's legal for them to do that, but hey, it's not fiction, this shit really happened.

You see our hero's name is Elwin. He's program faculty, as it's called. He has two MAs in English but no PhD. Why is this? Because he argued with professors all the time (these dolts value Victorian literature merely because time has past, not based on real criteria; you see, it's junk soap opera crap) and even though he squeaked by in two-year degrees, there's no chance of making it through a four-year degree with a painful dissertation. No way. Because he's not terminal (degree-wise, not cancer-wise) he can't even think about tenure. That's not the whole story though, either, you see, Elwin is teaching University Seminar classes. These classes are supposed to teach incoming students the basics about the university, about learning, about reading and writing. Either way, Elwin teaches differently and it pisses off older faculty and they sit around the break-room and they speculate: "Is it safe to have younger per-course faculty that students think are funny? Because yes they like him, but he's not prepared for class. Freshman need a slap in the face and discipline, not creativity and fun. The problem with freshman, to be sure, is not that they lack the ability to learn, it's that they lack the ability to wake up in the morning. Discipline first. Maybe we should bring back the yard stick …"

I guess the story isn't really about Elwin. Comparatively speaking, he's a normal guy. He has normal parents living on the East Coast. He has two sisters that love him despite his penchant for calling children "food for homeless people." They have children and he doesn't, so one would think this would not go over well, but it does. They love him anyway and they send poorly-imagined gifts on holidays and they invite him to come visit. He never does. He's a normal guy who plays video games, talks to girls at the rec center, wants to someday become a famous writer although he doesn't really know what the hell he would write. Kerouac? No, that was an accident. Vonnegut? Probably not, he's deceptively thorough about research and history. Salinger? No, that was a one-off. How does one do it, he often thinks? But no answer comes to mind. He's a normal guy, a little short, thinning hair, not serious enough about his life at forty … But that's not our story.

Our story is on the scraps of paper, the legal copies in the trash bin, the bits and pieces with weird loopy script in the margins. Speaking of Kerouac, the guy in the story is named Jake. Jake lives in St. Louis of all places. It's a green, seasonal city with a bad reputation for class struggles and crime. Which is true, by the way, but as is often the case it is not the whole story. He's a creepy guy with no direction, like Elwin sees himself, I suppose. So when Elwin, the program faculty teacher, starts to read the script from the trash can, he does two things: 1) he think of Diogenes, his hero, who lived in a trash can in ancient Greece and threw his poop on people that walked by and 2) began quickly to empathize with Jake.

I guess it makes more sense to just let you read some of the scraps.