The effects of altered consciousness on hypertext

this is my gift to you:

I just went for the type of walk where, if someone were to approach, you'd think to yourself, "I certainly hope to have the occasion to interact with this person, so that I may tell them how good I feel," and I heard the crickets and grasshoppers and cicadas all chirping and sucking up the swamp ooze and it was generally the good type of walk. On my way across the street, I noticed the thoughtfulness of the people who'd thought to put a friendly walk/don't walk sign before me, and of the people in the ambulance that was speeding past off on its way to save a life. I noted, with a slight bit more cynicism, the thoughtfulness of the people who put up the signs in the park, around the swamps, that the water was entirely unfit to be used in any capacity for human enjoyment. So you can imagine my cynicism at the park bench where I sat, which was tagged "MSX3-LPS", which is code around here for a bunch of high school kids who think they are in a real gang (I guess depending on your definition of "real gang" they were, but I sincerely doubt the Langley Park Squad of MS-13 is centrally recognized), which was a good deal (of cynicism that is), though not nearly enough to even put a pin prick in the amount of enjoyment I was having on that walk. Other things that could not even dent the enjoyment of my walk: the hot hot sun, the realization that I lived in a swamp and was right there with the cicadas and grasshoppers sucking up the swamp muck just to exist, the exhaust fumes from the road.

But one particular instance that did not at all hamper my enjoyment of my walk was this: some black kids, a few years younger than me, maybe younger were all hanging around a car in a parking lot. I remember noticing this because I had just noted that nobody in the parking lot would want to talk to me, because clearly if they were in a parking lot, a space that exists solely for transistence*, they had better places to be, but these kids clearly looked like they had no better place to be. As I walked by, one of them said something. I couldn't quite hear, so I walked up to the car, put my arm on the giant advertising sign they were parked next to, and said "what's up?"

He said, "Wanna buy a nextel? $10."

I said, "No thanks, I don't need a nextel. Then I hung around a little longer than I think I was supposed to, just kinda hangin, then told them to have a good one.

The importance of this encounter is twofold:

1) No matter where you go, you can't enjoy yourself without being offered a Nextel. Real life is just like the internet. Ok, this is not that important. BUT

2) The best way to have confidence is to act like you don't have any place better to be. This may be relevant to the several people on this forum (and there have been several, though I'm not gonna go count) who have asked how they can build/have/look like they have confidence. But so consider the possible transients of that parking lot:

a) a person there to park his/her car to get groceries, no purpose other than transistence, for the most part

b) a person walking through the parking lot to go somewhere. Understand that this person has a considerable bit more social baggage than the person merely parking their car, namely that they don't, for whatever reason, have a car, which is not insignificant in a commuter suburb such as mine

c) the person there for business. Generally, if you're walking some place that you feel like you're not supposed to be walking, and you see someone else there who is not doing the exact same thing that you're doing, or that other people are doing, you know they're up to something be it mugging people or offering people nextels, but they, unlike you, have an entirely legitimate reason to be there

d) the person there because this is seriously one of the most awesome walks he/she's ever been on and really any human interaction could only make it better, and even slightly nonhuman business interaction at least offers some amusement

I can tell you that there was at least one person in that parking lot feeling uncomfortable, and I was not one of them.

*transistence, n - the property of existing in a place, but only for the purpose of existing somewhere else, see Zeno's Paradox of the arrow