did not do so well today. and i will not get into details. was just really not doing well at all.
hope tomorrow will be better.
hmm... not the happiest entry somehow.
September 2008 Archives
walked back into that small shop, calling itself a department store. it is one of two places calling themselves that, on this particular mcdonald avenue block. the other one is more of a bodega really. the newly delivered tilde 10lb bags of rice inscribed with their new price $20.
this department store here sells mostly clothes and that almost orange gold jewelry that looks as if it were made of the purest, softest version of the metal.
i looked at the sale items, fabrics made with varying degrees of personal attention. looked at the prayer carpets folded under a photograph of mecca. not sure what else i looked at or for.
a woman with a small brown plastic bag began to pull out fists of gold onto the counter. the owner of the store moved the yellow treasure onto a scale behind him. he then calmly wrote down a number on a piece of paper and showed it to the woman. she looked at him, then just pulled more gold out of the brown plastic bag.
i did not feel like i was supposed to be there.
across the street three men were watching a politician on a television suspended over the entrance of the store. i slipped past them and towards the back. i butcher was cutting bones with a band saw. a skinned sheepshead, eyeballs still intact, rested on a bloodied block of marble. next to it some other, less recognizable pieces of lamb. some flies seemed to know what they were dealing with.
tilde rice was $19 here. that's less than across the street, a dollar more than i paid last week and about $8 more than the same amount cost me just a few months ago. the packaging is different now. perhaps it is rice from a newer harvest? perhaps this is the result of climate change on food prices hardly anyone is talking about these days.
i did not feel like i belonged here either.
a few blocks closer to home was the polish bodega. the old owner, marysienka (little mary) left because, as she once mentioned, of the worse and worse business recently. "polish workers used to come here when the dollar was stronger. they would find employment at the construction of villas mostly for sephardic jews. (the words she used were less specific,) now with the dollar weaker and weaker, it seemed that the work looked more attractive in europe. london and dublin were closer to home. and the work was in most cases more legal."
the new owner greeted me with a non hesitant "dzien dobry". i looked at some of the products, almost bought the "mother in law mustard"...
but i did not. i would come back. maybe. is this even worth mentioning?
the whole afternoon succeeded in pulling me into a darker and darker place.
i walked home, on church, walked home, across ocean parkway, taking the more dangerous crossing, the one where the one armed guy in fatigues, who looks like a vietnam veteran, often begs drivers arriving from manhattan for money. (at least on evenings when he is not riding his bike, miraculously healed of his amputation, on sidewalks around here.) i was just briefly surprised when he almost ran me over the other day.
need to take a better walk next time...
two english muffins and a bowl of matcha at sunrise. the air warm and in motion, short bursts of motion. then the sun marches up and on.
the lime trea seems to have survived last week's radical defoliation. there will be more leaves now. smaller, yet stronger.
jade trees will need to come indoors in probably a month.
the mother tree is now down to five individual plants and it might be time to separate them.
i should probably take the f train all the way to rockefeller center this morning. walking to the office by the lehman brothers building will most likely be a strange passage. perhaps i should not do that. perhaps it is not a good thing to do.
when tearing out lives from the neighborhood, will the ecosystem fail as well? will the shirt shop disappear? will the sushi restaurant have no clients? no more golden investment tips overheard at lunch?
in the evenings there will be fewer bicycles of delivery guys tied to the tree on 49th street?
as much as a tree can revive itself to bring back leaves, and as much as the air fills a gap opened by low pressure, things will stabilize somehow in some way at some point.
are we flies or are we trees?, mushrooms? mold?
it is such a luxury to be able to let the world pass through one's mind as if it were the dream of a larger self. the world is as complex as the filter that it is seen through.
dave recently mentioned two sayings. "a bear has many stories, but they are all about bears." and "when you have a hammer, all solutions look like nails."
i think i can see space from here. i wonder if it makes me an astronaut?
and the world peoples on.
the sky just turned a deep royal purple. and the edges of it are turning gold. the lights over king's county hospital look like three insanely bright gems.
what is it, what is it?
there must be something about today.
a pigeon just landed on the balcony, but not without actually hitting its head in a very unbirdy and clumsy way.
really. right now.
and i slept for only three hours or so.
will now go and have a brief talk with that pigeon.
