I Suppose That Stands to Reason, Sort of.

Today I had a strange salesperson hiss at me Lucky Boy because he liked my watch and may have wanted one for himself. It was creepy, primarily because having someone hiss at you isn’t really all that great but also because I’m not much of a boy anymore and mostly because I haven’t felt particularly lucky in a very, very long time.

Today

Sometimes you’re just too tired to make anything into a semblance of sense. Last night I went to buy yogurt (store brand, two for a dollar, because I’m broke again and I’m trying not to feel too dark about it, really) and an old woman was in line in front of me, shuffling through six or seven envelopes, searching for the right one from which to pay her grocery bill of five dollars and change. The envelopes were each stuffed with cash and I took it as a mark of her character that she was insistent that she find the right one. Eventually, the cashier voided her items and started ringing me up. The woman bagging started to remove her groceries from the bag with the intention, I would imagine, of returning the stuff to the shelves for resale. She continued to shuffle envelopes then slapped the bag woman’s hand away from her items. She had found the right envelope. “I knew that I had it,” she said, “I knew the envelope was here.”

At this point, I had paid. I snaked my way around the woman and as I exited the store with my sad and cheap yogurt, she said again, “I knew that I had it. I knew it was here.”

Things That You Might Think En Route to Buy a Bag of Tuna

I had just left the gym and was walking to the grocery store when I noticed that something about the light had changed. It was still an ostensibly bright day out, just that the sky had filled with those far off clouds that seem to block the light yet at the same time refract it in some way, giving the day an ominous quality. Perhaps I was just feeling ominous. I mean I knew that this would likely be just another banal afternoon in a lifetime of banal afternoons, but I just didn’t feel right. I passed a house that either had put out early or had never taken in some Halloween decorations; a green witch statue and an orange plastic pumpkin on a porch in Queens at the end of August. It was one of those disorienting sights where you think that perhaps you’ve just lost a chunk of time. Is it October? Am I having some sort of Kafkaesque moment here on this cracked sidewalk? The feeling of dislocation was further cemented when a kid came out of a building a bit further down the street wearing a Dark Knight cape and mask. I was sweating, still, and had a caffeine headache, and I did not like that I’d chosen this street to walk down. Suddenly a thought came into my head. What happens when you’re forty and have nothing? It was forceful and gross and set aside my relatively acceptable musings that immediately proceeded it. What a question to ask yourself! What a question that I still cannot answer, here now, in my apartment, so I’ll try to set it aside for now. What else is there to do?

Blood Sugar, But Without Sex or Magic

I’ve been feeling somewhat less than great lately, perhaps some mid-August malaise that happens inevitably as my birthday approaches. I was heading home today when a wave of complete despair (yes, despair is a heavy-handed word here, but there you have it) came over me. I was thinking of a line from a Sylvia Plath poem (the hand gets heavier and heavier) I cannot see where there is to get to (from ‘The Moon and the Yew Tree’, I think) and then I proceeded to consider all the things that I’ll be doing to fill the time between here and now, all the pointless or exhausting or petty or potentially unrewarding things lined up, day-in day-out, until I die in a small apartment with cats somewhere. It was that particular time of night when everyone out seems like a couple, and I was carrying too many grocery bags and whatever I had been listening to on my headphones had ended but I didn’t have a free hand to choose something new and for a moment I just wanted to drop everything and walk away, or run or scream or cry.

But you can never do those things. So I went home and ate some nachos, because it can’t be that bad.

My Fatigue Has a Zip Car and Lozenges

It’s that large. It’s successfully filled out applications for things. I’m about to head into Forest Hills for dinner but what I really want to do is fall into a deep, air condition-lubricated sleep with my small and surly cat.

The Prize in the Salad

The man who looked like Henry Kissinger was seated in a restaurant in Chinatown. I was staring at him through the plate glass of the building’s front, certain he was the man who’d orchestrated American foreign policy for Dick ‘Cocksucker’ Nixon. In front of him was a salad of some sort, a collection of greens and lemon wedges, certainly not appetizing, but there you have it. He didn’t notice me, fortunately, as I’d just left the doctors office after some blood work and looked a little beleaguered. In fact, I looked a lot beleagured. It was easily ninety degrees out and I was wearing cut-off jeans and a tank top. With the band-aid stuck in the crook of my arm, I could have been mistaken for a junkie or a hooker or a hooker junkie. Or maybe just a kid pushing thirty with too many tattoos and sunglasses just to the left of too fashionable. The fact that I refer to myself as a kid at this late date might reveal more about my character than I would like, but nonetheless, there you have it.

Regardless, there I was, something of a mess, staring at the doppelganger of a former Secretary of State as he sat with a very odd salad. I was about to leave when he raised his hands and sank them into the greenery on the plate. He was remote and strangely resolute as he began digging, searching, turning the leaves and lemons as if they had hidden a prize somewhere and if he was studious and good, he might find it.

I Have Terrible Powers

Whenever I root for someone to win, they lose.

Something I Learned Today

Skinny jeans look stupid with flip flops.

Invasive Grey Things

Judging from my bedroom curtains, it seems likely that my lungs have enough cat hair in them to provide enough material for several socks.

The Screams in the Hallway

Were actually coming from 4F. Or rather the woman who lives in 4F, who was packing for a trip to Greece and noticed an “unfit” and “dark” man leering at her from the fire escape window. The police came and seemed nonplussed, but I suppose that is another of their responsibilities.