More than just a coffee shop, I guess, but coffee is all I usually get here. Recording the sound of this place and of my fingers typing to provide ATMOSPHERE. Heh.
Walked to Rainey and back, checked on the cars, checked on the payphone. I wonder if it is enough of a habit among people to say that there is a culture of people who go to the river simply to stare at shopping carts and discarded electronics, checking in to see if these objects of detritus have moved since the last time they were seen. I saw someone utterly staring at a set of Costco shopping carts today, like they were critically important to him.
Wow, just made eye contact with a woman I worked with at corporate long ago. She is one of two women from that time in my life who I see around here once in a while. The other woman was, when I knew her, exceptionally nasty to her husband the one time I saw them together. It was hard to believe, actually. This woman I just saw seemed nice enough when I knew her but incompetent at her job, and she got fired soon after I started. I mean she really had no fucking idea what she was doing. Today I see her doddering about, picking through trash cans and looking lost. She just looked right at me and, as I sometimes consider when I see that other woman, I wonder if she recognizes me, even just a faint glimmer of recognition from the caverns of her mind.
She lives on this street, if her comings and goings from and to a house a few blocks down are any indication. I do not stake her out or make any kind of project of following her around, she just appears very frequently, as do I. On that basis of simply seeing each other around enough maybe she recognizes me anew, unaware that we have a slight past in common.
Hah, one of the products made by the company we worked at was ANEW.
My mother has filled my dreams the last few nights. Last night’s dream featured individuals from every chapter of my life, not necessarily individuals significant to me. My mother tried to make we wake up at about 8:30, but I knew not to listen to her because her presence there was impossible. Even if she were alive she never had a key to the apartment and it was locked such that she could not have entered anyway, even with a key.
I cannot remember her other appearances now but they were earnest and complicated.
Friend called last week to remind me that it was the day of his 20th wedding anniversary. We both laughed heartily, as his marriage lasted less than a year, and since its abrupt end he never heard from her again. “She wasn’t very nice,” he has often said, this time adding “but then neither am I, maybe.” He was early 40-something to her early 20-something, which should not constitute a warning sign in and of itself, but the constituency’s steadfast sticking to their ways seems to have made the union impossible right from the start.
I told him a story I never told him before. Years after the wedding (which I attended, and at which I played piano) I was at some other event where, it turns out, I was wearing the same jacket I wore to the wedding. I discovered this when I reached into the coat pocket and found a pin with a photo of the bridge and groom, a pin which was worn by everyone at the wedding.
He busted out laughing so hard when I told him this last week, saying “That jacket is cursed, get rid of it!” I described how, when I discovered the pin in my pocket, I handled it like a hot potato, quietly emitting an earnest “Gaaaaah!” sound.
He cheerily added something I never knew, that for whatever regrets he had at ever being married in the first place he did save at least one of each party favor from the wedding, including (he assumed) the pin that I still have. I offered to give him mine if he found that his was missing, which drew another bellylaugh.
The funny thing is that before the wedding there was a similar kind of wtf moment of randomness. He had been with a woman around his age for a few years, I think, when he suddenly and abruptly ended it, dumping her for this much younger woman in spectacular manner, feeding the ever hungry gossip markets of their mutual acquaintances.
I had known this woman somewhat as an acquaintance. She was perfectly nice, and I’ve lost any memory of what went wrong between them. Whatever the case, a few weeks after the wedding was announced I got a call from him, but he did not leave a callback number. So I called him at the last number I had written down for him. A woman answered. I asked for Jack. Her voice curled up into a ball of crud as she whimpered “Nooooo…” Not realizing who I was talking to I asked “Oh so this must be Sally…” “Nooooo… this is Emily.” I realized that I had called Jack at his ex-girlfriend’s number, and she was none too happy about it but mentally adroit enough to not blame me for the mistake. In fact we talked and talked for well over an hour. At the end of the call she invited me over to her place, an offer I eventually accepted, fully aware of the potential for weirdness.
i don’t think she had vengeance in her heart but if she and I went to become an item it might have made for a bitter retort to being dumped so dramatically.
She called me the next day to say it was great hanging out, let’s do it again, but I never called back and never heard from her again.
I told Jack this story and his reaction was similar to last week’s anxious bellylaugh, but at the time I think it was a liittle too close to the events of the breakup and the wedding and the quick divorce for anything that came from all that to be genuinely amusing.
