At a Starbucks, where an impossibly beautiful woman is sitting directly in front of me. Good God, thank you for this. One day I will attempt to articulate my relationship with beauty. Long story short: It doesn’t go far with me, and even serves as a hinderence in getting involved with somebody (as if I presently have even the remotest interest in getting involved with anybody… hah). But man oh man she is hard to look away from. Nothing wrong with looking, the conventional wisdom goes…
I do not generally worry about my general safety when at the cemtery but I am starting to think that maybe I should. Before today the only danger I felt exposed to was at Calvary, when I broke out of concentration to discover I was about two-thirds surrounded by geese, and they did not look happy to see me.
Today was a different scenatio, like something from a suspense film. I noticed a vehicle parked at a curb, with the driver side door open. From a distance it appeared the person was exiting the car, but very slowly. I took this to mean that the person was elderly, as is often the case with cemetery visitors. As I got closer I found that the person never fully exited the vehicle, at least as far as I could tell. The person was not elderly. It was a 20-something kinda punk looking kid with a really sketchy look in his eyes. He made direct eye contact with me for several seconds before hitting the gas and screeching off. You just don’t do that at cemeteries, go tooling around at high speeds. There were other people around the place but few and far between. At the moment I saw him a woman jogger passed by but anyone else I saw was way off in the distance.
When the kid in the car reappeared several minutes later I decided that he was making me just nervous enough that I would cut through Section 14, even though there was plenty of snow on the ground to make such a trek uncomfortable. As it happened a paved walkway magically appeared and I walked on that, looking for a path to the underpass that connects Calvary 2 to Calvary 4. It was hard to get my bearings while surrounded by tombstones obscuring the view. The sidewalk was narrow but on both sides it was surrounded by enough space that the car could easily have crossed, should this kid have some deranged desire to really run me down. I didn’t seriously anticipate that but I wanted to avoid making myself an easy target for a casual mugging or whatnot. So I got off the sidewalk and just slogged through the snow, which was even more of a hinderance than I would have expected. All I had eaten thus far was a plum and a multivitamin so I was not in top physical form… like I ever am… hah
I found the passage to Calvary 4 and looked all around for the car. In the distance I did see a car but its headlights were on, and I noticed that the car I was worried about did not have its lights on. I had escaped, though with uncertainty that I actually had good reason to do so. There is just so much space out there and virtually no people to be witnesses. It was with relief that I arrived in beautiful West Maspeth, where in addition to genuine urban blight there was plenty of human activity. People going to and fro.
I want to ask people sometimes: “Are you going to, or fro?”
The unbelievably beautiful woman has left, and is presently replaced by another beautiful woman whose frowning countenance and pesky tone of voice makes her beauty kind of evaporate. She is having a little pissing match with her daughter, or a girl I take to be her daughter.
I did a lot of talking today. it’s been good. My throat is feeling sore, which I had in mind as a goal, if only to get through roughing up my voice and strengthening it for future hours-long litanies. My unintentional fixation on grade school flirtations has me turning the perspective around. I am not looking through a window into my past. I am looking at a mirror, a two-way mirror through which those girls are frozen in time and still looking at me. Nothing has changed inside of this mind or this emotional compound. I can compartmentalize better and move on from things but the fundamentally fucked up, borderline OCD, emotionally frail human being that I am will never change, and manifest itself from day 1. I found Lily in the 1982 yearbook. She looked frighteningly like I remembered her, which is all the more surprising consider I cannot even remember the last time she crossed my mind. The significance of “Where are you going?” never really impressed itself on me until now.
The Starbucks girl is here. She practically lives here. I’ve seen her here for years now. I wonder who she is.
Unsettling incident earlier:Walking past Steinway Billiards I saw a derelict looking dude ahead of me, wearing short and no socks on a 40-degree day. Something was off about him, I thought, and my suspicion was confirmed when someone appeared from inside the pool hall and started repeatedly yelling “SCUMBAG!” at him. He was with someone who seemed to be concerned about the situation. I don’t know what happened but hearing “SCUMBAG!” in that manner and tone of voice was icky.
