I woke up with two words in mind. Ozone Park. Actually four words. Shave face, and then Ozone Park. I shaved face, then headed for the E train, thinking after all these years that it still stopped at the Steinway Street Station. It does not but the M or R will get to it at Roosevelt Avenue.
I did not make it to Ozone Park, but I expect to try again. It is one of those curiously-named areas I wanted to see since way back when I first moved here. I never got around to it. In August that area was in the news when a Muslim Imam and his assistant were shot and killed. OP was also where the first murder of 2017 occurred.
While I failed to make it there today I did get to uncover the other side of Hillside Avenue, which crosses from Briarwood over the forbidding (to a pedestrian) Van Wyck Expressway into Kew Gardens. It was cool. A lot of distinctive houses, some of which looked like something you’d find on a ranch. In Briarwood there is an Animal Hospital on Queens Boulevard that appears to have formerly been a large house.
I found Austin Street and thought I was in Forest Hills. I was not, but I unwittingly ended up walking right back to where I started, at the Kew Gardens/Union Turnpike subway station. There were a couple of those horrible LinkNYC monsters along the way. One of them worked, the other did not. God those things are ugly.
It has been another day where all women are beautiful to me. Damn it. All I can do is look away. The only trouble I have with that, looking away, is when I cannot tell if I am looking at a woman or a man. To say that I have trouble looking away is not to say that I gawk. It amounts to but an additional nanosecond of uncertainty reflected in a timid drifting of my eyes. I do not simply stop and stare. I look away. I always look away.
Speaking of nothing I would like to become an advocate for the renaming of the vagina. I consider it a term of misogyny, yet it remains in common usage. It derives directly from the Latin word for “sword sheath” or “scabbard”, suggesting that whoever transferred that word from Latin to English considered the female sex organ a place to stuff his, um, sword.
Then again I guess we can’t just have our swords dangling about. The two could be said to complement each other, symbiotic-like. Nah, I still find it repugnant. I never liked the word itself anyway. If I could be remembered for nothing else let it be that I advanced the cause of renaming the vagina.
I prefer “cunt”. Maybe I should incorporate this into my story by that name.
I was surprised to hear Joe Frank over the radio last night. I turned the radio on and pretty much by chance happened to land on 820 AM, a station I don’t listen to very often. I had heard from someone that he was still on the air, but the person who said this made it sound like Joe was doing new material. This show was an old one, from the ‘90s, and it was an absolute masterpiece. Hearing it through the crackling, rugged sound of the radio also brought some extra life to it. Today Joe posted on FB that he deleted a bunch of his postings there because he is working on something where he is not allowed to use material that was posted online. Isn’t he cheating on that by deleting it and telling whoever is concerned that it was never public?
I overheard two kids on the subway trying to agree on what places of business were located at 160th Street and I don’t know what intersection in Queens. They seemed to concur that there was a food court there but other than that I don’t think they reached a consensus. There was a notably fevered pitch to the discussion, but no barbs were thrown. One of the kids started touching the other.
I don’t have anything to say, do I? I am restless and jumpy, and need to get food. I am at the Bakeway even later than last time.
