Crossed paths with two exes the other day, within a few minutes of each other. One isn’t really an ex. That was L., the Dalliance, the Huge Mistake Averted, the Bullet Dodged. I changed direction to avoid anntoy kind of encounter, and I’m reasonably sure she noticed. But I don’t even care. The only takeaway from that sighting was that she had a spritely bounce in her gait. She looked happy and confident. That’s the L. I thought I would be getting but I was wrong.
So a few minutes later I noticed A. standing outside a restaurant, smoking a cigarette and talking to another woman. I have absolutely no problem with A. but I happened to have bumped into her a couple of weeks earlier, at the Trade Fair. When I first saw her at the Trade Fair she was CRYING. She said her brother had moved away and she depressed over that and other things. She messaged later to apologize for dumping all her shit on me. We said we’d meet up for coffee sometime, but we probably never will. So when I saw her again a couple of weeks later I didn’t see any reason to go out of my way to say anything.
A middle-of-the-night text storm from my old friend M. was really quite excellent. We probably talk two or three times a year. M. was Sandra’s best friend, and we talked some about that. I had no idea M. was aware I’d slept with Sandra those two times. I should not be surprised, as they seemed like the type of friends who told each other EVERYTHING. But M. gave no signal whatsoever that she knew about all that. She was saying last night how infatuated I was with Sandra, and that Sandra knew full well. But we would have been a trainwreck of a couple. Given lifestyle differences I think we’d have been maybe even worse than the disaster I avoided with L. I really was infatuated back then but those feelings evaporated a long time ago.
…
Went for what should have been about a 90 minute ramble out to the location of the DETEX Watchclock Station in which I hid a couple of my website calling cards. It turned out to be an almost 4 hour ramble not on account of me having such a fabulous time but because streets and sidewalks in West Maspeth were closed off such that even on foot they were impassible. The closures were in the area under and around the Kosciuszko Bridge. The roads are being redone under the new bridge, and there are basically no sidewalks to speak of on Laurel Hill Boulevard.
But the fun began over by New Calvary, where I discovered that the Q67 bus no longer operates on weekends. This is contrary to the published schedule, effective earlier this summer. In the past the Q67 was kind of a ghost bus which, at a driver’s or supervisor’s whim, would simply not do their scheduled route. This seemed especially true on weekends, making it strangely appropriate that they just altogether gave up running the Q67 on Saturdays and Sundays.
The scary part was trying to get over to Woodside using the pedestrian overpass that twists and turns its way from Laurel Hill Blvd. over to 43rd Street. Only after walking the entire length of that overpass could I see that the sidewalk path to Woodside was fenced off. Why did they even allow me to set foot on that overpass?
So I had to make my way clear back to Old Calvary, near Review Avenue. At this point I’m thinking Uber but I don’t really want to spend the money and most of where I was standing at that moment was either inaccessible to cars or had no street address. I’ve read somewhere that Uber requires an exact street address? I don’t know…
On the way back to Calvary I encountered a trucker who was maintaining his rig curbside. That’s actually illegal but it’s rarely enforced and I see it happening all the time on that street. The trucker asked if I knew where there was any food around there. I couldn’t think of anything that would be open on a Sunday except for Bantry Bay, the bar/restaurant on the other side of the cemetery. That’s about as much as a mile walk from where we were standing, a distance which seemed prohibitively far to this person. If that pedestrian overpass was useful I’d have pointed him that way. But having just come through West Maspeth I could give the guy good advice that nothing was opened.
As often happens with me it did not enter my mind until it was too late what I should have done. I should have given him a sandwich I’d been carrying in my bag for about 3 hours. That would have been the generous, thoughtul thing to do but I just didn’t think of it until I was too far gone.
I also could have suggested he try GrubHub or something similar for an unusual delivery location, assuming he had appropriate apps on his phone.
But I missed a chance to help a guy out. Oh well. At least it was a friendly exchange lamenting what a desert stretch of land we were in.
My impatience with all this walking around in giant circles disipated when I got to Calvary. The path back to AsLIC should now, I would think, be unimpeded by random street blockages. And I spotted some new developments of which I was unaware. They got rid of the paved roadway along the eastern end, which ran along Laurel Hill Boulevard. The former roadway will now host what looked like hundreds of new burial plots. I thought it might be another columbarium like the one at new Calvary but it looks like more traditional graves. They also finally finished repaving much of the roads, which they’d been working on for what seemed like over a year.
It was that Q67 missing that really gets me, though. I sent an email to the MTA asking WTF but they’re probably just going to ignore it. I’ve had this feeling before in that area where it seems like I could just collapse or disappear into some overgrown bushes and no one would know until the vultures came out. It is one of urbanity’s paradoxes that this could happen in one of the biggest most densely populated cities in the world.
I went out for the exercise, because I have not been doing my epic walks of late. Trying to clean up and link up my web world again. It’s slow going and tedious that’s why they call it work.
Saw an astoundingly handsome rooster at New Calvary. Got pictures but haven’t copied them over yet. That’s one of the most beautiful animals I’ve seen, not that I see a lot of wildlife.
