Tomorrow will be a walk day, I think. I have not done one of those lately. I do long subway and bus journeys, and a good amount of walking usually accompanies that. But I haven’t done a bridge walk in months, since cancelling the 181. I haven’t done a 181 run because the 181 is no more. Perhaps it has taken a new owner, or if not maybe I could reclaim it. But I don’t want it back. Don’t need it. I just wonder what interesting deliveries might arrive for the current/future owner. 

But tomorrow I walk. I was just out walking moments ago. A mild weather day after some rude rain. Tomorrow looks similar. Mild. Cold but calm, like my heart. Having worked down here for almost a year I find I’ve made no real connection or affiliation with the neighborhood. It is a lot of tourists, college students, and unbelievably wealthy tripping over the homeless and derelict. With the wealthy I will likely never have any affiliation. I am already priced out at the $10 beers at the bars around here, and do not feel like my class in society earns me the privilege of breathing their air.

There are a couple of hideaway spots I keep meaning to look into. A couple of chapels and some art installations. But mostly I just work. I like the work. I like being busy. But I’m getting nonchalant about things. I don’t care anymore. I keep my eye on the prize of making it a full year at this job and basking in the bountiful privileges and rewards that come with arriving at that milestone. Yeah… I lie. We all lie. The privileges of making it one year here are not magnificent. I arrive each day with the belief that  I might not make it to the end of the shift, and I clock out every day feeling it could be the last time I do so. 

But for this much ambivalence the conflict is that I love the job. I lose interest but I love what I do, what we do here. I feel like I am part of something, although this is paradoxically a lonely feeling place to be. Everybody is sequestered into columns of communication, conversations are very brief, and I’m yet to find anyone with whom I feel any kind of spark. 

Some of the women are beautiful, though. When I stared here I was in the midst of a pretty robust series of monogamous encounters/dalliances. It felt I could do no wrong, the women just came to me, and when they didn’t my pursuits were minimal. 

Enter this workplace and I got nothin’. One woman makes we weak in the gut any time I hear her voice. She just sounds so sweet and gentle, though she gives off a more extroverted persona. Another woman I can hardly look away from, such beautiful hair that reminds me of an ex’s. Because of my hair-locked eyes I move my workplace to other locations where she is out of view. There are three or four women here like that. I must look away.

Tomorrow I walk.