It’s a classic cuisine. Classic breakfast splatter. 16oz, organic Driscoll’s strawberries. Price varies day to day but this batch cost $1.50 at a fruit stand on my street. The exact same product would be 3 or 4 times that price across the street, at the chain grocery store.
My earlier weekend breakfast ritual, of a cheese omelette and sausage patty from Jubilee on John and Gold, I think that little tradition has ended. Jubilee has no seating and I came to find eating in the public space at 100 William Street to be less than comfortable. There had been outdoor tables at a space on GOld Street but they seem to have vanished to make way for some renovation
Part of the joy in that ritual was when the dude behind the counter always remembered my order, even if I didn’t show up there for a few weeks. I don’t know why I take comfort in that but I do. I do I do I do.
Exiting the 4 train at Fulton Street today I put my glasses on, looked around, and found that I had made this little journey with several people I would never recognize should our paths cross again. I don’t know how many people populated the subway car. 20? One woman had long fingers and maroon nail polish, white shorts, flip flops and very long toes, and a sad but anticipatory look on her face. Two men exited the train in front of me, continuing a conversation that included the word “annoying.” I don’t like the word. It reeks of privilege. But I use it anyway. Last night I got the wrong train to Astoria. I got the R thinking it was the W and I didn’t think to check until I heard “Queens Plaza” instead of “Queensboro Plaza.” That’s when I knew I’d fucked up, and that the walk on Broadway from Steinway Street to 29th would, as each step accumulates in quantity, become more and more annoying. The monotony of these additional steps needed to get from transit to safe at home starts to feel endless.
So many of these little agonies being lived all around us, all the time, never stopping to breathe. How we suffer for our mistakes.
Dreams last night included rail-thin women rushing up to me on a street and threatening to strangle me, but not strangling or even touching me. Another dream included a page from a novel with numerous hand-written comments and annotations defiling the printed page. I joke about these notations representing “defilement” but it comes from my belief as a pianist that there is virtually never a reason to annotate a printed score with hand-written indications, fingers, or anything else. If you want to learn the music you will.
I found a Bible once. It was my father’s, passed down from his grandmother. I don’t recall dad being religious at all, and my possession of this Bible was not the culmination of a ritualistic momet where the family Bible was one day ceremoniously given unto me. I absquatulated with it.
Finding it was intriguing, though. There were pencil-written notes throughout, nothing i can recall now, but enough evidence to prove that someone had actively engaged with the Bible. It surprised me to think that my father would have done this. Maybe someone else had possession of this Bible? His brother? A cousin?
None of those parties wrote the notes upon that Bible. All those etchings came from me. I must have been 10 or 12, maybe older, when I first attempted to travel the full distance of the Bible. However old I was back then I had no memory now of that journey, or of the teeny-tiny comments I made in that very tightly-printed volume.
Last night’s dream reminded me of that Bible. I don’t know where the crazed-seeming women threatening to strangle me came from, but I have been corresponding with a dominatrix, now out of town for a few days. She really lit something up in me but I suspect I already bore her, and lack a financial basis to keep her interested. I don’t care. Doms are not hard to find.
A woman was clearly reading over my shoulder yesterday, a text exchange with the dom which opened with “Hello love.” Everything else was pretty routine stuff but the woman reading our little correspondence seemed like she was finding it hard to look away. There was one sexual reference in that screen of conversation. Enough to keep the eavesdropper intrigued, I suppose? Enough to make her consider me as a sexually viable entity for her consideration, for her imagineering. Did the blowjob reference in our chat lead this bystander to imagine sucking me off the way this woman casually referenced doing?
I sometimes look over people’s shoulders when they’re texting, or doing whatever. I never see anything interesting. I do not consider myself a voyeur, either, but seeing someone’s screen just ends up being something inevitable that happens on a crowded train or bus. Much of what I see is not in English. To iterate, though, I don’t troll around looking for people’s screens. It just happens sometimes, as happened to this woman yesterday who found herself positioned just where she could quickly read this conversation between myself and the woman I’ve been playing with. I did not care. No names were shown and no harm was done by letting this woman unwittingly dip in to a detail or two about 2 peoples’ casually carnal conversationalism.
Everything is everywhere. I thought of the creatures scurrying through a patch of bushes outside an apartment building this morning. What were they doing? Where were they going? Did they go underground or stay above, camouflaged by the leaves? What was their plan for the day? What of the small anthills I spotted on the sidewalks? Why did they emerge where they did, on those spots? What plans do the ants have for us? What are they doing now, that I have no oversight of their movements? They behaved differently as I passed, I think. I can’t know that but it seems likely that a towering creature stomping past might strike some sense of dismay or panic into these tiny beasts.
