A pound of strawberries had been my breakfast staple for workdays for most of last year. I think I shall move on from this tiny but beloved ritual. They have become too expensive, the task of transporting them in my already cluttered bag had always been problematic, and frankly, I just don’t care for the inconsistency of the product anymore. One piece will be perfect, the next will be like a dead frog. Some are moldy, others not. There will be insects, which I can simply flip away, but I don’t have to. Not anymore, since strawberries are OUT for 2024.
What next for breakfast? How about nothing? The common lie, told for generations, that breakfast is the most important meal of your day, is in fact nothing more than a Kellogg’s tagline intended to lure you into eating more cereal. Breakfast is no more critical to your day than any other foodstuff, and I may go ahead and just skip it altogether for now. Today’s effort involved a bagel with sausage egg and cheese. It was like rubber, and cost $5. But the experience was worth it. The vendor is nice, asks questions without being nosy, and gives me a knowing grin when another customer is being a pain in the ass. It made me feel connected to something. I was on William Street, looking up toward the Supreme Court building, then over to the other side of the street where construction workers have been moving pipes and scaffolding around for weeks. I wish I had their job, sometimes. A job where I move, and do not sit at a desk most of the day.
I was in bed early for NYE. I like the holiday but don’t care for the all-night aspect. New Years Day is, by my reckoning, the only holiday that everyone can agree on. There is no politics, no controversy, no real axe to grind over what is nothing more than an arbitrary day to have a good time and be happy with your fellow strangers. I still regard the Y2K celebrations among the high points of humanity in my lifetime. One by one, each country or time zone took the stage to celebrate the arrival of a day. Would that we did this every day.
I worked New Years Day. It was painfully boring, and I am yet to find fulfilling ways to silence the screams in my head when boredom rains. I try writing poetry but it is bad. I wrote some nasty screeds aimed at a couple of people who have reentered my life, unannounced and uninvited. Some people just don’t know when to leave well enough alone, when to let a former friend/lover go. I cannot believe one of these women is 75 years old now. Wow.
I would like to write more but it is very cold in this psace. I am in contact with another documentary filmmaker doing a film about something near and dear to me, to which I already donated countless hours to the coffers of another documentary filmmaker. That was before Covid. Things changed with that. But the landscape of this subject matter has also changed significantly.
