Author: Jeff

I checked the time as I was getting onto the bus, walking up the steps of one of the rear entrances. I tried to check the time – I made the usual arm flick to free the watch from my sleeve and I felt the weight of my watch suddenly disappear. I felt around in my jacket sleeve and looked down at the aisle. I retraced my steps to the door. The steps were clear and I didn’t catch a glimpse of anything that might be my watch on the dark sidewalk behind the closing doors. The bus pulled away and I sat down in the seat just across from the doors. Before I could decide between heading back to the last bus stop to make a more thorough search and figuratively throwing up my hands, I saw my watch resting on the floor by my feet. I guess my wrist flick had pitched it clear across the width of the bus. I inspected it. One end of the wristband had freed itself from the watchface. The pin that held it in place was gone. I noted the time and put the watch away in my pocket.

[I’m reminded of an encounter at a hostel in the UK a few years ago. I said hello to a guy who’d just walked into the dormitory-style room – he was a Welsh/Italian teenager. He started to respond, but was distracted because his watch chose that moment to fly off his wrist and smashed itself against the floor. I helped him find all the pieces and gave him a Zip-Loc bag to keep them in. My greeting and his watch-breaking seemed linked; I feel sure that if I’d said hello at any other moment, his watch would have stayed intact on his wrist.]

I went to Rite-Aid this afternoon to look at watchbands. The band for my $30 watch was expensive enough that I decided to take a quick look at new watches. They were on sale at 40% off. The price was right, so I switched my attention to buying a watch.

The things I appreciate in a watch are:

1. It should have a face clock. It shouldn’t be a digital watch.
2. It shouldn’t have a metal band. Metal bands will catch on your arm hairs and pull them out. (I’ve never had a watch with a metal band, but somehow I know that this is true.)
3. There should be a little window in the watchface with the day of the month showing through.

There were four watches that met these standards. One was the same model as my broken watch; I eliminated it first. I liked the nice crisp sans-serif numbers on another model, but decided against it. To the left of the day of the month window, there was a window that showed the day of the week, and for some reason I wasn’t comfortable with that. Of the remaining two watches, I chose the one that looked the least like my old watch. The design is clunky. The rim around the watch crystal is plastic instead of metal. The date showing through the little window is white on black – it’s barely readable.

I wear a clunky watch, which is fine, and I have broken watch in a drawer somewhere. That’s the state of things.

Something I just noticed, Lincoln Towing has a little Starfleet logo hidden in their sign. Odd.

Revisiting an old theme.

So many of the trees around town are growing out of the ground at odd angles. It’s like they have someplace to go.

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On Wednesday I joined Manuel and Tom for a photologger meetup. We met at Ancient Grounds, a really neat cafe that also serves as a Native American crafts gallery. It was pretty interesting.

An acquaintance scribbles the time and address of a party onto the last page of my notebook. “Bring a bunch of people with you,” she tells me, “Most of my friends are guys, so I’m worried that the mix will be a little out of balance. If any of your friends are girls, bring them.” Underneath the address, she writes, “Bring alcohol/girls!”, which sounds like it was written in a different spirit than I think she intended.

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I finish reading a book and get up out of my chair. A little slip of paper with the words “Inspected by 42” printed on it falls out of my lap, and I can’t really figure out what it’s from.

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A cartoonist who I recognize is shuffling past. His attention is completely consumed by the new issue of the Stranger. He’s flipping furiously through the pages, trying to find his illustration.

I shift the heavy bag from one arm to the other on the way home from the grocery store. There’s a late night barbecue spilling out into the sidewalk up ahead. It’s a quiet scene as it turns out. The full-size grill is on the sidewalk right in front of the path. Someone is turning a cut of meat over with a spatula. There are three or four people relaxing on the steps leading up to the most graffitied house on the block. I nod hello to nobody as I trespass through the barbecue, where the chilled spring air is mixed with charcoal smoke.

When I’d seen them up ahead, I had prepared myself for something less sedate – maybe a broken beer bottle on the sidewalk or a jeering comment thrown in my direction. But last night was a perfect evening for a tentative first barbecue of the year. They were doing the most sensible thing – sitting outside in their dark side street, setting up the barbecue on the most convenient plot of level ground, pointing at the sky and pointing out the Big Dipper as “The Great Dipper“.

A man walks by with a pair of overly-groomed dogs of identical pedigrees. They stumble ahead with their leashes stretched out behind them. The dog on the right – the one closest to the street – falls behind to investigate a bush. Two girls, sitting several feet away, stop chattering to giggle. The other dog continues ahead and stops to look back at his owner, who is now looking back at the first dog trailing behind him. That dog turns around – either because he wants to face away from his owner or because he favors peeing to the left. The man is left out in the middle of the sidewalk with his arms stretched out in opposite directions, with each dog waiting a leash’s length away. The dog lowers his leg and turns around. But he gets confused on the way back. He runs up to his owner’s left – the wrong side – his companion dog’s side. The man quickly swaps one leash for the other, untangling the leashes and they move on.

• Attractive women would prefer receiving more speeding tickets.
• Protestants are more suceptible to altitude sickness than Catholics, and Catholics are more suceptible to motion sickness than Protestants.
• Chefs on the east coast will only serve asparagus that’s been quartered lengthwise.
• A pimple in between the eyebrows is a sign of wisdom.
• Left-handed people are childish.
• Politicians read the comics first.
• Cat owners drink chocolate milk.
• Middle children finish their dinner more quickly than their older and younger siblings.
• Insomniacs are good at locating misplaced items.
• Doctors read to their children more than lawyers do.
• Sitcom writers prefer Pepsi to Coke.
• Smokers enjoy the company of celebrities.
• Men with uneven sideburns are untrustworthy.

I’d just gotten a new box of Sudafed and opened it on the way out of the store. I walked around the corner outside while pressing one of the little plastic bubbles so that the pill would break through the foil card on the other side. I tried to choke the pill down without a cup of water; it didn’t quite make it. It stuck to the back of my tongue and started to dissolve. The bitter medicine spread through my mouth. So I stopped under a bus shelter and concentrated on gulping the pill down. I continued down the hill, fishing around in my backpack for mints. I found the mints as I was crossing into the street. I cracked open the tin and the wind immediately caught hold of the little fold of paper wrapped around the mints. The paper blew out into the street and the mints went out after it. I ended up with an empty tin in my right hand and one mint in my left, not sure if I’d gotten hold of the mint before the tin’s contents blew out or if I’d caught it in mid-air.

The empty chair across the table from me jolted up against my leg. An empty chair at the next table was pressed up against my empty chair. The woman seated at the other table must have shifted in her seat, pushing her feet against her empty chair. The kick was amplified through the one chair, the next chair, and into my leg. She didn’t seem aware of it.

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Birds swarm around the pier in a jittery swirl of chirps. They pass overhead, zip down among the barnacle-encrusted pylons, and come up again from the side. Two seperate flocks come up from opposite sides. The groups collide and merge; and the combined group speeds away in a new direction.

The days are getting longer. The sun hangs out past the water in the west sky, resisting the horizon.