Category: Before

This morning, drowsing in bed, not ready to get up after a late night. I hear a crashing sound, something like the recycling truck tossing recycling bins around or one of the giant yellow trucks that has been hauling loads of gravel up and down the street for a couple of months. Wait, why’d I think of recycling, that’s too specific. I bolt out of bed, dress, and drag my building’s bins out to the curb in record time.

The construction guys are out there. One truck has a shovel on the front – it picks up the balance of the gravel pile from across the street and drives away with it. There’s a woman standing in the road with one of those signs that says “Stop” on one side and “Slow” on the other. She spins it around restlessly. There’s no traffic and if there were they’d be more likely to respond to the yellow menace than the sleepy flagger. The truck with the shovel returns, it dumps a load of gravel across the street.

I take a shower, sure that I missed the recycling pickup for the second time this month, meaning we’ll have another $12 fine. I fix myself a cup of tea and contemplate the next problem.

I crippled my computer yesterday. I was zealously collecting banner advertisers’ domain names to block using the hack I just learned about. But I forget one rule – the list must be fewer than 2000 characters long. Now, when I log in, I have access to my tool bar for about ten seconds, time enough to launch one application, then my desktop disappears. I knew that the problem was in my registry files, so last night I hunted around using Ultra-Edit, but I didn’t know what I was doing.

I finish my tea and have a bowl of cereal. I sit, feeling useless and stupid, and listen to the Jim White CD.

On the way to the internet cafe, I have a peak at neighbors’ recycling bins – they haven’t been emptied. The truck hasn’t come yet. I will have no problem there.

And, from the cafe’s computer, I will find the Microsoft Knowledge Base article to help me fix my Windows problem.

It’s looking like a good day.

I just had a look at my site from here and it looks totally different. I have the browser use its default font, and I kind of like how that works. Maybe I could trick the page out to use a handful of fonts semi-randomly.

I overheard part of a conversation where a girl suddenly listed off things that she has never done, while her companion read the “Musician Wanted” ads in the Stranger out loud (“Bass player, bass player, bass player, Christian bass player.”):

She has never been to a wedding.
She has never taken acid.
She never graduated from high school.

Today, after getting a haircut at Rudy’s, I headed down to Bauhaus where I sat and read the new issue of the Stranger.

When I was finished, I looked up at the people lounging around. At least two-thirds of them had a copy of the Stranger open in front of them. I looked over at the newspapers piled up next to the cash register. There were three neat stacks of Strangers – each at least four feet tall.

I was bemused to have validated what I’ve suspected all along: I’m a cliché.

I thinned out a few books and CDs today and hauled them away to sell.

Aside from clinically examining the CDs and putting them into little stacks, the guy at the CD store made no motions to indicate that I was present. He rejected a few (I’ve misplaced them at some point) and paid out slightly less than they should’ve gone for.

I have a nodding acquaintance with the bookstore employee. She’s a cartoonist. I went off and skimmed Graham Greene’s autobiography while she went through my books.

When she was done, she came up and said, “Did you know you’ve got some really good books?”

“Do you mean they have some value?”

“No, you have some interesting books. The book of Paul Auster’s poems looks interesting. Poetry’s not my thing, but I’m going to have to check that out.” Then she asked, “Are you a cartoonist?”

We’ve had this conversation before. There were a few comics among my sendoffs and because comics are so marginalized, cartoonists assume that anyone who reads comics must also make them. “No.”

She looked at me like I was withholding some information. “I mean I used to draw and I’ve done a few pages.” But the answer is really no.

Shut off the PC, go outside, and soak in the sun. The most direct rays are at noon. It’s nice and comfortable about now, and the sun will resist the horizon until after 9. We’re in extra innings until almost 10.

This is the perfect spot.

Most of my reading has been pretty uninspiring recently. Mostly I think that’s because I haven’t been keeping as focused on what I’m reading since I’ve taken so much time off. I have plenty of time to read – so why don’t I just read later, I think. If I were doing much else, I’d be more focused while reading since it’s time away from working.

I don’t like where this is going, I guess this means that I read for escape rather than for some mind-nourishment reasons. Or maybe having free time brings out lazy tendencies in me.

I just dropped the book that I’d spent at least two weeks with (which was pretty good) and picked up Calvino’s The Watcher. I’ve zipped through it in two days.

Now I think I’m going to change my story. I blame habit. I was really digging Calvino when I was reading his books last year, I think that a couple of more books will charge me up and get me going again. I’m not equating speed-reading with satisfied reading, I’m saying that I go through books more quickly when I’m especially engrossed in them. Pacing feeds attention, attention feeds pacing.

Okay, I’m going to change the direction of this thing one more time. I’m looking over my bookshelf and noticing a few books that I’ve read recently, zipped through, and really enjoyed. I’m probably not doing as badly as I thought, it’s just a temporary lull.

There’s something to what I said about habit though. I just put on Meat Puppets/Too High To Die and it’s putting me in a certain frame of mind – not exactly the frame of mind I’d have while listening to it in 1994, kind of neo-1994 though.

There’s a little door in the wall of my bathroom that accesses some plumbing and some space in the wall. Since I painted, the door hasn’t been able to latch securely. Recently my neighbor (who I guess has a similar door) started storing boxes in there. They’ve bumped against my door a couple of times & popped it open. So I was fiddling around with it today, trying to make it fit better so I could use the latch. I noticed that on the inside of the door, in red pen, someone has written “i [heart symbol] u sena” & the names “Sena”, “Jeff”, and “Baker” as the three corners of a triangle.

Now I remember that, when I moved in, there was a little “Sena Marie” in a circle painted in red on one living room wall. The “i” was dotted with a little heart.

I didn’t meet the man who had my apartment before me. I know that he lifted weights and I know he was on the mailing list for a baseball equipment catalog. His name wasn’t Jeff or Baker. I’m afraid this leaves more questions asked than answered. Is there a Jeff Baker? Who is Sena? What’s with the cutesy shorthand?

Yesterday I walked down to the waterfront. Pier 61/62 is closed – loaded down with construction for Summer Nights at the Pier – so I walked south to the piers with the tourist shops.

I watched things happening in the sound. A boat headed out from the next pier and let someone out into the sky on a parasail that had “Visio 2000” printed on the side. A single jelly fish inched its way through the water. A couple, speaking German, walked by.

There’s a semi-enclosed area filled with as many plastic tables and chairs as will fit. Scattered among the tables, there were a handful of tourists sipping beers, sometimes with dazed looks in their eyes. There are places like this everywhere I guess. A gaudy spot for tired tourists to sit when they’ve walked to far, have had enough museums for a week, or killing a couple of hours before going to the train station next train – considering what they’ll do in the next city.

I did that last summer – Champs-Elysées, the Mexican restaurant in Vienna, and the Franz Kafka Cafe in Prague? If I did, that’s not how I felt. I felt really good (when I wasn’t figuring out if it was correct to seat myself – yes – or pay for my tea immediately – sometimes), worn out in a good way, confused but not defeated. I’ll have to explain this better another time.

Later I went to the film festival screening of The Princess and the Warrior at the Egyptian. The director and the star of the film were there for a little Q&A after – they were the German couple I’d barely noticed at the pier.

“It’s not like she skips school to go banging or to sell drugs. She just likes to skip. But she’s square. She’s hella’ square.”
-A girl to her friends On Pike near the market

I’m crossing Pine at Broadway toward SCCC. A teenage couple is in front of me, their shoes are making clicking sounds against the pavement. When they hit the sidewalk, the boy steps forward onto his right heel and pushes off with his left foot. He coasts a few feet and repeats on the other foot. The girl follows right behind him. They have wheels set into the heels of their shoes.

Caffe Minnie’s is the place where people go to eat at odd hours. Each dish has a pile of fried potatoes scattered over one side of the plate, and all of their food pretty much tastes just like those potatoes. Though, more than one person has reported that the tomato soup is excellent.

My sleep patterns got all out of whack after a long nap on Wednesday. I had a night of tossing & turning, reading, and pacing around, so I gave in and headed out for a bite at around six. I ordered an omellete and a cup of Darjeeling; and settled in to read the Stranger. The food arrived – and I worked through the heavy omelette, and picked through the dry potatoes. That was just about right.

They serve a small scone with breakfast and it’s a pretty nice piece of work. Mine had a single currant right in the center.

The food doesn’t matter, I sat there and watched Broadway. The clouds hung over us, foreshadowing the coming day of uninteresting weather. No one walked by the window. Aside from the deliverers of the newspapers, who were long gone by now, there were few signs of life.

I finished a second cup of tea and headed back home. Walking back up Broadway, I saw the first signs of commerce – brief glimpses of slow movement in a few shops. The Gap girls folding t-shirts. The old guy cleaning up at Dick’s.