I car pool with a friend of mine to work. We both
work downtown, our office buildings are one block apart. Anyway, on this
one particular day, in the
morning after we got out of the car I was walking by myself down the street from
his building to mine. As I went down the street, ahead of me on the same sidewalk
a woman was
going the same direction. She was pulling a small dolly and on it
were two boxes full of binders, one box stacked on top of the other. She
reached the crosswalk, and then she crossed the street, about 10 steps ahead of me, and once she reached the opposite curb,
and after her dolly was on the curb and clear of the crosswalk, the boxes toppled and
the binders spilled out all over the sidewalk.
I got to that corner shortly after this happened. I looked at the mess, thought for a second, then the walk light lit up for the direction I was heading, so I turned and crossed the street.
I had considered offering to help. I imagined the most logical scenario was that she would gladly
receive any assistance, especially offered by such a dashing young man dressed in
stylish modern finery.
But then I thought about the combination of the early hour and human potential for random paranoia and brittleness, and that quickly discouraged me.
Even though she was older than me, she was an attractive woman, and good looking people seem to get brittle and paranoid pretty fuckin quick as the young world loses interest in them.
Now, I don't want to try and help and then have it blow up in my face, so I do nothing.
How gallant of me.
Last night I had gotten a good nights rest, I exercised at the gym, didn't do any drinking, ate a good dinner.
Despite all of this I am tired this morning. Before my first cup of coffee I take a short nap in the bathroom at work.
Its not the most comfortable, I have to sit on the toilet seat lid and lean on the handicap
bar beside the toilet.
Once I start on it the coffee eventually wakes me up, which in my present work environment probably isn't
going to make anything any better.
One of the women I work with is worried that I have been avoiding her. I can detect this anxiety from
the not so subtle clues in her behavior. The anxiety is probably influenced by the fact I haven't spoken directly to her in months.
As a matter of fact, I am avoiding her, mostly because she is an unbearable
fucking whiner, which if that wasn't reason enough, now she is also expectant
around me hoping for some indication that I approve of her. A conversation
with her promises to be nothing but effort on my part to comfort a whiner.
I would rather have 2 angry cobras slapped on the face and dropped into my pants. I see her looking at me, hopeful that I will initiate a conversation, I decline to do so for the 50th time.
She looks away dejected, a tea cup of relief washes over me. The rest of
the morning I try to decide what I am going to eat for lunch. On any given
day, if I don't begin thinking about this by 10 am I won't have a decision made
before 1:30. I have eaten at almost every business that serves food in a
10 block radius of my office. My final decision is to eat lunch at the city center food
court.
Lunch time comes and I walk over to the food court in the city center mall, which is about 10 blocks away from the building where I work.
The food court is a fucking menagerie. Its pretty much the exact same crowd you would see on any downtown city bus around 10 am. Every species of weirdo that could be drawn into the downtown center who commands the wealth to purchase a lunch at an express Arby's is represented here. Overweight young women with shiny curly hair pulled back, dressed in clothes that leave little to the imagination, and for the most part make me nauseous, carelessly push baby carriages directly into other peoples paths, sometimes shins. They usually are the only women under 35 who don't have a cel phone glued to their face.
I am sitting in the food court and I notice two teenage girls sitting nearby. Teenage might be wrong, they look anywhere from 11-15 years old, its impossible for me to tell. They are dressed kind of inappropriately provocatively, in tight jeans and skin tight tops with thin straps over the shoulders. Here's another thing, normally I wouldn't notice this, but proportionally their breasts are big, close to the same as if they were adult women. These girls are proportioned and sort of dressed like a normal woman, shrunk down in size about 20% until they stand not even 5 feet. I don't recall girls having breasts like this when I was that age. And believe me, I was paying close attention. Is it something in our milk? I heard some crazy shit about how girls in South America are maturing way faster because of all the hormones shot into cows which then end up in milk. I choose to accept that rumor with little reluctance, Why? I guess I don't feel like I need to know more. What does it all mean? Don't know.
There are usually some really old people eating in the food court. I like the elderly people a lot. They talk and eat really slow, they never look around, they seem to be delivering the latest news to each other, divided into small portions. They pay almost no attention to what is going on around them. If the building was on fire, someone would have to go over and tell them. I am full of envy.
A young couple eating lunch across the food court discuss something, then the girl's phone rings. She snaps it open, and the guy transforms into the face to face version of being put on hold. He doesn't even bother to look busy, he just slows down to a stop.
Nearby me, a nice looking well dressed woman, maybe 25 ish is eating something off a styrofoam plate, drinking a bottle of water and reading a paperback book. I wonder if her job requires much reading?
The possibly teenage girls are sitting nearby talking loudly, making silly voices. I toy with the idea of flirting with them, but decide against it, although it would be funny. Just kidding. Or am I?
I finish my lunch, get up and leave the food court. Back outside and on
street level I make my way back down the long wide main street towards my office
building. I consider running down the street with my arms out so my 3/4 length coat billows out behind me like bat wings.
I decide against it.
A young dude and what must be his girlfriend stand on the same street corner as
me, all of us waiting for the walk light. The girlfriend, bleached blonde, looks at
me, I look at her, she makes a little smile, I make one back. The scrawny
young tough doesn't notice. Fuckin' dude is shorter than me, wearing a black
wife beater shirt and
jeans, also black, and a ball cap perched atop his head with a whimsical sideways
skew. He is preoccupied, trying to look tough to the passing cars. If
the two of them weren't here, I wonder if I might do that myself.
At the next crosswalk we are in the same position again. As we wait for the light to change a car pulls around the corner to make a right hand turn directly in front of us. It stops on the corner and is then rear ended by the car behind it. The car behind presumably also planned to make the turn but for some reason was not expecting the car ahead to stop and wait until the turn was safe. The car that struck the first car from behind is driven by a woman who looks to be about 20. She's dressed in either american apparel or lululemon style lycra sportslut clothes, wearing make up that I presume she has a sandblaster at home to remove. The instant after the collision, the girl who collided with the car ahead of her forms this expression on her face of like, "oh great, now what?". This expression suggested to me that her feeling was that this unfortunate setback caused by her own incompetence was a totally unfair imposition on her day. My thoughts: How remarkable!
The accident was not serious. The bumpers were damaged a little, but no one was even slightly hurt. Every witness to the accident proceeds across the green light and on their way. No one stops. I wonder if someone should have. On the street a different young man is wearing a fedora hat, it looks ridiculous. I take the time to imagine the following events. Something very surprising happens in front of us, perhaps an octopus jumps out of the sewer. We are all totally shocked. And in the instant of his total surprise, his stupid hat flies straight up in the air off his head. But then it does a full summersault and lands back on his head perfectly. Then we all applaud, including the octopus. This does not transpire at any point in the walk back to my office.
I return to work. The girl sitting next to me will be beginning her maternity leave for the birthing of her second child at the end of her shift at work today. Her shift will end in about an hour and I may not see her again, possibly ever, since she might find another job while she's on leave and never come back to this one. She's a bright girl. Working together we would occasionally have conversations about our lives and what interests us. I would talk about women, spaceships, semi exotic cheeses. She would tell me things about her culture, and we would talk about her family and her husband. Going by what she says, her husband and I are a lot alike. Once she is on maternity leave she isn't going to have too many people to talk to, just her 2 year old son, her immediate family and I guess her newborn baby. It is obvious that she wants to have a conversation about anything at all with anyone at all outside of the family circle she is about to enter, just a little bit more outside world interaction time before she goes home to a permanent routine. She makes efforts to engage me in conversation for the last hour or so of her time here before she's gone. But I don't really feel like it. Instead I put on my headphones and listen to music. She is a nice person, but by portions of both choice and necessity she is incapable of doing most routine social activities alone. She works with a man, me, who is incapable of doing most of those things with others. The role and respective amounts of choice and necessity that are involved in my case, are unclear.
At the end of the day I reflect on a day spent numb and totally self absorbed. It's probably just a mood I'm in, we all have days like this I guess. Man, I need to lighten the fuck up.