Places to meet strangers:
- Coffee shops after opening
- Subway cars at all hours
-Bus Shelters and shop awnings in the rain
- Bodega cash registers
- Brooklyn Bridge Fourth of July
- Christmas Eve outside of Macy's
- Rite Aid on Valentines Day
- Any sports arena after a huge loss for the home team
- Bars on singles night
Worst people I've ever met ->
Greatest people I've ever met ->
People I am still looking for ->
Topics of Conversation:
- The price of a cup of coffee and the paper
- The current weather
- Yesterdays weather
- The weather to come this weekend
- The crazy mother fucker who just left
- The regular who hasn't come in in a while
- What happened last night at so and so's
- Recollections and fabrications of some event that you should have gone to. It was fantastic/ great/horrible/ awful/ beautiful/ fuckin' crazy man!
- What have you been up too lately?
- How are your kids?
- So and so's marriage/baby/birthday/funeral
- Recent breakups/hookups/bf/gf/life partner
- Sexual explorations and exploitations
- Unrelated pop culture phenomenons or events
- New technology and how much/little some one paid for it
- How crazy someones life is
- How stagnant someones life is
- How unpleasant, upsetting, unrelenting, unforgiving, unnecessary life is
- The way of the world
- How it used to be
- How it is
- Anicdotes on politicans and common people
- Community troubles and the worlds woes
- Disasters and accomplishments
- Feats of strength and bravery
- Tales of poverty and modern slavery
- Human emotions running wild
- Personal opinions and cultural perceptions
- World focus
- Local focus
- Wide open spaces or far off better places to raise a family and start your life
- Vacation days you wish you had
- How the weather is going to affect your day
Thursday, February 25, 2010
Veselka 3:49AM
It's rainy and cold on the Lower East Side.
The streets are empty except for the bottle pickers and the awning hoppers.
With no umbrella but a head full of ingenuity I grab a crushed card board box from someones neat stack of recycling and use it to escape the drizzle.
The coffee is weak and hot as hell, the challah soft and the borscht is perfectly tepid.
The yellow sponge soaks up the rich magenta.
The chunks of beef melt in my mouth and the pink tinted Lima beans give it texture.
I've limited my dairy intake. So i only butter one slice of bread. It makes me appreciate the oily slipperiness, the creamy sweetness that coats my lips.
One worker talks about losing 12 pounds to the night shift.
The G train has been real messed up you know?
I get home so late I just go to sleep then wake up for work.
I weighed myself after one week on this shift- 12 pounds I had lost.
I order two more slices of bread. I succumb to another packet of butter.
From where I sit I can see the staircase which leads to the office upstairs.
I remember once going up there and feeling the sense of privilege.
AS Tom, the owner, and my parents talked, I peered through the decorative cuts into the slatted railing down at the customers.
They buzzed about unaware of my eyes looking down into their glasses of water, their plates of pie or pirogi, their dishes of stroganoff and soup. Looking over their shoulders, down on their heads, studying their postures and gestures.
I took deep breaths and thought about those people. They could not see my young quizzical nosey eye peering at them cutting their meatloaf watching their every motion they made sipping their coffee.
But there I was watching.
I'm sure the next morning when I came in for my scrambled egg on a roll- my eyes darted to that fenced office. I'm sure I wondered who was looking back down at me.
I feel a sense of pride sitting here at the counter.
No one here would remember that skinny six year old with bright blue eyes and shiny pink shoes.
But I know her. She's still sitting at the counter. A little taller. A little bigger. Still looking down at the top of the world's head. Studying life's movements from a distance.
The rain has stopped now. But I'm too tired for walking. My body just returned from a journey several years to the past.
The streets are empty except for the bottle pickers and the awning hoppers.
With no umbrella but a head full of ingenuity I grab a crushed card board box from someones neat stack of recycling and use it to escape the drizzle.
The coffee is weak and hot as hell, the challah soft and the borscht is perfectly tepid.
The yellow sponge soaks up the rich magenta.
The chunks of beef melt in my mouth and the pink tinted Lima beans give it texture.
I've limited my dairy intake. So i only butter one slice of bread. It makes me appreciate the oily slipperiness, the creamy sweetness that coats my lips.
One worker talks about losing 12 pounds to the night shift.
The G train has been real messed up you know?
I get home so late I just go to sleep then wake up for work.
I weighed myself after one week on this shift- 12 pounds I had lost.
I order two more slices of bread. I succumb to another packet of butter.
From where I sit I can see the staircase which leads to the office upstairs.
I remember once going up there and feeling the sense of privilege.
AS Tom, the owner, and my parents talked, I peered through the decorative cuts into the slatted railing down at the customers.
They buzzed about unaware of my eyes looking down into their glasses of water, their plates of pie or pirogi, their dishes of stroganoff and soup. Looking over their shoulders, down on their heads, studying their postures and gestures.
I took deep breaths and thought about those people. They could not see my young quizzical nosey eye peering at them cutting their meatloaf watching their every motion they made sipping their coffee.
But there I was watching.
I'm sure the next morning when I came in for my scrambled egg on a roll- my eyes darted to that fenced office. I'm sure I wondered who was looking back down at me.
I feel a sense of pride sitting here at the counter.
No one here would remember that skinny six year old with bright blue eyes and shiny pink shoes.
But I know her. She's still sitting at the counter. A little taller. A little bigger. Still looking down at the top of the world's head. Studying life's movements from a distance.
The rain has stopped now. But I'm too tired for walking. My body just returned from a journey several years to the past.
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