Riding around-which I have been, as it's now Spring, apparently-riding around on a bike allows you to experience the city very differently. You get to smell it. In a car or the bus you're separated from the outside odors, and walking isn't fast enough to get the sort of...spectrum of smells that being on a bike offers. Damp and hot asphalt in the first warm sun of the year. Diesel fuel from the bus I'm following. Three different clouds of pot smoke in two blocks.
February's no proper month. 28 days, stunted, deformed in the calendar. And this whole Leap Year bullshit. I saw Feb. 29th referred to as "Leap Year Day" in the RG...because "Leap Day" was too complicated? It's a lost day, a limbo day. Watergate had it's 18 1/2 minute gap, Doctor Who his Eleven-Day Empire...every four years, we get a phantom day.
I did laundry yesterday, down to the ghettomat. The realest place for ten blocks. I once sat in on a three-way deal twixt three different homeless guys there, trading guns for money for drugs. Thrilling. But not classy. There's nothing classy about my neighborhood laundromat-after all, it's my neighborhood.
But anyway, the owner just put in a vending machine-soaps, dryer sheets and such. And sundries, things like gum and candy. AND little individual packets of Pepperidge Farm Milano Cookies. It was the most optimistic thing I've seen in forever, and it made me smile. Later, I saw a lime-perfectly good lime-on the ground a few blocks from my house. This, along with the blueberries in the verge last week, lead me to believe there's something going on. I don't know what it is, but fallen produce crossing my path is apropos of something. Ominous, even. AND, last thing...the first honeybee on the blossoming rosemary just outside my door. February's no proper month, but Spring is the most proper of seasons.
February's no proper month. 28 days, stunted, deformed in the calendar. And this whole Leap Year bullshit. I saw Feb. 29th referred to as "Leap Year Day" in the RG...because "Leap Day" was too complicated? It's a lost day, a limbo day. Watergate had it's 18 1/2 minute gap, Doctor Who his Eleven-Day Empire...every four years, we get a phantom day.
I did laundry yesterday, down to the ghettomat. The realest place for ten blocks. I once sat in on a three-way deal twixt three different homeless guys there, trading guns for money for drugs. Thrilling. But not classy. There's nothing classy about my neighborhood laundromat-after all, it's my neighborhood.
But anyway, the owner just put in a vending machine-soaps, dryer sheets and such. And sundries, things like gum and candy. AND little individual packets of Pepperidge Farm Milano Cookies. It was the most optimistic thing I've seen in forever, and it made me smile. Later, I saw a lime-perfectly good lime-on the ground a few blocks from my house. This, along with the blueberries in the verge last week, lead me to believe there's something going on. I don't know what it is, but fallen produce crossing my path is apropos of something. Ominous, even. AND, last thing...the first honeybee on the blossoming rosemary just outside my door. February's no proper month, but Spring is the most proper of seasons.
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