Saturday, Oct. 04, 2003 - 12:25 p.m.
I had a most eventful walk back to my car yesterday. My route takes me right through the college bar/secondhand boutique/pita counter section of town. There are two recent additions to this area, the first being a set of pink patio umbrellas outside one of the bars. These umbrellas are decorated with purple and turquoise wavy lines, with the exclamation �Playtime!� repeated several times at varying angles. One side of each umbrella says �Seagram�s Coolers: It�s What Women Like!�
These umbrellas make me inexplicably furious.
The second addition is the Starbucks that opened last week. It�s the only one I�ve ever seen in this town, though I�m sure there are others out by the malls on the edges of town. I can�t tell yet if it�s getting any business; the same man was sitting at one of its sidewalk tables every day this week, writing in a notebook and smoking a cigarette, but I have seen no other patrons.
The man was sitting there again Friday afternoon. As I approached, he looked up at me for the first time ever, though he wasn�t REALLY looking at me � his eyes were kind of unfocused, and I saw that he was less dirty hipster poet and more just plain unstable. He started muttering, then announced in a loud voice �YOU MUST TRUST TO GAIN TRUST. ACCEPT YOUR COCAINE ADDICT!�
I like this. It�s ambiguous: am I to accept my local cocaine addict? Is he referring to himself? Or am I to accept my inner cocaine addict? What might that involve?
This American Life was preempted last night by a live broadcast from the South Carolina State Fair, so my usual Friday night solo dinner was accompanied by Built to Spill instead. I realized yesterday afternoon that I�d never cooked meat in my life, since I don�t eat it. I�ve cooked fish and seafood now and then, but never meat. I decided to remedy this. The desire to try cooking something new overrode my semi-vegetarian ethics, and I went to the yuppie grocery store and bought a skinless, boneless chicken breast. I saut�ed it and made chicken piccata. I also made fennel a la greque, with which I was unimpressed.
Cooking chicken was fun (the cat was especially ecstatic, thinking I�d finally come to my carnivorous senses), but my house still smells like chicken. Thankfully, L came over later to eat the second half of the chicken breast � it was good, but I didn�t need any more of it. We also ate two slices each of the chocolate mousse cake from yesterday.
That�s a good beginning for a weekend. The rest of it, so far, has consisted of me making grumpy political observations all morning while moving an enormous bookshelf with L.