Monday 10/5/20
* I feel like when one describes nature in terms of "scenery" that one is missing the point of nature.
* Here is last week's Downtown segment, which pertained to secular works of art with Biblical origins. In some part. So: Lord Byron's "Darkness," Chekhov's "The Student," the 1941 "race" film, The Blood of Jesus, and Sam Cooke with the Soul Stirrers live in LA in 1955.
* I am fine today after my little tumble yesterday. Bruises are darker, but I am good to go once more.
* There is a man I presume is a transient who pushes a cart and is often near the water, but I will see him all over the North End and up by Haymarket. He engages with me, and is well-spoken. I'd say he's about fifty. As the day goes on, he drinks more, and around four or so--or earlier--you'll him bellowing songs from the eighties in the street, often in the middle of the street, blocking cars. He'll carry dead flowers and give them to people, but they are not gross flowers--I suppose they look about as good as dead flowers could. I saw him a couple weekends ago near Haymarket, watching intently--as though he was learning something--as some men worked on the road. He stared at the jackhammer from a few feet away. A couple times now he's told me that he is going to kill me. He'll slice my throat open and watch me bleed out. He did this the other day as I was reading by the water. Same place he'll sidle up to me and start talking about whatever. He has no recollection at these times. I wonder if that's what the flowers are for, amends on the days after with various people. I'm careful around him. I make sure my hands are not in my pockets. There was a woman and her young girl coming the other way--the girl was on a bike with training wheels--and I waited for them to pass and move into the distance of their day before I left where I had been reading and where the man remained.
* A woman reached out to me over the weekend to tell me that if I go to a coffee house I can have any woman I want in said coffee house simply by going over and talking to them, which was a nice thing to say, if not a true thing. I liked the use of the term coffee house--makes me think of Samuel Pepys. I don't do this at all, admittedly. Yesterday on my walk there was a very beautiful woman next to me--about twenty-eight, I'd say--and we were moving at the same pace and that meant we stood near each other a bunch as we came to the end of a block and waited for the light. I noticed that she kept looking at me. She smiled. She had a Vanity Fair tote bag. I'd never seen one. You see New Yorker tote bags. She was very fit. And I easily could have said something about the bag, asked if it was in reference to the book or the magazine, added that I've written for the magazine, but I don't know--that kind of makes me feel gross. But I also think I'm being impractical, and costing myself an opportunity. In a situation where there is absolutely no risk. I mean, what's the worst case scenario? A sentence or two back and forth, then each person peels off in different directions a half block later? That ended up happening a few blocks after, the peeling away, that is, in Kenmore Square. She went in the direction of the Citgo sign, and I headed towards Fenway. I took a look across the street--and it's actually like three streets, the way everything runs together, and she was doing the same thing, looking at me. And I felt rather stupid.
