OTHER

This afternoon I am at the First Other Coffee Place With The Good Coffee. I am drinking the largest, most jacked latte they serve. It is good, as I noted, damn good. Maybe tomorrow I will go to the Other Other Coffee Place With The Good Coffee, and do a proper comparison. It is important information to know, where to get my drug of choice. I never have to panic.

I am sitting and facing the main street in town, busy on a Saturday. Well, busy for here anyway. This never compares to the misery of the Dan Ryan Expressway at any hour. Shoppers and lunchers walk by. Everyone looks clean and pleasant and well-off, as usual. There are flowers planted in the median strip, blooming wildly in yellow and purple and red. I would tell you what kind they were except that I know fuck all about plants. The red ones are tulips. There. It is cloudy but not raining, so everyone is out in force in gratitude and the need to burn off some nerd bucks. No one looks particularly happy or sad. The dogs walking by look the happiest.

Directly across the street is the Waxing Salon. It is delightful to watch who comes in and out of there, and wonder what services they are purchasing. Clearly, the young swarthy hip Italian dude is getting his back hair ripped off, the young girls or mid-age-girls probably everything off. Oh, but look. There goes Grandma into the salon! She looks to be decently into her 70s, very much Grandma Cookies and Milk, very regular and sweet and a bit frumpy. WHAT IS SHE HAVING DONE THERE???? OMG, I have to know. I could run across the street, waving a crosswalk flag of course, burst in their door and say, “I HAVE A BLOG AND I NEED TO KNOW WHAT THE ELDERLY WOMAN IS DOING HERE RIGHT NOW!” If I was with someone else here, someone devilish like me, I would dare that person to dare me, and then I would do it for sure. But I am alone, so I can only speculate. I want to think Grandma Norma McNormalson is having a full Brazilian done, and afterwards will don a hot pink thong under her elastic waist beige poly pants. OK, I know, she is probably having an upper-lip wax done, but let me range out here. I love the unexpected.

You never know about people. I like looking into homes at night as I drive or walk by if they have their lights on and drapes opened. Because I have one of those kind of minds and am almost always filled with coffee, I instantly start imagining who lives there and what they are doing and what other kind of stuff is in their house and what they do for a living and what they do there when they are there. It is fun. Sometimes I can get a good view in and see what they have for knick-knacks and art and such. This can tell you a lot. Single men generally do not collect porcelain unicorn figurines. Single women generally do not collect massive flat-screen televisions and gun cabinets. Poor people generally do not have post-modern angular furniture. Rich people generally do not have porch couches with holes bored into the arms to hold beer cans. You learn stuff about people, after awhile.

But really, you just never know. People are so odd. Who isn’t odd? You think someone isn’t odd, oh boy, I will bet you they are the oddest. I think sometimes the people who are outwardly different, say, the young goth sexually-ambiguous girl who served me my coffee, are not so odd underneath. They are who they are, present it right out front, and there are no secrets to be uncovered. It is the senators and the nuns and the teachers who always seem to have something wild going on. They should always close their drapes. There are blogs about.

This is officially the most tangent-filled thing I have written on here so far. It was unexpected, so I deem it good.