Wednesday

There's very little I love more than walking aimlessly though streets teeming with exoticisms I cannot quite understand. This is a willful ignorance, meaning that I have, at times, purposefully missed opportunities to learn about the environment around me. It's just so interesting watching it freewheel in brightly-colored exclamations without justification or value beyond its differences from me. I imagine this is a fairly shameful admission of isolation, faintly lazy and colonial, a lack of commitment with my surroundings. Is it interacting when I reduce x to the sum of my alienation? When I'm done bouncing off a thousand years of culture, assimilated only to the ends of my aesthetic benefit, I'll return somewhere ironically familiar, right? But understand: were it not for the time and the money, for my thin roots and certain practicalities, I would maybe never alight at all. I'd go on freefalling through this whole oddball world with nothing to harsh my Zen beyond the mounting, jealously guarded wonder. From that I would emerge unhaunted by the usual specter of accounting for my lifetime or even any feeling of having wasted it. But whatever, because walking around this town has become insufferable. It's the nicest time of year, weather-wise, and they've gone and dug up nearly every sidewalk between here and everywhere else, replacing them with slippery cavities of stacked masonry and mud. But here's a recent Alice-in-Wonderland moment, anyway: walking through the nearby park the other night, I saw a lady hawking cartons of raw quail eggs from a shallow basket. She was attempting to sell them to the amorous teenagers who cruise the parks after hours. While I see this group as a likely target for niche entrepreneurialism, I'm not sure small and freckled raw eggs is what I'd choose to tout. [Cavin]