Friday, February 04, 2005

STOP ME IF YOU’VE HEARD THIS ONE

I found this entry in one of my notepads. It’s dated 2:25 p.m., Wednesday, 18 December 2002.

Enter Downtown Crossing, pass a panhandler constantly, aggressively ringing cup with change. End by passing a Salvation Army bell ringer doing, essentially, exactly the same thing. In between is an aggrieved man, in the center of an intersection, with a baseball cap, puffy jacket and a white mustache who’s holding a book — a Bible? — and yelling, with no one listening, although three cops walk past, eyeing him in a friendly but jocular way.

“The day you become comfortable with moral corruption in your life,” the man yells, “is a sad day.”

Sometimes it astounds me how meaningful and meaningless things seem simultaneously, with random occurrences suggesting patterns and the most pointed of statements saying, ultimately, absolutely nothing.

And now, sushi.

4 comments:

Indri said...

God, I'm envious. You not only carry a notepad, you actually use it. I haven't got that discipline done; I see an interesting thing, and I think, oh, I'll remember that.

And then it disappears. Almost immediately. Or I do write it down, but on the back of an ATM receipt. My life is a series of crumpled ATM receipts crowded with illegible handwriting.

Someday I'm just going to thread a length of cord through the spiral of a small notebook and start wearing it around my neck.

Indri said...

"discipline DOWN." Dangnabit.

Scape7 said...

But the notepads are used for everything, from movie times, phone numbers and Au Bon Pain orders to vital clues, plans for the future and deep thoughts. They're heavy on the former set of crap, light on the latter. So don't be too envious.

But you also shouldn't let my reality get in the way of your ideals.

Indri said...

What is Liquid Sharpie? Some new extension of the Sharpie brand of which I am somehow not aware?

I can't describe my trepidation, considering that I've been a black Sharpie stalwart since I was a tot teaching myself to animate on 35mm leader back in the day, when I discovered that they'd come out with a whole new range of "fashion" colors--lime, turquoise, silver. But I love them all now.