Sunday, July 31, 2005 One big union
Oh, Baltimore, I cannot hold thee close enough. I've got my Sunday morning mood, which is equal parts "tired as hell" "full of Thai food and tiny donuts" and contented. I have some potatoes cooking in the oven, and I'm typing that because if I don't tell the internet, it's practically a lie, and I would forget to take them out of the oven, so they would burn as well as suffer from mendacity.
Mendacity!
The market was jammed this week. Everyone woke up and realized that they needed to bite the bullet and try heirloom tomatoes. Everyone needed corn. Trucks that I know were full early this morning were down to nothing but a pile of stray husks by 11:30. I am typing this so that it will shame me later: I want to sell jewelry there. Later on, when I am not obligated to spend so much of my day providing content, I will figure out what I need to do. It's probably too late for this year, but shit, next year's coming whether I do the paperwork or not, so I might as well get on it.
Important potato update: they're out of the oven and unburned, so I will accept my trophy now. I am taking them on the journey of their lives in a little while. Bus challenge today involves an unfamiliar line, and I'm a little nervous, but I think the potatoes and I will prevail. One of my co-workers is having people over to her house, which is located on Mars or some other neighborhood I never go to. Tracy is coming too, because he's a trooper.
He and I were like a couple of little Lohans last night. After the party was the after party, and after the after party was the other party we got sucked into on the way home, and after that were birdsongs and the horrible light of dawn.
I wasted most of my teen years sitting in this one twenty four hour cafe in Richmond, eating greasy hashbrowns and making note of the miraculous non-decay of a roach that had been smashed to the floor at the dawn of history. The crowd the 4th St. Cafe attracted in its golden age tended to be dirtier and more delusional than the 3rd St. Diner a block up, and I knew where I belonged. When, for some reason, I was not inside 4th St. and I met someone who I thought might become a friend, I knew all bets were off if they started talking about 3rd St.
4th St. was where I saw a man fall drunk off his bar stool when I was eating breakfast one morning, but he was nobody. When you follow the same routine over and over again, the people whose paths you keep crossing but to whom you never speak turn into something like celebrities. You follow their lives based on the clues provided. You hear stories about them, and come to know them without knowing them, and when you see them, whether they are glamorous or interesting or not, you get a little thrill based on recognition alone.
At 4h St., you could be somebody based on nothing more than consistancy. People began to know my name, and I knew theirs. I could go out alone, grab a booth in the back, and know that if they didn't kick me out for ordering nothing but endlessly refilled coffee, and see crew after crew of my friends and associates come in and out last night. It doesn't work anymore. You can't go home again, and any time I've tried to go back in the last few years, it's just been a shitty diner, but it and it's all-star cast live on in my heart.
A few months back, an old friend wrote to ask how I was doing, where I was living, etc., and I was trying to explain Baltimore to him. I told him it was like one big 4th St. Cafe. I meant that it was dirty and filled with eccentrics, but last night, in increasingly sparse moments of lucidity between bouts of Lohaning it up, I realized that Baltimore is just exactly like 4th St.. We are all each others' personal celebrities. And there are cockroaches here. posted by Frenz | 7/31/2005 01:16:00 PM
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