No, I didn't JUST eat salami, but I did consume about four to five ounces of the delicious stuff each day; three different kinds of excellent artisan charcuterie: traditional Italian, Alsatian, and Spanish chorizo. Donated to Trinity Cathedral by Olympic Provisions, in apparently U.N. food drop quantity. Talk about an angioplasty waiting in the wings! A pity I never canned up the money for cheese to accompany it, alas. Still, even despite all that salami — not to mention the overall high fat content of my providential diet — I managed to slip into a pair of thirty-two-inch waist jeans donated Saturday, and without any blue-faced tugging or writhing! I can't recall a time when I wore jeans this slim … maybe fifteen years ago? Well, anyway, I made up for the salami binge on Sunday by eating nothing but cottage cheese and salad (after finishing off the last of the chorizo) — hell, I even went on a lengthy four-hour canning run that day.
But, who cares? It's Spring Fever time! Not just for me, either; an increase in aggro has been effervescing noticeably on the streets recently: in the past week I've seen three altercations that didn't quite escalate into violence. In meal lines, too, of all places to choose to lose it and pull a baseball bat out on someone. That was Friday night; there I was in between the two testosterone emitters, slouching against a chain-link fence having a pleasant conversation with a volunteer … blissfully unaware of the thunder rolling around me until HOLY SHIT! Look, there's a bat being waved at someone just a couple feet in front of my face! I suppose this could all be blamed on the waxing of the moon, which is what Crazy Michael suggested when I ran into him at a streetcar stop yesterday. But, the moon won't be full until the sixteenth, and that's all hogwash, anyway. Whatever be the cause of tempers flaring on the streets, and whatever connection it may have with Spring Fever, all I know is for me the season begins with Daylight Saving Time when I'm living outside; a blessed end to premature gloamings!
Humans are tidal creatures, nonetheless, whose ebb and flow is directed by a restless and protean geography, the changes of which often are subtle and operate largely on a subliminal level. At least metaphorically.
The tides seem to have washed me ashore in the Northwest neighborhood. I've been sleeping in the no man's land beneath the freeways that border the Pearl District to the east since a few days after I left the Fairfield but I didn't start to consider myself a local resident until I joined the Friendly House a week-and-a-half ago, which is located on the western edge of the neighborhood. I forked over fifteen dollars for a year's membership and a month's locker rent, which provides me with a place to shower and get online six days out of the week and to store my excess stuff throughout. Much of my first year in town (this time around) was spent in this neighborhood, back when my youthful charm weaseled me into girls' homes; when I thought I was punk rock enough to panhandle and drink in public, even mix benzos with pitchers of Pabst and shamelessly court a big-breasted junkie in an open relationship with a boyfriend busy at the time growing pot in Switzerland. I like it here, even though I feel very out of place in an area where software designers play dodgeball and a cheap weekend brunch is found only at Jack in the Box.
