This city has got me feeling like a motherfucker

Walking home from SG’s in the dead, glaring middle of night. It’s a nice night for this time of year, the temperature rising twenty degrees and tricking you into wearing lightweight garments. But all at once the cold comes rushing in, making you think twice about your threadbare jacket and the holes in your shoes.

Up Dove and down Jefferson, past the sketchy bar, with the faint cacophony of the goings on indoors, where people are reveling in throwing darts at a cork board, and drinking two-dollar drinks. This is what we do, how we pass the time. I think about going indoors and seeing if there’s anyone I know inside, but there’s no kind of refuge for me, tonight.

At home things are no less bizarre. El Smell has taken to locking herself in her room, interrupted only by short trips to the kitchen to get something or other, where my attempts at conversation are thwarted by monosyllables and grunts. Needless to say, things seem grim.

It’s a strange life, and a strange time to be alive. And it would be entirely possible to retrace your steps, to find out how you got here, from the womb, but that’s old news--something thought of, and thought of again, the thoughts themselves like so many layers of a tree, layers and layers removed.

At the threshold an empty plastic milk container rattled past my feet, like some absurd tumbleweed. And then I scurried indoors, like a rat, out of the cold.

The building I am living was considered to be some kind of an historical site. The Aqua Ducks tour bus told you this five times a day, when it drove by, and an internet website. It used to be an ice factory, used to construct square ice blocks. That had seemed about right to me.