27 Jan 07

Time:

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Money:

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More interesting things:

Watched out the window of Cafe Collage as a guy in black latex underwear and leather harness was led around on a chain by a guy in spiky clothing (that's all I remember about it) getting whacked on the ass with a big white paddle. Roey suggested that it might be a fraternity thing, but I don't know - they were bald and, like, 40.

Watched out the window of Cafe Collage as a dog in black shag and leather collar (maybe) was led around on a chain by a regular guy. The only interesting thing about it was that the dog looked exactly like Jake-a-Root.

Walked across one Village corner or another - I think it might have been Bleecker and Mercer, actually - listening to a middle-aged lady with some sort of European accent barely avoid getting run over by an impatient cabbie (she WAS, it must be said, standing in the middle of the freakin' intersection) and expressed her perturbation with a very pestered-sounding "What IS dees?", as though she couldn't fathom what a CAR might be doing in the ROAD.

Listened as a nice-looking man asked his small daughter (?) about her classroom-pet snails. We had hermit crabs when I was about that kid's age, and Anne mentioned keeping a corn snake (named Tangerine, incidentally) in her classroom, but this was the first I'd heard of school snails.

Schlepped down... Houston? no, Broome, maybe... past a stack of traffic which included a minivan with New Jersey or Pennsylvania plates, as I recall, and a man standing with his upper half well out of the sunroof supporting a professional-looking video camera. It was either a very well-supplied tourist or a very badly-supplied news crew.

Schlepped a little more - we were well into the fun parts of SoHo by this point - past a guy arm-in-arm with a very tall woman whose voice the surgeon forgot to enshrill; she was stylin' in her fur coat, but sounded like she should have been looking for her football jersey.

Ate, serendipitously, a cappuccino truffle from Kee's Chocolates, which I wrote about not long after I started keeping track of all the more interesting things. Anne and I were just sort of wandering back unambitiously towards campus, and I realized that that was the place featuring creme brulee truffles - at least if you get there early enough. The next best option, I learned, was not available, either, nor was the third-favorite, and I wasn't interested in a green tea-related item, which was supposed to be the best of what remained, so I stuck my neck out on the coffee front and enjoyed it immensely; if the others are really better than that one was, I will have to begin a system of pilgrimage.

Moseyed past a fenced-up space labeled, simultaneously, "Metropolitan Parking Lot" and "No Parking." You don't have to wonder about the proliferation of psychologists and psychiatrists in a city where even the real estate is identity-conflicted.

Looked in the window of the "Chess Shop" on Thompson (I think) and was at first completely taken with all the sets in the window - Civil War, monsters and their hunters, cowboys and Indians, Romans and barbarians, golfers, you name it - and then decided I was maybe even more taken with the sight beyond the shelves: about twenty people, different ages, men and women, all stooped cozily over half as many tables playing the game themselves on a chilly, windy Friday night.

Waited for Roey and Rebecca at the campus Starbucks, where I ordered a black tea-lemonade and a piece of cinnamon cake, and only had to pay for the drink; the cake, the cashier said with a scrunched-up smile and a tap on his chest, was "on me."