Saturday spottings (sudden clouds)
The Black Hole of Retail at 63rd and May seems to have been repopulated; last year a Half Price Books outlet took over the old Hollywood Video space — imagine that, books replacing video — and now Ballengers Furniture, a place where I have spent way too much money, is moving into the space vacated by CompUSA way back when. Praise be unto JAH.
Speaking of locations on May, my non-automatic car wash of choice, the old National Pride wash in the Village, has apparently swallowed its pride and closed its doors, except of course that it doesn’t have any doors. I have tentatively settled on the Xtreme (!) Wash at 38th and Meridian as its replacement; it exceeds the usual cleanliness standard, the mechanicals are friendly — no coin changer, you just shove in bills as needed — and they have one of these on the premises, which suggests they might actually pay attention to water quality.
Snark of the day: at the meat counter, from a woman who was finicky about filet mignon. She found one she liked, and then pointed to a tray about two feet away for her second. Said the butcher, “Good stuff, but that’s the prime. It’s five dollars more per pound.”
“Oh, he’s not worth five dollars,” she said.
Yeah, we all laughed; comic timing, I decided, outweighed the appearance of misandry. And having bought nothing over four dollars a pound from their display case, I figured I probably wasn’t worth it either.
Later, sighted across a parking lot, this was chalked (shoe-polished, more likely, but you get the idea) on the windows of a van: “RIP,” a girl’s name, “We Love You,” and her dates.
Three months and three days apart.
The skies, already darkening, seemed to be so much more so all of a sudden.
I had gotten about three miles away when The Spy unexpectedly served up Kirsty MacColl’s unjustly-forgotten “Walking Down Madison.”
“From the sharks in the penthouse
To the rats in the basement
It’s not that far…”
This marked the transition from “somewhat weepy” to “totally lost it.”
