Today’s soundtrack: I thought I’d know better
Today at 3:12am: At an Amoco station on Queens Boulevard, topping off the whip.

Long day.

Sometime last week around 3 in the morning, I stood naked in the shower with the water off. Shaving my head, I do it once a week.

I did most of the front and had started on the back when the clippers died. They simply stopped cutting. I swore some, and when I realized that wasn’t fixing the problem I ran out of the shower to get a screwdriver.

Five minutes later I had the thing open, screws everywhere, and still had no idea why it’d stopped working. I spent ten minutes tinkering with it before throwing it in the garbage. Washed my patchwork head off and went to sleep.

The next morning I woke up, nearly late for work, and ran to a nearby Chinese hair salon. My hair was a scrappy mess, it looked like I’d gotten a haircut from Ray Charles after he finished three pots of coffee.

“Can you please shave the rest of this off?” I asked. The hair salon was packed. I waited my turn, enduring the unabashedly disapproving stares of a half-dozen Chinese women my mother’s age.

Today I ran out to get a new pair of clippers and a half-dozen other errands. I hate errands. I also hate people who can’t speak English; the Carribbean woman at National Wholesale Liquidators thought, by my gesturing, that I was asking for shampoo. ESL baby, learn it, live it, love it.

Made it home just in time to pull my Hapkido uniform out of the dryer, unwrinkle it and run to class. My partner for the day ended up being Hapkido Girl, who is a red belt. It’s a weird thing to throw a woman to the ground, and then to have her get up and reciprocate. But that’s how the practices go.

In the straightaways everyone jockeys for position; most people are afraid to cut each other off around the curves. I’m on the Long Island Expressway, headed to JFK to pick up Deadly Ed Lee and Betty, who are returning from a wedding in Sacramento.

It’s 9pm and I’ve planned this pickup with precision--the LIE to the Van Wyck to the JFK Expressway, in as long as it takes to make pancakes--but I’m foiled by an unexpected traffic jam at Terminal 9.

In bottlenecks like this you have an option to either sit in the appropriate lane and wait your turn, or be one of those assholes who cruises in the wrong lane and cuts everyone else off at the last minute, fucking up traffic in that lane. I choose to wait my turn, because at the age of 31 I now feel that’s the right thing to do. Five years ago I’d have been doing the wrong thing.

Predictably, the asshole lane fills up with assholes, jamming everything up. I waited for 25 fucking minutes. “Bad, bad person,” I muttered to all who passed.

Around 11pm I’m back in Manhattan, dropping Mike and Shady off at Forbidden City. Me and Yuka are headed out to Queens to do our late-night grocery shopping at a 24-hour Pathmark. We always try to go around midnight or later ‘cause there’s no lines.

First we stop at Home Depot to buy some drill bits. (I’m putting up some lights at my place.) Yuka’s eye is drawn to the energy-saving bulbs in the Lighting section so I have to spend seven minutes explaining to her, in a mixture of English and broken Japanese, how a 15-watt bulb can be equivalent to a 60-watt in terms of Lumens output.

At midnight on a Wednesday the cash register lines for Home Depot still take forever. What the fuck.

At Pathmark the pasta’s half-price this week so I bought 2,560 ounces of rigatoni. (16 bags.) Also picked up a couple gallons of Ragu and three gallons of OJ. Yuka bought enough chicken, pork and beef to feed an army. Nevertheless, we’ll be back in two months.

We call Eumi from the parking lot of Pathmark and pick her up around 2am. Groceries in the trunk, we head to a diner on Queens Boulevard. I need a bacon cheeseburger immediately.

The three of us spend an hour catching up, and it’s just like old times. When Eumi lived in our building, the three of us were marginally employed and spent lots of afternoons hanging out together like a bunch of housewives. Except I’m a guy.

Around 3:30am Yuka and I are hauling our groceries up the steps. She begins unpacking it while I go back downstairs to drive the car back to the garage.

After dropping the car off, I’m walking back home when I see two staggering figures a half-block ahead of me. It turns out to be...none other than Mike and Shady, limping their drunk asses home from the bar. Really is a small city.

I run up from behind to scare them, but they’re too plastered to provide an entertaining reaction. The three of us walk home in silence. 4am, everything’s quiet and I’m walking home with two drunks.