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Today’s soundtrack: and a mortal minute makes it more

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Today at 11:02am: the mourning coffee

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This morning I was doing the dishes with rare Manhattan sunlight filtering in through the kitchen window when I noticed this big spider hanging out on the counter. He was just chilling out next to the sink.

I was psyched when I saw him because I like spiders. I don’t like them individually--spiders are like people in that if you look at them closely, they’re actually quite gross--but I like the concept of spiders: These big bugs whose sole purpose is to walk around your apartment eating other bugs.

I tried to shoo him away, so he would get back to work eating bugs, but he didn’t respond to my hand-waves. I then slammed my fist on the counter next to him but he still didn’t respond, meaning he was either dead or a very heavy sleeper. I looked closely at him to see if he was breathing (stupid, I know) but couldn’t tell, and got kind of grossed out. A second later it registered that the spider was sitting in the middle of a puddle of water, totally dead.

The poor bastard. I wondered what chain of events led this spider to die here next to my sink. Accidental drowning? Arachnosuicide? Did he fall from a great height, or simply die of old spider age?

My apartment is largely bug-free, which means the spider was either making a pretty good living here by eating lots of bugs and giving me the impression my apartment was bug-free, or that there were simply no bugs for him to eat at all. But he was pretty big, the size of a nickel, so I’m guessing it was the former. Over the next few weeks I’ll endeavor to observe if there is a rise in bug-related activity, particularly around the kitchen area, and then I’ll know.

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Today’s soundtrack: an angel off the page

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Today at 10:02am: making the best goddamn cup of coffee I know how to

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I’ve got a friend who alerted me to a popularly-held belief (among followers of the Mayans) that the world will end in 2012.

According to what she’d heard, this belief is predicated on the fact that the Mayans had calendars for every year from their existence up until 2012, and then there are no more.

Well, I think that’s hardly conclusive. What if like, the Mayan guy who made the calendars just got in a fight with his boss and quit? He could’ve been like “Fuck this shit, I ain’t making no more of these goddamn calendars, I’m out of here” and his boss was like “But you’re only up to 2012, and the world doesn’t end until 3675” but the calendar maker was like “I don’t give a fuck, you either let me take my kids to the pyramids on Thursdays or you can kiss my ass.” And then he went off to start his own company making calendars with pictures of firefighters on them, but he couldn’t find any firefighters because there were none back then so he went broke.

Whatever happened to the Mayans, anyway? I’m guessing they all died in a fire.

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One time I was in a lesbian bookstore in Provincetown, Massachusetts (long story) and the bookstore owner said I looked Mayan, and asked if I was Mayan.

Are you out of your fucking mind, didn’t the Mayans die out like two thousand years ago? I thought to say. Instead I just said “Thanks.”

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I got some reading gigs coming up.

Not sure what I’m gonna read, maybe some fiction, maybe some scraps of the book I’m finishing up, How To Squander Your Twenties. The shows are free. Are you?

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Today’s soundtrack: the music sounds better with you

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Today at 11:02am: cleaning the studio

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If you’re looking for personally-tailored new music, there’s this website called pandora. You basically enter the name of a song or group you fancy, hit the button and it plays other songs you might like. They isolate specific elements of songs you enter, then use algorithms and cross-referencing to figure out other tracks you’ll dig.

I was initially as skeptical of this site as I am of online dating sites. Both try to break something that is essentially ethereal and serendipitous into mathematical compatibility formulas. But the music site is low-friction, disappointment is dismissed with a mouseclick, and you don’t gotta buy nobody dinner.

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Today’s soundtrack: go ahead and light up the town

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Today at 12:02pm: taking calls in the stairwell

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Social scientists in Scandinavia* have devised a question, a sort of riddle, designed to identify psychopaths and serial killers. Apparently if you can puzzle the answer out there’s something very wrong with you.

The riddle goes as follows:


A man’s mother dies.

He attends the funeral. At the funeral, he sees a beautiful woman.

After the funeral he looks for the beautiful woman, to try and talk to her, but he cannot find her anywhere; she’s gone.

Two weeks later, the man kills his own brother.

Why?

(For the Answer, click the “Comments” number above.)

#

*I gleaned this from cocktail party chatter and cannot back it up with facts.

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Today’s soundtrack: layin’ in the cut!

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Today at 7:02pm: tippling

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For once I’m on the phone with a marketing guy who’s trying to make me money.

“You like scotch?” he asks.

“Scotch is great,” I say.

“I’m gonna put down that you drink Johnny Walker Blue twice a week,” he says. Jesus, like I can afford that.

“How much money do you make?” he continues. I tell him. “No no no,” he says. “I’m gonna put down that you live in an over-$100,000 household.”

“Okay,” I say. Basically the marketing guy is fudging figures so I can qualify for a focus group he’s trying to fill out. Who knew marketers lie?

#

Later I show up to the focus group, which is at some faceless office building in lower midtown. I take the elevator up to a frosty reception area decorated like what would have been considered a classy cafe in the 1980s: Everything is shiny, polished surfaces, faux marble, tall round tables with tall black chairs. I’m expecting to hear Robbie Nevil’s “C’est La Vie” blaring out of the stereo.

The receptionist has me fill out a questionnaire about my alcohol preferences. A table at one end of the room is loaded up with meats, cheeses, cookies and soft drinks. “Help yourself,” she says.

I fill the questionnaire out as bodies start filling the room. In my jeans and T-shirt I am the shabbiest-dressed fellow in here. The rest are mostly suits, with only two other working-class guys showing up in jeans. Everyone is male, ranging from their 30s to their 50s. Afterwards I go to hit the refreshment table, but the suits have already picked the damn thing clean.

Next they split us up into two groups of eight. The two other working-class guys are in my group, and we’re led down a corridor into an ‘80s-style living room with black leather couches, pastel tones and a large mirrored wall. There’s a gaunt, intelligent-looking man waiting in the room to greet us.

As we take our seats, the man introduces himself as a marketing guy doing research for a well-known alcohol manufacturer. He looks like he’s pretty behind on sleep. Then he gestures to the mirrored wall behind him. “There’s an observer behind this wall,” he explains, “but please ignore it.”

Next he asks us to familiarize ourselves with the people sitting on either side of us. “I’ll break you up in pairs,” he says. “Please learn a little bit about your partner, where he’s from, his favorite movie, and so on.”

We dutifully make perfunctory small-talk. To my right is a pompous, sharp-suit-wearing entertainment lawyer who looks like Dr. Gaius Balthazar from Battlestar Galactica. To my left, a down-to-earth real estate guy who looks like George Clooney’s heavyset older brother. His favorite movie is The Sting, and I tell him mine is The Third Man. Whoopee.

Marketing Guy then makes us go around the circle and introduce each other. I’m tempted to tell the group that Real Estate Guy’s favorite movie is Anal Avengers 4 but I stick with The Sting. After we’re done he breaks into the presentation.

#

He basically shows us a bunch of liquor bottles, some real, some fake, and asks us what we think of them. The shapes, the heights, the label sizes, how much would you pay for this, et cetera. It goes on and on. After about an hour he shows us one concept that’s a little on the frilly side.

“That’s totally queer,” says one of the working-class guys on my right. Then he realizes there’s a totally gay mixed-race guy sitting on my left. “Uh, I didn’t mean it that way,” he hastily adds. I was half-hoping the gay guy would pick one of the bottles up, break it into a jagged weapon on the table’s edge and scream “Well what did you mean, motherfucker?” just to break it up a little.

Marketing guy continues with the questions, asking us stuff like “Now this bottle here--if it was a person, what would it say when it walked into the room?” I’m guessing it would say Holy shit, I’m a bottle that’s been transmogrified into a human being! but I knew those weren’t the answers he was looking for.

#

At the end of it, Marketing Guy leaves the room for a minute, and comes back in with a tray loaded up with highballs. It’s expensive scotch from the client! All of us grab a glass, some of us clearly more greedy than others, and start swilling it.

Then we’re done, and as we walk out the receptionist hands each of us our remuneration--an envelope containing $125 in cash!

#

I hear there’s a whole subculture of broke-ass guys like me who try to make a living out of attending focus groups. The friend of mine who tipped me off about this one made $250 sitting in on a Macintosh session, and a couple hundred bucks here and there watching VW commercials and looking at logos for Wendy’s. If ever there was a subculture I needed to join, this is it.

#

I took the train home smelling like scotch. The little taste I had had given me a craving, and on the way back to the apartment I stopped off at the neighborhood liquor store. I walked in with a hankering, and walked back out fifty bucks lighter with a bottle of single-malt. Maybe marketing does work.

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Today’s soundtrack: now I drink from a paper cup

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Today at 11:02pm: losing

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This morning someone threatened to stab me, and by someone I mean a crazy person. He didn’t look crazy--just your average run-of-the-mill thug--but he sure talked crazy. I was on Sixth Ave having a cup of sidewalk coffee with my friend Roger. Ironically enough, we’d just gotten out of our martial arts class, and my master was somewhere nearby getting a cup of coffee as well.

So this guy walks up and asks me for a cigarette. I declined, politely I thought, and he starts talking nuts. Something about how I didn’t know him, and about how everyone in the city was retarded, and I was retarded. Then he says “You don’t know me, and afterwards you might say ‘let’s be friends’ but it’s too late. I’ll stab THE SHIT out of you, motherfucker.” This whole time he’s staring at me (not Roger), like he’s daring me to twitch. I couldn’t tell if he had a knife on him or knot.

He kept on like this for a while, causing Roger and I to do the city thing and put our conversation on hold; when a crazy person accosts you it’s like an ambo driving by with the sirens on--you fall silent in the understanding that in ten seconds this will pass and you can get back to your life.

After his tirade Crazy McNutjob walked about ten feet away, then turned and yelled vague threats at us. I idly wished my master was coming down the block with his coffee that very minute, just to see what he would do, but I know he’d probably ignore the crazy guy too.

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Roger once told me a story about how he ran into a husband-and-wife team of Wing Chun kung fu practitioners. They were bragging about how a wino crossed their path one night, got in the woman’s way and she beat the living shit out of him. Roger just shook his head, saying “The guy’s a fucking wino, he needs help; you could have just walked around him” but the couple went on and on about “honor.” Martial arts attracts more crazy people than the sidewalks of New York do.

But who knows, maybe we were wrong not to do anything? Maybe in a parallel universe I like, totally got stabbed and today was the last day I spent on that alternate Earth.

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On Friday I lost at Lotto. It was up to $220 mil and not a single one of my numbers matched. They say all you need is a dollar and a dream, but there’s more to it than that.

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Tonight I went out to Brooklyn to shoot some stuff for Ishle Park’s new book. I’m really psyched because it’s the first time anyone’s asked and paid me to shoot something for them. Okay so really it’s the second time, but the first time it was also Ishle, and that was just one picture; this is for a series.

Even better, I needed a new camera, and Ish paid up front. The amount of the check almost entirely covered the cost a new Canon SD-30, which I went out and picked up for the project.

I still have my old, fucked-up SD-10 and I’m probably going to give it away, to one of you online people in some kind of random drawing. I lost at Lotto but maybe one of you will win a camera with a damaged sensor, hooray.

None of the shots I’m taking for the book are supposed to have people in them, but in between shooting I fucked around and took some flicks of Ish:

I’m not a very expressive people photographer. My directions are usually “Face away from the camera please” or “Less passion, less passion.”

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While shooting on Ish’s Brooklyn rooftop I accidentally kneeled in some tar. Fuck! This glob of it got stuck on my (favorite pair of) jeans. I couldn’t get it off, and then I decided I don’t care, like maybe it doesn’t matter if the pants I always wear have this shot of black goop on them. So what if I look dirty. I’m trying not to be vain, which, as it turns out, is pretty easy if you’re not really good-looking to begin with.

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After I lost at Friday’s Lotto, the pot went up to 260 mil, and I bought another ticket.

The drawing was tonight. I just checked the results, and whaddaya know, I still ain’t rich; but at least I didn’t get stabbed.

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Today’s soundtrack:
There must be a reason that I have been hanging 'round
for so long in this goddamn café all night

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Today at 12:02pm: tapping

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I miss volume knobs, because I’m one of those people who constantly adjusts the volume of things. Everything’s all buttons now, which is ridiculous. We still have doorknobs. Imagine if doorknobs were replaced by buttons: You push it once and the door opens a crack, but if you want it open all the way you’ve got to tap the button like fifty fucking times.

I want a cell phone with a big, fat volume knob on the side of it. The sidewalks of New York are a bad place to have cell conversations. The coverage is great, but the prevalence of buses, fire trucks and jackhammers is not. Every time someone sets their house on fire they are basically condemning everyone in a five-block radius from having a cell phone conversation until the trucks make it there. Cingular, Verizon and T-Mobile should sponsor fire safety public service announcements.

Another thing I’d like to put volume knobs on is other people. Soooo many times in the subway you wish you could reach over and adjust the person next to you. I’d constantly be getting into volume wars with people, where I’d switch some girl off and her boyfriend would be all “Hey! I was listening to that” and turn her back up. I guess it would be better if you could hit “mute” and switch them over to subtitles you could ignore.

Anyways yeah, much of my life in the city is me living with incorrect volume levels. You can’t hear what you want, but the shit you don’t comes in Dolby Surround.

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Today’s soundtrack: I may be wrong, but then again I may be right
Today at 7:22pm: ascending stairs



If you are rigid on the subway, you will collapse. Lock your body and the motion of the train will knock you down.

So you relax, though your feet are planted firmly on the ground, and let the sharp vibrations go through you, like the proverbial tree bending in the wind. You lean against the door or a pole, those few square inches of surface contact giving you the extra balance to stand.

If a camera was fixed to the interior of the train, moving along with it but focused on you, it might look like you were having a slow spasm. Body swaying, shoulders shifting, head nodding this way and that. All around you, people seated in various states of wakefulness. And there’s you, standing and lurching, doing what you have to do to not fall down. Without the context of the subway it would not be clear why you were moving in that way.

I took the train back from JFK by myself, carrying nothing and with headphones on. After raising the volume and closing my eyes, the grimy subway car and everything and everyone around me just fell away and disappeared. I felt myself in blackness, standing still but moving, being tugged at and jolted by unseen forces, anesthetized by the music that drowned everything out. Sooner or later I’d get where I was going.

I think this is from the "Deleted Scenes" portion of the "Fatal Attraction" DVD:

http://quadrant.livejournal.com/69392.html

Today’s soundtrack: I play the stereo loud, I disturb my neighbor, I want to enjoy the fruits of my labor
Today at 12:02pm: waiting for the light to change



Two things you need to know for this entry: One, the studio I live in used to be a factory, so the floors are for shit--low-grade plywood that’s been sloppily painted a half-dozen times. Two, there’s this bell on my computer that “ding”s every time I get a new e-mail.

So today I’m down on my hands and knees trying to strip a test area of the floor with a chemical paint remover, and the computer dings once or twice. I finish applying the remover, then slap the paper on top of it. In theory you wait a few hours, then peel the paper off and all the paint comes off with it. I couldn’t afford to buy the special paper you’re supposed to use so I’m using scraps of photographic background paper from the studio.

After applying the remover I climb up into the loft to check the e-mail. It’s something from a LiveJournal user, saying I’ve made it onto some type of ranking list. He says I’m on top of the list. I click the link to see what he’s talking about.

Apparently some guy used an algorithm to calculate the ten most “popular” LiveJournal sites, out of the four million or so his algorithm was able to access. I’m ranked fourth. Then I realize the three sites ahead of me are group sites, so yeah, like the guy said in the e-mail, I’m the first individual blogger on this list.

I figure it’s a mistake, since I’ve seen plenty of LJ users that have more “friends” than I do. The Kim_Jong_Il__ username, back when I had the chops and the inclination to update it, routinely drew more than twice the traffic of “hipstomp.” And I’ve seen LiveJournal “Top 40” lists with me not even in the running.

Then I read a little more and realize this algorithm-thingy is not going by gross numbers, but by the Google PageRank system, where if the people linked to me have lots of people linked to them in turn, my numbers go up.

So. By mathematical quirk, according to this one guy’s calculations, I have been deemed the single most “popular” LiveJournal blog within certain numerical parameters rather beyond my comprehension. I’m not quite sure how it works, I don’t get the sense that it’s completely accurate, and I don’t feel first.

The bell dings a couple more times. It’s more random people, repeating this statistic to me. You are number one.

So I flip open a copy of Entertainment Weekly and sit by the phone, waiting for it to ring with offers of book deals, movie deals, or newspaper and television reporters dying to interview me.

In an hour it rings twice: the first time is Verizon calling to upsell me on some services I can’t afford, the second time it’s a wrong number, asking for a “Dr. Lam.” Whomever Dr. Lam is, he either went to med school or has a PhD. Me, I didn’t stay in school a day longer than I had to.

I put the E. Weekly down, grab my coat, go outside and walk the streets of Manhattan, waiting to be recognized, mobbed and adored. A busload of tourists pulls up in Little Italy and I saunter past them confidently, waiting for crowds to gather and point. Nobody seems to see me, perhaps my clothes are not bright enough.

Next I have lunch with a friend at a NoLita cafe, where I wait for the manager to send over a bottle of wine or maybe comp our meal. Instead we finish eating and the waiter unceremoniously brings the check.

Then I walk over to Broadway, where surely one of downtown’s many attractive women will take a break from shopping and thrust their phone numbers into my hand, hoping to sleep with me. I bring my shoulder bag to collect the panties they’ll throw. But everyone looks pretty busy, no one comes my way.

A news helicopter passes overhead, and I stand still so the cameraman can get a clear shot of me while they circle. But the pilot just keeps going and the ‘copter disappears behind some buildings. Maybe they’re going to get gas.

At the end of the day I come back to my apartment, to take the paint stripper off the floors. But the substitute paper I’d used is apparently all wrong for the job, and when I try to peel it off it shreds messily. The paint stays on the floor, now with jagged scraps of paper seemingly glued to it. I try taking it off with a scraper and only succeed in making more of a mess. When I stand to wash my hands I’m dizzy from the fumes and feeling sick.

I spend twenty minutes looking for the bottle of mineral spirits I’d bought to clean up the stripper, but can’t find it anywhere. While looking for it, I succeed in making my apartment a mess to rival the one now stuck on my floor.

For dinner I got take-out from a Chinese place, some tofu and rice in a brown sauce. I ate it at my desk, like always, in front of the computer and next to a fresh stack of bills. If you were there you could hear me chewing. My phone had no messages, the computer stopped dinging, the bed behind me as messy as it was empty. I turned some music on so it wouldn’t be so quiet.

Today’s soundtrack: he still insists he sees a ghost
Today at 12:02pm: crawling back into bed



It’s shortly before midnight in Manhattan and I’m standing on a Second Avenue sidewalk. Feeling the booze in my system, watching the cars go by. I’m having a cigarette and this girl comes up to me.

“Are you open?” she says. I look at her blankly.

(Nightlife History Lesson)

Trends often start in Manhattan. Used to be the only thing inside a New York bar was stools and drunk people who paid too much rent. Then came the early ‘90s, and two bars changed everything: Merc Bar over in SoHo, and a bar called “bOb” on the Lower East Side.

I happened to know the owner of bOb, his name was “D” and he was a helluva nice guy. D’s innovation was to fill his Eldridge Street haunt not with stools but with comfortable, low-slung couches. Merc Bar did the same thing around the same time, and within months the lounge revival was in full swing, with bars from Brooklyn to Jersey pulling out wall counters and putting in banquettes. I spent a fair amount of time over on Eldridge Street, helping D pay for his mortgage like I was in some kind of alcohol-infused telethon with a hip hop soundtrack.

The lounge thing eventually cooled off but left a legacy; you can still get a cocktail on a couch at a million places on either side of the Hudson.

The next bar trend was Speakeasys. For those of you unfamiliar with (what little there is of) U.S. history, in the 1930s alcohol was made illegal. Secret bars popped up all over the city, their entrances obscured by long alleyways, underground passages and peephole doors manned by password-demanding gorillas. After booze became legal again, the speakeasys disappeared.

In the mid-‘90s two guys opened up Lansky Lounge on the Lower East Side, the first honest-to-god speakeasy I’d heard of in my short adult life. You couldn’t find the signage-lacking back-alley entrance unless it had been previously pointed out to you. Lansky Lounge wa s a hit with the hip.

Although Lansky ran its course and closed its doors a while ago, speakeasys are still all the rage. The most popular is probably this taco stand on Kenmare with a high-end bar/restaurant hidden underneath it. But this being the internet age, no secret bar remains secret for long, which takes the piss out of the system.

The Blue Owl on 2nd Avenue is billed as a speakeasy, but it’s far from the real deal. It’s true that the entrance is difficult to find--it’s below sidewalk level and lacks a proper sign, demarcated only by a neon blue owl--but with only one little “secret room” in the back, it’s decidedly lame. I found the place and went downstairs anyway to have a drink.

Halfway through my drink I come up the stairs to have a smoke, and that’s when the girl approaches me.

“Are you open?” she says. I look at her blankly. The bar isn’t visible from the street, so I know she ain’t talking about that.

“Are you guys still open,” she says, slower this time, as if I can’t speak English. I look behind me to see what she might be referring to. Above the bar is a storefront window that says CHINESE MASSAGE.

“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” I say. You want a massage? It’s a hunnert bucks, now lie down on the sidewalk.

The next morning I’m coming out of the diner, which is on the edge of Chinatown. This big, fat tourist hick in a green shirt approaches me. “You sell purses?” he asks.

“What?” I say.

“Purses, you sell them, right?” he says, in a thick Southern accent. (For those that don’t know, mainland Chinese immigrants are known to sell counterfeit purses on the streets of Chinatown.)

Sure, I sell purses. You sell tractors, or farm pigs?

Trade you a Louis Vuitton for a fucking John Deere.

Today’s soundtrack: party people going places on the D-train
Today at 9:02pm: swilling tea at the neighbor’s



Little Italy, 11pm on a Sunday, not far from my house. They’re filming a movie a few blocks away so parts of the street are blocked off. I’m squatting in the middle of the street, pressing the bottom of a new camera against the asphalt, trying to take a long-exposure photo of the Mulberry Street lights. A gypsy woman on the corner is calling out solicitations to bypassing bar-goers.

“I’ll tell you your future,” she says.

“We don’t wanna know,” laughs a gaggle of drunk, slightly trashy blondes.

I squeeze three shots off, then put the camera away and walk towards the gypsy. We make eye contact at the same time.

“What’s going on with you,” she says.

“Why don’t you tell me,” I say.

“Have a seat,” she says, getting out of her chair. She’s old, fat, wearing the type of clothes that didn’t exactly come off the racks at Bloomingdales. Seated next to her is another, slightly older, slightly fatter gypsy woman who doesn’t get up.

“How much?” I say.

“For ten dollars I’ll tell you what kind of person you are, what your favorite color is, what kinds of things you like,” she says.

I’m thinking that’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard, why the hell would I pay you to tell me what I already know. Not to mention my favorite color is brown and I’m wearing a brown shirt.

“What else you got?” I ask.

“For twenty dollars I read your palm, tell you what lies ahead,” she says.

“Twenty bucks, I’ll pass,” I say, and start turning away.

“Give him the full reading for ten,” the other gypsy loudly blurts, a disgusted expression on her face. (Disgusted with me, not the first gypsy, was my guess.)

“Sit down,” says the first gypsy. I take a seat in her chair and she takes my hand. The streetlights are bright enough that the lines are plain to see.

“You, you’re very creative, you make your own thing, you don’t walk in anybody’s footsteps,” she says, almost immediately after looking at my palm. I guess that’s a fair assessment, but what is she gonna say? You, you’re unoriginal, you’re a sheep and a loser, now pay me.

“You do different things,” she says. “I see cameras and flashes going off around you, am I right?”

I’m shocked and try to keep my poker face on so she can’t tell. I manage a photo studio, you see, and am often there during shoots. But then again, maybe she saw me squatting in the street taking the long-exposure shot and figured no amateur would put the kinda time into it that I was. “Something like that,” I say.

“You do many things,” she says. “Your career is on the right path. I see good things coming to you if you just keep doing what you’re doing. You’re on the right path.” Yeah? Then how come I don’t have any health insurance?

“But you’re very unhappy right now,” she continues. “Something is not sitting well with you, something is not settled.” I keep the poker face on.

She keeps studying my palm. “You’re having some problems with love,” she announces. “Some problems. There is someone you want to be with very much but for some reason you cannot be with her right now. But I see this other person is thinking about you. And you want to be with this person very much but there are some obstacles.”

The gypsy squints. “Also, there is more than one person, am I right?”

I look away. There’s only one person that matters.

She switches gears. “I see you moving away from love. Put love aside for a moment and spend time with your career.” Jeez, what a New York gypsy, it’s all about the work.

“Good things will happen to you later,” she concludes. “Now ask me something, anything, I’ll answer you right back.” She looks at me confidently.

I think for a moment. Lotto numbers, stock tips, date of my death, too obvious. Plus these aren’t the things that have been occupying my mind lately. I decide to keep the question vague-sounding, even though I know exactly what I’m asking.

“Do I make the move, or let them make the move?” I say.

“You let them make the move,” she says, without hesitation, like she knew I was going to ask. “You’ve done enough. You have to let them come to you.”

I pull out ten bones and press them into her wrinkled hand. She tries to upsell me on a tarot reading but I decline. (I once had a bad experience with tarot cards, remind me to tell you about it later.)

As I cross the street and head back to my house, one of the movie P.A.’s stops me. “You can’t go down this street, we can’t have any bodies in the shot,” he says, motioning towards the camera crew down the block. Enormous lights are focused on a couple standing in front of a bar.

“How long’s it gonna be?” I ask.

“A while,” he says, dismissively. I turn around to look at the gypsy like What, you couldn’t tell me this was gonna happen? but she’s not looking at me anymore.