02/06/2026
I avoid the bar. I walk up my block with "Sons Of Pioneers" playing. A girl in a messy sewing room, deep in concentration. A woman in kimono at a desk of her massage parlor in front of a big glowing fishtank. A young girl doing a goofy dance because she thinks nobody's looking. I keep going. Pretty young ladies selling sodas on dirt scrap piles under filthy awnings. Old ladies beating discarded furniture up with hammers. A kid crying insanely sat on a filthy sidewalk with precarious construction above. Guys casually squatted in flipflops and shorts next to a bulldozer perched on trash bringing a building down. An old lady walking backwards fanning herself. The top floor of a building, casually on fire. A car driving slow with the hood up and a guy squatted inside the engine area, tinkering around. Everyone in the streets. People need each other. They do the simple things. They sit together in the dark, eat pumpkin seeds, picnic by the lake. She leaves and I walked to food street, every square inch a spectacle of people just living unabashedly in their skin, smiling and crying and barfing and sweating and stroking their kids. I do what I normally do there; I roam for a vaguely inviting place then end up at the one in the center that really is no more inviting than the others. I ask for rice, beer and the bathroom. A young boy who works there stares at me. I give him the smile. He gives it back. His little sister is sitting across from me at the table when I return. She looks straight through me, unimpressed, for a long time, then leans over and vomits in the little bucket by the table, then goes back to looking through me. An average date, really.
