This afternoon at the corner bodega I saw a slightly frazzled Muslim woman who was looking after five or six energetic young children. She was wearing a tightly wrapped headscarf, and sticking out of the side of the headscarf was the lower half of a pink Motorola Razr. Though the phone was open, she did not seem to be having a conversation with a person on the other end. My first thought was, “Wow, somebody’s begging for brain cancer,” which was a strangely hostile thing to think.
Tonight I walked into a Starbucks, and immediately knew that something was amiss. Everyone, customer and employee alike, had a slightly stunned look on their face. Nobody was saying anything.
Eventually somebody giggled. The silence having been broken, I asked the man standing next to me what was going on. It turns out that moments before I walked in, someone had entered, grabbed a bag of coffee beans, then run away in a bizarre, cartoonish fashion. “Knees all wobbly,” is how the man described it. My first thought was, “I guess Starbucks employees won’t run after me if I ever decide to steal a bag of coffee,” which is a naughty thing for me to have thought.
An hour later, standing in line for a comedy show, another thought: “Hey, I’ve had two odd experiences today. I wish something else would happen, because three odd things would feel more narratively complete.” Five seconds passed, then a guy walked by me — having a casual conversation on a cellphone, and wearing these things:
I didn’t notice if the cellphone was a Razr. I’m going to go ahead and assume that it was.
New York City = nuts.
