Fall of '05

A gaggle of larger-than-average-sized men have congealed near the coffee shop’s back wall. I can only imagine these individuals have come together for some sort of support group.

At the opposite end against the front windows, a squadron of idiosyncratic characters has gathered: a man wearing roller-blader wrist protectors at the end of each chubby limb holds a strangely quiet child who, as if to follow suit, dons a pair of coke-can glasses framed in a translucent pink, petroleum-based solid… the coffee shop’s token fat-chick complete with green-dyed hair and stratified multi-color J-Crew scarf… what at first looked to be an ugly woman with the jowls of an angry man, but upon closer inspection more closely resembles (and, in fact, is) a man who simply looks like an ugly woman… a man sporting a mustache and hideous long hair but missing his trench-coat and fedora (a ghost of my freshman year roommate from college?). I would hazard a guess the last partook rather vigorously in Dungeons and Dragons games well into his late-20's.



Amidst this spectacle sits a singularity; a defiant homeless man in a last-stand attempt to stave off the grip of the cold outside these walls. His skin is more weathered than his coat and he looks to have long since rediscovered the common denominator that lurks behind our cotton-polyester blends and Abercrombie & Fitch sweaters. It has taken precedence over these things. I imagine that to him they must be superfluous, repugnant and, more importantly, stubbornly unachievable luxuries – meanwhile, these are the same things that many of us take for granted and hold to be basic components of our daily lives.

He is quiet, though I can see a dialogue rushes back and forth within his mind. This is bothersome neither to him nor to the rest of us that sit alongside and across and apart from him. To him and to us alike, the only thing that seems to exist is the understanding that he is not like us and that we are not like him; we each see the other as an ethereal article – nothing more than part of the background to which no amount of consideration is worth the effort.



My bubble has cappuccinos and iBooks. How about yours?