My trip yesterday: Coffee outside right near a GNC.

Before going to a concert yesterday I went up to study at this one Arab-run coffee shop I've been to before that stocks good rugallah (this time it was shitty though) and has pleasant outdoor seating. I was talking with the owner a lot, who's an engineer from Syria. He's been having trouble sleeping, so I recommended some stretching exercises he can do before bed that I was reading about in Men's Health.

(My new obsession is prefacing things conversationally with the names of magazines, like, "Men's Health recommends stretching before bed for a sounder and more pleasant sleep." Yesterday too someone complimented me on my hair, and I was like, "Actually I'm getting it cut on Monday. Maxim recommends a six-week haircut schedule." In addition, I was talking about emo with someone, and they mentioned "Fall Out Boy" as an emo band, and I was like, "People Magazine often publishes photographs of Pete Wentz." I usually leave the remarks short, and leave it to the other person to pick up the conversation again.)

In addition, next door was a GNC that no one visited but had an incredibly hyperactive late 20s musclebound guy with a scruffy face and an earring and an attitude. He would come outside about every ten minutes and smoke a cigarette and had an incredibly visible trach scar, and he would lock the store always and go run errands, like he did when he went two doors down to the other side of the coffee shop to a gyros place that had rows of skin-on half-chickens roasting in their front window, and came out with his dinner in this grease-soaked paper bag. When he was going to and from the restaurant, too, he was whistling the bass-line from the White Stripes' "Seven Storey Mountain".