An odd bar encounter.

The other Monday the other week going home from tutoring, I took the bus south from my one job, where it'd be a bit of a hike over to my neighborhood from where I got off, but doable, and so I decided to do this to hit up a "new" bar at this one intersection.

(It was actually an older bar I had been to before, but it had flipped ownership and names, and so I had to go to it again.)

So, I go in and I go sit down at the bar, and over to my left is this (young) (balding) (redheaded) guy with a ponytail pulled back, and he was shaking his left knee nervously.

He talked rapidly and with low affect, and had awkward social cues.

He said he was surprised that this part of the city was so safe, since it doesn't look safe on the news.

I then talked around a bit, and he was down from a northern suburb for the second time in two days, since he had gotten really drunk at the bar the night before and left his bag there.

"It's less busy today," he was like.

He then said that he had been attending a massage parlor near there called [name removed] that had closed up and that there was this one (Asian) woman named [name removed] who worked there who was nice and beautiful, and so he was going around looking for her.

He also said he was a dishwasher, and that he had been banned from establishments in his town where he lived for posting Facebook comments on different public organizations' pages about some female police inspector.

. . .

The whole thing gave me the creeps.  I hope that woman went somewhere where she can't be found, and that female police inspector knows what the fuck's up and keeps herself safe.

A dream of being late (2 of 2): No alarm set.

The other morning, I dreamt -

I wake up drowsily, and I look at my clock.

The alarm's not set, and I wander in to the kitchen to see if I had set my second alarm, on my cell phone, which I usually do.

I hadn't.
. . .

Like right then, I wake up.

Right away I check my bedside alarm to see if it was set, and it was, and then I wander drowsily out into the kitchen to go check my cell phone alarm, and it was also set.

Then, I go back to bed to sleep till my alarm goes off.

A dream of being late (1 of 2): Calling off morning work.

The other week I had been up late working, so the next morning instead of working a full day at my library shelving job, I decided to call in and shift my starting time back to noon, so I could get some sleep.

(They're a cool job like that, and are fine with it.)

But, I got up at 7:35am and the one guy I could call into wouldn't be there till like 8am, so I decided to half snooze until I could call in.

Then, I dreamt -

I called in.

Then, I snoozed a bit more, and I wasn't sure I had called in, so I picked up and checked and the phone said I had called in but I didn't think I had, so I called in, and my boss who's a very nice guy yelled at me a bit asking me why I was calling in to cancel multiple times.

. . .

Then, I woke up.  I wasn't sure if I had called in or not, so I checked the phone.  No outgoing call, so I realized that everything had been a dream, so I called in to cancel and then went back to bed.

Later when I was actually at work, I told my boss who's a very nice guy about the dream and him yelling at me, and he laughed at it.

Another commuting event on one of my morning bikerides:

A (young) (thin and "rough trade"-looking) (bearded) white guy, sitting in a thin white coat on the curb, talking into the cell phone and sobbing angrily at someone.

Then, half a block up, a (fatter) (young) (black) woman sitting in a black SUV idling by the curb, talking all no nonsense into the cell phone in a firm and even a bit shouting voice.

Otherwise, things were quiet, all around.

Saw some (black) city workers underneath the viaduct the other day.

The other week, I was going in to one of my jobs, and passed under this one viaduct where (white) city crews had been doing some work on and off the past few weeks.

This time, as I'm biking up, there's a (black) woman in a neon green construction vest all by herself in front of a van in front of the viaduct just facing away down the street looking at nothing in particular, and she's doing kneeling stretches like she's saluting the sun or doing tai chai or whatever.

Then, I pass under more, and there's a couple more (black) city workers in neon green construction vests, and they have Christmas music blaring.

Then, I'm a few blocks away, and there's this (old) (white) man from the neighborhood with a fat old beagle without a leash, and it runs across the empty street, and he yells at it, because he's afraid for its safety.

Then, I biked in to work, otherwise uneventfully.

A neighborhood drunk shouted at me.

The other week I hopped on a bikeshare bike to go commute in to one of my jobs, and as I was coasting in to the stoplight at the intersection, a(n old) (unshaven) (white-bearded) guy in a thin, open coat tooled out of an alley and across two lanes of traffic and into a minimall parking lot without looking out for cars at all, and as he was going into the parking lot, he turned a bit and shouted at me over his shoulder, "Get yourself a bike!"

Observations of a Christian book industry worker.

The other week I was at a new bar, this new taproom for a decently established brewery in the city, and the (youngish) (blonde) (kind of bro-ish looking) guy next to me on the bar stool not only turned out to be an off-shift bartender at the place, but also an editor in the Christian book industry.

He said that he wrote, and that he was trying to get more into brewing.

He said that it's hard to reconcile the pastoral and the commercial in that industry, and the way he said it, you could tell that he was just absolutely disgusted, though he really didn't elaborate.

He also said that evangelicalism doesn't contribute to or push forward the wider literary culture at all; it imitates stuff it sees commercially like a year or two after it happens in non-evangelical circles, but it never sets trends, let alone do anything artistically interesting.

I shared with him scholarship that I had read on the deconversion of evangelical artists, and he said it made sense to him, that they grew beyond the tradition.