Some people on the subway and in subway stations...:

1) In one subway station on my way to work, a (young) (black) guy just sitting and waiting, hanging his feet off the edge of the platform, till a few minutes before the train comes, when he swings his feet up and rolls over a few times and lays on his side next to a column like six feet in from the platform edge.

2) As I'm in a car in the early afternoon on my way to work, a(n older) (broad-shouldered) (fat) (bald) (black) man with a small circular cloth covered pillow and three red plastic bottle caps on it, calling out loudly to everyone and doing the shellgame with them at full volume, while he announces each and every move to the car very loudly as he holds a roll of (fake) bills like fifties and hundreds, like "best game on earth, folks, see where it ends up, win a hundred dollars..."

Then, when he does that at one end of the car and then finishes and comes to the middle of the car and sits next to me, I'm like, "Man, please don't do that here," and he says something to me and goes ahead, so I'm like, "This is a fraud, you let people win and then you go and switch it," and he starts to speak up something, and then a (young) (Asian-American) woman standing up and holding a rail strap near us jumps in and cuts him off and is like, "He switches it, if you look closely, you can see him!", and then he defends his dignity, but no-one really plays with him or even pays attention to him now, so he sits quietly for a few stops, and then gets off the train.

3) As I'm returning home late at night from work on a quiet car with just me and a (middle-aged) (black) lady and a (cleancut) (young) (white) guy on it, we pull into a station and this train from the other direction is at the platform and just dumping out people onto the platform from just car after car packed with young sweaty concertgoers who were at some downtown music festival and now they're all loud and shouting, and a few are ambling over towards our train but fortunately none get on, and then the doors close and we start pulling away, and I'm like, "I am so glad that they are not on here," and the (black) lady is like, "I know, I was worried too, I wanted that door to close faster!", and at that the (cleancut) (young) (white) guy perks up and looks at us and just laughs, since he agrees, too.

We all bonded.

Halloween: Two bits.

1) This one little (Asian-American) boy had one of the most realistic firefighter costumes that I've ever seen, with like a yellow jacket and green flashy reflective tape pieces on it and a realistic-looking hat (no cheap red plastic hat at all!).

2) This one (black) woman was out with a (younger) (black) girl with a witch hat and a neon green wig and blood on her mouth.

"She's a vampire witch," the woman was like, "But she lost her teeth."

We talked some, and then for some reason the girl tried to get my attention and started jumping up and down and was like, "I got coffee candy tonight, I got coffee candy tonight!"

"Well," I was like, "Between all that sugar and now all that caffeine, you might need to go and find another vampire witch at bedtime, to cast a sleeping spell on you tonight."

"That spell's called 'Baby Benadryl,'" the woman was like to me, laughing.

You know what irks me?

The people I talk to forever about my campaign who are clearly interested and might very well end up voting for me, but who then won't sign the petition for me to get on the ballot, and are instead like, "Come back."

If you don't want to sign, just say it, honestly, it's so much more honest and understandable.

Instead, they're all going through the motions like they have to do research, when you know they won't, and the idea that I somehow have the time to go back to them in particular is just laughable, since I just canvassed the section and that and the productivity of uncanvassed streets and my 50 hour workweek between my jobs and my commute make it very unlikely I'll ever come back, at least in this stage of the campaign.

I really don't think people realize how much work it is to get signatures, and how much it helps to get just one more, and how much time it would be for me to go back and find them in particular, as if they as one individual would command that much weight in the world of potential people who could sign for me.

I guess they're trying to be nice?

Instead, they come off as clueless, and the worst kind of clueless, the people-who-think-they're-being-nice-but-aren't, and who perhaps think they're a bigger fish than they are, when they're really just one voter among thousands.

With those type of people, I find that I'd always rather deal with an outright asshole, it's so much more straightforward.

My response, though, is always something like, "Thanks, but I probably won't be back here again during signature season, please keep me in mind for the election, please do call or email me with any questions if you or your friends or your family have any..."

[insert eyeroll emoji here.]

You know what's awesome?

The landlord and his girlfriend and his two kids, like a baby and a six year old, moved in upstairs this summer.

And, they've decorated for Halloween!

Strings of skull lights on the front fence, a glittery pumpkin cut-out on their door, garbage bags tied up to look like big spiders sitting on the front stoop, that kind of thing.

My family never did that when I was younger and I don't think I've ever lived in an apartment that had that, and it's kind of fun to have around, to be honest.

The best part is is that someone else did all the decorating for me, and I just enjoy it when I come and go from my apartment and I see it sitting all out there!

I never thought I'd admit to liking something like this, unnecessary objects from consumer culture, and all the consumption.

I guess "an old dog can learn new tricks," and "don't knock it till you've tried it."

A dream of an apartment, and friends.

The other week I dreamnt:

I'm in the foyer of a house, and up to my left is a white carpetted staircase that jags left up the wall and then around right to a second floor that I can see up above extending out to my right, and it's all carpetted in white with no railing but maybe a little copperwork as sort of an open doorway in the middle, all sitting smack dab crosswise on top of another door on the floor below, that's in front of me in the foyer and down a few steps.

I walk up the stairs to my left and then turn to the copperwork, and it makes a low doorway, and there's a gap in the floor not quite a foot across, and beyond that the back of a white chair is pushed up tight to the edge of the gap, and I can see that in the room beyond it's the end of one row of similar chairs and there's another row facing it, all over to the left into the room on the second floor that I could see a bit from the foyer..

I somehow lean through and push the back of the chair and move the chair away from the gap to make some room for me to get to the other side, and between the gap and my having to bend over to get through the door, I'm really really scared of falling, and I don't know why anybody would set up a door like that, where there's a gap in the floor right where you're trying to get through.

Next, I'm somehow through, and I see over to my left my one art school friend who wears women's clothes slouched down in one chair, and across from him my one Romance Languages coordinator friend, and they're laughing and joking and discussing some movie they saw about Zimbabwe, like everything was normal and they hadn't noticed the fright I'd been in, getting through the weird doorway.

Then, I woke up.

. . .

A person on the subway the other day late at night when I was coming home from work:

A (fatter) (very late middle-aged) (black) woman with a short bristly moustache and a beard, and a lot of full plastic shopping bags, who comes in and sits down two seats up from me and has a Haagen-Dazs container in her hands with the plastic peeled back, and she sits there leaning forward and she holds it out in one hand and every once in a while she brings it in to her mouth to lick the top of it, since she doesn't have a spoon and must be really hungry for ice cream.

Two happenings at the resthome, recently:

1) I had heard that this one woman with pretty bad memory and confusion and delusion due to dementia was a very good piano player, and she finally got her piano bench repaired, and so I could finally go hear her play like we had talked about a number of times and like had she been inviting me to.

She plays by ear, and so I asked her to play "God Bless America" and "We'll Meet Again" and "Blue Skies" for me, and she did, and then she was getting tired, so I asked for "Good Night Ladies," and she did that and segued into a brash version of "Mary Had a Little Lamb" before doing a joke-y close.

Very smart and very humorous, and very amazing.  I really really loved it, and so did the one (Mexican) (female) aide who came and joined us at the end.

The one resident kept asking me to bring my "fiddle," though, because I had once told her that I play double bass, and since I had told her that I didn't own one but I had borrowed them years ago from different ensembles that I had played with, she was saying that I should have rented one from the people who had come by recently (?), and then we could have played together.

"Next time you bring your fiddle and we'll play together," she was like.

2) This one (very old) man and I were in the elevator, and he's largely non-verbal and can be out of it a lot of the time, and he pointed down at my right shoe and how one loop of my shoelace was too big and lying on the floor.

"Be careful," he was like.

Later that night, too, he got done with dinner after everyone else had finished, and a few dining hall workers were vacuuming and cleaning up, one in her socks, and as I was escorting him out of the dining hall he noticed a pair of shoes under the table, where the one dining hall worker had taken them off and left them while she was vacuuming.

As soon as he saw that ,he stopped dead in his tracks and kept pointing over at them, and he wouldn't get moving again until she came over and put her shoes back on, even though she was saying, "[his first name], I took them off because my feet hurt!".

. . .

(People with dementia can be highly attuned to changes in texture and color and shape, so that's maybe how he noticed my [black] shoelace lying against the [fake brown wood] elevator floor, and her [white] shoes among the [brown] table legs on the [green] carpet.  People's brains can change differently, too, where they can still do some things very well, even as they can't do other things at all, it's all really fascinating.)