I had to get out of the bed and breakfast around two because I was getting restless - I kept shifting my legs and cracking my left knee. I grabbed Infinite Jest, which I've been reading off and on for months, and a slim notebook and walked to a random park.
Slight paranoia kicked in as I walked around this unfamiliar area passing the occasional stranger. I got mad at myself for dropping my eyes when one of these strangers approaching on a bicycle stared at me. I looked back up and glared until he passed and then felt ashamed a few seconds later when it registered that he was just a 14 or 15-year-old kid trying to look hard.
I sat down on a bench and tried to read but kept thinking nervous thoughts...
When people passed, I wondered if I should make eye contact with them, how long I should make it for, where I should look, how I should make my face look when I looked, how my face may not look how I thought it looked, how the people passing might misinterpret the way my face looked, how I would interpret their misinterpretation, how much of my interpretation would be misinterpretation, and why a guy couldn't just sit on a random park bench and enjoy a good book.
To shut off this part of my mind is one of the reasons I drink.
I stuck this out for about half an hour, before getting up and starting the walk to my old neighborhood in Edgewater. An issue that I had with that neighborhood had come up on my date last night. There are these guys that hang out around the Thorndale stop and say shit to women as they pass by, probably because they have nothing to do. It's usually innocuous shit like "hey girl" or "I like your hair" or just a two-toned whistle. These guys usually hang out in groups of two to three, don't have much discretion, and say it to most women who pass. They've said that shit to my then-girlfriend (only once while I was there, and I didn't say anything back).
The girl I was on a date with had to go feed the parking meter for her car once while I stayed with the table. I went with her to feed it again (she was parked near the Thorndale stop), and she told me that some guys had said shit to her while she passed.
I asked what they had said to her (it turned out to be "hey, are you Haitian?" but she said it was the way they said it) and started peering down the street - I thought I saw some dudes who were probably the culprits slouching under the El tracks half a block away. I started walking a little down the sidewalk towards that way with my head up but not yet looking directly at them, because I was going through the whole, insane eye contact mantra that I've described for the bench setting above. I had this sinking, blackhole feeling in my stomach as I walked a few more steps that way.
The girl asked me where I was going, and I saw that she had already set the new ticket on the dashboard and was waiting expectantly for me further up the sidewalk. I turned around and joined her. Another guy that I hadn't seen outside of a closed shop gave a very faint two-tone whistle after we passed. I turned my head and he was already facing away, even though there didn't seem be anyone behind us on the sidewalk.
Ah, you pussy, you fucking coward, you little spineless shit - I thought this about myself to myself as we turned the corner. I kept fixating on this as we walked. I rationalized out loud that what they said was usually harmless. My date said she didn't mind it as much when she was on her own, but she thought it was more disrespectful when someone was with her, that it was disrespectful to me. Ah, you pussy, you fucking coward, you little spineless shit - I thought this must be what those guys were thinking every time I had passed and said nothing.
To shut off this other part of my mind is another reason that I drink.
And so I thought about this as I walked back to the neighborhood today. I started practicing gazing just past the left shoulder of every guy coming my way, keeping on my side of the sidewalk, and making what I thought was nonchalant eye contact for the two or so seconds before we passed each other. This would be my warm-up for when I got to the Thorndale stop; I would wait there near the hecklers and call them out for being disrespectful the next time a woman passed and they said anything. I didn't know what would happen, but they sure as hell were going to respect me.
I was thinking this as a taller guy about my age starting crossing over to my side of the sidewalk. Here it goes - I hunched my shoulders, clenched my fist, and sped up slightly. He cut across my path, gave me a distracted glance, and continued on to get into the driver's seat of a taxi - it was his taxi parked along the side of that street.
oh jeezus jeezus jeezus - I dropped my head and kept walking.
A block further down, a white truck with the words Anchor Steam emblazoned along it was parked outside of a convenience store. The driver was unloading cases of beer. I sped up.
I recognized a cafe that I'd been to once before, jogged across the intersection, and ordered an iced tea that I forget the name of - gulp gulp.
I sat there for nearly two hours and read and doodled in my notebook, the badly positioned sketch you see above. I'm not sure what else to say about it other than the sunshine-eye in the top left is the trapdoor-blackhole that I talked about this morning and it's my face turned away from it. Open to interpretation - but I felt a little more sorted out after making it.
How petty and pathetic and plain stupid for me to be on the warpath to look for "respect" from people whom I knew and cared nothing about, especially when I need to be whole, happy, and healthy to be there for the ones I love.
So how about I start respecting myself first and see where keeping sober takes me?
To help this part of my mind come more alive - the part that abandons moments of craziness for sober realizations - is a reason that I don't want to drink.
I've also realized that taxi drivers aren't my responsibility and that I've been taking more cab rides while pretending that all drivers embody the same concept as a twisted type of punishment lately.
I did end up taking a cab to get back to the bed and breakfast tonight, but I struck up a conversation with this driver instead of keeping silent and staring out the window without really seeing - we talked about moving apartments and traveling. He's moving his stuff into storage because he's finally ready to take a trip to Europe and Africa that he's been planning for 15 years. I listened to his travel plans and envied his organization.
I gave him the same 50% tip that I've been giving to the other drivers but for an entirely different reason.
"Live it up," I told him and tried not to overthink it.
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