8 January 2015 8:00–9:55 PM
I can count the amount of times I’ve been on Lincoln Road as being a little over twenty — and yet when it comes to counting when I’ve been there on anything that isn’t business, I’m not afraid to cut off fingers. Ok, I’m very afraid to cut off my fingers. They’re MY fingers. Anyway, I always consider being there just to hang and then the strip always reminds me of how it seems to have a severe problem with having every single restaurant on it playing the same throbbing techno club music — maybe they all share the same playlist — and yet just walking by them (usually in their outside umbrella class) makes me feel underdressed. These restaurants, or at least their patrons, and I have very different ideas of what makes club music appropriate, probably since my idea is less when I am trying to get food to stay down and more when Hell runs out of Enya tapes to play.
Ignoring this, there is still the lateness of the winter chill (the tardiness outright pissing me off) combined with the petty tapping on my flannel shoulders to give me that briefest of aggravation. The moon does a better job than the dim underlit flood of the chez kissass and pizza parlours in illuminating my awkward stroll in this heart of the storm that I don’t belong in, all the people looking like they live in the strip rather than being so outsider that they had worse time finding a parking garage that didn’t cost a leg and a soul than I did. I maneuver my rain-blinded trek around modern art works that make known only a few direct important facts: they’re big and they’re plastic and they sometimes shoot water out of their ass. Where I would like to think their ass is.
I finally make it to my destination, maybe five minutes late, hopefully no more than ten, knowing me and how my clock runs most likely twenty minutes to grab a diner dinner with my ex-ex-boss and discuss our past grievances and how we will be putting to rest our previous attitudes that we left each other for a much healthier work manner. I smile and nod, knowing that I squashed this the moment I realized I can’t live in this world without the lack of normalcy this job gives me and asked for my damn job back. Apparently, he just wants a concrete communication of our obvious resolutions with each other. I just keep stalling and ordering more coffee to avoid going back into the kiddie kool shower that is outside for the next half hour or so. I wonder if he is just thinking the same, but the difference he actually dressed for the weather and I am in a long sleeve flannel shirt and futbol shorts. I didn’t just feel underdressed for Lincoln Rd. at a winter’s rainy night, I fucking am underdressed for Lincoln Rd. at a winter’s rainy night.
We realize we got to the end of the agreement of truce when I found myself concentrating a bit too damn hard on what dessert looks the most digestible and he states how he expects me back at the office tomorrow morning. I smile politely and sleepily before being shaken back to the real world with the tab on the table. The tab with both of our meals.
This is maybe when I realized that we weren’t just working together again, but we were maybe honest-to-Odin friends again. Because only a friend would pull such a move on you and expect you to be cool as shit with it (knowing that the next day, I’d just demand he pay me back for his part of the tab). Either that or he really hates me enough to retroactively undo everything we were acting like we needed to talk about, just so he could grab a meal, but at this place? Not worth it. It’s definitely the more optimistic friendly motivation, right?
Right?
Fuck, which parking garage did I hit up again? I hope nobody sees me like this.
