Got to Keep The Loonies On the Path

Yes, another taco bowl

P was to come home this night from his trip to Kentucky.  I woke with an eerie sense, as if chaos in nature had occurred.  That's the feeling I had, but what it meant I did not know.  We broke out of our 5th heatwave that night and it dropped 30 plus degrees for one, which was incredible but also very strange as if we were immediately in Fall.  The brightest sun we've seen was replaced with a gray, dark morning sky.  I needed a jacket and anyone who's lived through this summer knows it's been deathly hot for weeks and weeks.  Plus it was raining.

I got myself to work early, there was no one around except this man that hangs around the building in the morning.  He doesn't appear homeless, he dresses in clean clothes and I've seen him talking to security before, so he's not completely insane.   However, he's out there almost every day in the winter hours before the store opens and he just stands there by the bike racks, and he's huge, football player huge!  I ride up and everytime he sees me he starts laughing..... hysterically, with full mouth blow outs of chuckles.  At first I would say to him, 'hey, what's so funny?' but as soon as I did his eyes would gloss over and he'd switch to his own frequency, a dimension where I did not exist, apparently.   I'll have to film this sometime because it's gone on for about a year.  I went from fearing he was gonna kill me to trying to hand him money. I had not seen him for a couple of months but of course on this odd day, he's there.  I find him sitting in the front this time and I use one of the two benches to take off my bike gear.  He's on the other. I'm making side eye checks, making sure he's not worse as we're the only ones on the planet it seems.  Red Hook can feel so desolate and secluded at night and in the mornings.   As I'm dealing with my insecurities over his smirking giggling reactions to me, all the sudden these balloons come blowing from God knows where and we both stop and watch them roll all the way down the street like a tumbleweed.  It felt so out of place, these bright happy balloons on this gray cold rainy day.  Then suddenly a giant black bird, I thought could be a hawk it was so big, soars down and low, circles us and then lands in a tree across the street at the community farm.  He's having a fit over something and I realize he's been gawking this whole time.  He hops down to the sidewalk like a vulture before he ends up flying past us and lands on the top of one of the cranes.  I stand up to watch him and then look back at the man looking right at me.  I say 'Dang, that is one big bird!' and he just starts nodding and laughing like it was the funniest thing he's heard all year but before I could say another thing, his eyes glossed over again and he was gone. 

I walked up the four flights to clock in but instead of a security guard holding a temperature gun poking out of a glory hole behind plexiglass, I was greeted with a new standing robot machine that automatically takes our temperature and talks to us.  You must acknowledge that you have not been sick, you have not been out of town, various questions that must all be no or you cannot be admitted.  We are somewhat now in our own new dimensions.