I’d planned to do laundry at a friend’s house today (since she has a washing machine and I don’t), and to write some code for the $work project. First, I went out to find the hours for Teatro Ciego, petting a small spotted dog locked up in a neighborhood store on the way home, and then at home I began to write about a friend’s idea.
Much to my surprise, the doorbell rang; a French sculptor I hadn’t seen in maybe a year had dropped by unannounced, and so we went to sit nearby to meet a tall lesbian musician from Darmstadt. Neighborhood kids were playing dodgeball noisily against the metal shutters closing a storefront, so we sat elsewhere and caught up on our respective lives.
The musician arrived, irritated at having taken the wrong bus, and we walked around the neighborhood, buying empanadas on the way to the park. I introduced her to capresse empanadas, and she told me about her pessimism about Bitcoin and Wikipedia, based in part on the history of radio, in a mix of Portuguese and Spanish. Later, in my apartment, sweating from the summer heat, the three of us sipped green tea from atop a styrofoam cooler chest wrapped in cellophane tape.
Perhaps too late in the day, I texted my friend about the laundry. I never got a reply.
The three of us went to a bar where the musician would perform later. I ate a cold raw pickled eggplant burrito, which wasn’t quite nauseating, as plump and tattooed young Argentines played rock to thunderous applause, despite their inability to sing in tune. Crammed between walls hung with psychedelic surrealist paintings, the crowd demanded an out-of-tune encore. A disheveled woman in a plaid shirt fanned herself and, inadvertently, me, with a folding fan, as I drank a Speed Unlimited energy drink — like a Red Bull with less vitamins.
The musician got up to play. She sounded like Janis Joplin, and is by far the most skilled musician I’ve ever heard perform in this bar. Instability in the power supplies for their green LEDs gave rise to a distracting yellow flicker in the spotlight.
A bespectacled young man with a mustache at the table in front of me, wearing the only button-down shirt in the bar, took his Android phone out of his satchel to check the time.
A tattooed young couple gazed into each other’s eyes across a table nearby, stroking one another’s hands before leaning slowly across the table for a quick, perfunctory kiss before parting.
Walking home, I pass a small boy in a baseball cap picking through the garbage, and then a middle-aged grandmother with her daughter and baby granddaughter doing the same. On a busier street, a young woman showed necklaces laid out on a blanket to a mother with covered hair and her two yarmulke-clad boys.