The apartment where I will be cat-sitting for the next few days is fabulous, too fabulous, such that now that the owner has left me and it for Paris, instead of exiting into greater Denmark I am hanging out, eating whatever meal-like arrangements I can make from the contents of her larder and being soothed by the Scandinavian design and unimpeachable blondness in every one of the portraits and watching “Friends” with Danish subtitles, trying to pick up a pronoun or two.
Barely left the house today, but to sit in the crow’s nest thing in the little park nearby to write a bit, strum and change the lyrics of that song to be about not missing New York until a park guy asked me to leave because they were closing and I had to go back to the house. All of a sudden I’m sick of Friends — it was a sweeping shot of the Brooklyn Bridge that did it — why am I watching TV I’ve already seen set in a city I deliberately left behind?
When I was done with work for the day I spent some time re-doing the closures on my knapsack, swapping the overlong unfinished and fraying twine I found at Morris’s in Marrakech when the original drawstring bit the complete dust in the first place for the surviving intact lace on my hiking boot and using an interior segment of the broken lace to replace that littler string latch — the latter innovation a particular point of pride — I’m feeling it now — especially the way I melted the ends to really finish the job — all while watching a little Brooklyn Nine-Nine to feel comfort raised to the power of a push to get a move on, into the unknown for which I have willfully left all that, and then I began the walk into town.
I tried to sit outside to write but had to move in — it’s so cold! — but writing with this fresh pen is like how that emo brainiac from Stanford who spoke only to me on our birthright Israel trip described hang gliding, impressive in the back of that bus on the road to Haifa or wherever all those years ago — that is, like taking a long, long piss — that is, a relief.
The locals here — at least, around this bakery, which seems to be by the side of the Santorini version of a highway — are not friendly. They don’t smile back, and the latte lady fairly barked at me about where to pay and did not reply to my ευχαριστώ OR my thank you, and I caught myself sticking out my tongue when she turned her back. On the ceiling-mounted TV an advertisement for a water filter shows a water glass overflowing as this filter fills it endlessly and MADE IN THE USA around a circular insignia of the stars and stripes, so I guess that’s a selling point here.
Everyone but me seems to know to anticipate high winds, everyone meaning Byrdie-and-family plus the Australian guys I talked with on the shuttle up from the port, and I guess me, I only know for their telling because I don’t consume any information anymore. But they are correct. Powerful blowing, dust in my eyes. The table I started at outside was coated in a fine grit, like the Aegean sea spray finish on yesterday’s ferry but of earth instead of water borne on the air.
