There Is Nothing to See Here

Yesterday I was at a local café that I generally strenuously avoid. (Strenuously: read: Its couches might be vermin-infested. No, I have no evidence of this.) And I was writing. I was one of those people with my iMac or iBook or whatever the crap it’s called these days on my lap. I even drank a fucking cappuccino. (I only drink espresso normally. The place coopted my brain.)

And after I’d finished working on a story, I realized that in this warm light on a cozy-if-disgusting couch it would be a decent time to write an actual blog entry. That’s when my neighborhood friend with a tremendous amount of hair came in and sat down. I find it hard to focus on what he says because of all the hair on his head—cascades of dark curls—and on his face, actual long scruff. While we were talking I peered beyond his massive dark head and snapped a photo of this, below, with my camera phone. I thought it would provide a backdrop to the blog entry I might write. I sent it to my e-mail, said goodnight to the hairy man and went home.

This morning I opened the photo. And, much to my usually irritatingly analytical sense of preemptive surprise, I realized I had taken a picture of a transom. An actual transom. When I took the photo, I was admiring the woodwork on the door and the strange insertion of it in the middle of a wall in the café, the fact that it was old-school Brooklyn, not that there was an actual fucking open-your-eyes transom.


Sometimes it seems you can eye things without really seeing them.

(And I slink into the day to regain my sense of subtlety...the rest is silence.)