Living in my Head Set
Dec. 3rd, 2014 01:31 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jack_babalonStopped at the Buford Highway Farmer's Market on the commute home for dinner. It's not too far a walk from the last station north on the line and not too hard on the holiday strapped wallet. Besides shopping and eating there always makes me feel like I'm living in some kind of Bladerunner future and that at any minute I'm going to have to tell Admiral Adama that I'm retired from hunting replicants. In the meantime I got an 'android' of my own in my pocket, it streams Bonobo straight to the ear goggles while letting me read Stevenson's 'Treasure Island' for free. I'm eating braised kale and sweet potatoes because that's how you're supposed to eat after 40 apparently and there's this music bleeding in over the stream. I fiddle with my robo-phone a few tries before turning it off to realize the notes I'm hearing is coming from the table across from me.
The kid working the cafeteria counter, the one who looked up at me startled and said I looked exactly like a friend of his will in twenty years, is teaching a young lady how to play the ukulele.
She looks up at me and smiles shyly before focusing back on her instrument.
Messing around to get my robo-phone to pipe back in the Bonobo and I end up cranking out 'Cirrus' with its chiming cascade of beats all through the cafeteria. Until now I had no idea it could even play music that loud sans a speaker attachment. After a few failed attempts and a fumbling of the phone in jitter-self-conscious panic I manage to get it to feed through the jack again. This was more embarrassing than two weeks ago when I went to film Death In June at the Pearl and learned that my camera is equipped with an automatic flood light worthy of signaling Batman with.
"I'm like a cave-man, here." I mutter except my muttering when my ears are plugged in sounds more akin to the conversational shout you speak with a deaf relative with.
I see the kid giggle at my robo-phone buffoonery. I see the young lady slap his arm lightly and mouth something to me.
"What?" I shout, catch myself, pry off the phones and repeat the question.
"I said 'I thought it was pretty'." She says with a flick of black hair and I smile back at her in confusion to finish my meal accompanied by looping-beats and ukulele strings.
Later, after browsing the aisles, delighting in foreign mascots, Russian pastries, Mexican candles, and whatever fish-in-a-can that tastes like licorice thing they have in the Scandinavian section, I finally hit the register. 10 or items or less and I punch in my PIN (or 'Secret Number' as it reads on their card-scanner). I make my way to where I checked in my Indiana Jones approved satchel bag and hand the lady my ticket.
And there she is. Ms. Ukulele herself. Her skin is olive and bronze. Her hair is long and black so that when combined with her thick round glasses gives her this sort of GI Joe/Baroness vibe. She takes my ticket with a smile. Her hand wavers over my shoulder bag. The fabric ripped, the strap held on by safety-pins, the two-headed eagle that adorns it faded to an obscure Rorschach stain.
"Yeah, that's mine." I say looking at my raggedy satchel bag, "She's been through a lot I'm afraid."
"'She'" Her accent vaguely British, "has a lot of character. Just like 'her' owner I bet."
"..." I glance around nervously and smile back before composing myself. "Thank you and uh, look, if I was single and well, wasn't old enough to be your father I'd um, shit, I mean... sorry, look never mind."
As the ancients of my home land would say - "Smooth move, Exlax."
Instead she smiles at me but enigmatically this time, her head cocked to the side as if studying me and she says - "My father is a much older man than you. In his sixties. But he's big and strong too."
Yeah, well, that's me... or at least it should because it takes me three tries to get the auto-sensor on the supermarket doors to register my presence and slide open. A process that involves me almost walking into the door twice.
The whole time I registered the heat of her eyes on my back.
Four months ago I was the Invisible Man as far as the opposite sex was concerned and unless I'm mistaken (which I often am) either she was flirting with me or fucking with me. I register it the realm of remote but not impossible. Somewhere between secret government UFOs and lizard men running the IMF.
Stepping into the early night, down Buford Highway along the rush hour traffic, the tracks switch on my robo-phone and I'm singing along as I step my way towards the next southbound home. "Sweetness... sweetness, I was only joking when I said I loved you..."
Then I stop. I have to. Because for a moment there I swear I caught a shadow cast off this invisible man from the flowing headlights behind me.
The kid working the cafeteria counter, the one who looked up at me startled and said I looked exactly like a friend of his will in twenty years, is teaching a young lady how to play the ukulele.
She looks up at me and smiles shyly before focusing back on her instrument.
Messing around to get my robo-phone to pipe back in the Bonobo and I end up cranking out 'Cirrus' with its chiming cascade of beats all through the cafeteria. Until now I had no idea it could even play music that loud sans a speaker attachment. After a few failed attempts and a fumbling of the phone in jitter-self-conscious panic I manage to get it to feed through the jack again. This was more embarrassing than two weeks ago when I went to film Death In June at the Pearl and learned that my camera is equipped with an automatic flood light worthy of signaling Batman with.
"I'm like a cave-man, here." I mutter except my muttering when my ears are plugged in sounds more akin to the conversational shout you speak with a deaf relative with.
I see the kid giggle at my robo-phone buffoonery. I see the young lady slap his arm lightly and mouth something to me.
"What?" I shout, catch myself, pry off the phones and repeat the question.
"I said 'I thought it was pretty'." She says with a flick of black hair and I smile back at her in confusion to finish my meal accompanied by looping-beats and ukulele strings.
Later, after browsing the aisles, delighting in foreign mascots, Russian pastries, Mexican candles, and whatever fish-in-a-can that tastes like licorice thing they have in the Scandinavian section, I finally hit the register. 10 or items or less and I punch in my PIN (or 'Secret Number' as it reads on their card-scanner). I make my way to where I checked in my Indiana Jones approved satchel bag and hand the lady my ticket.
And there she is. Ms. Ukulele herself. Her skin is olive and bronze. Her hair is long and black so that when combined with her thick round glasses gives her this sort of GI Joe/Baroness vibe. She takes my ticket with a smile. Her hand wavers over my shoulder bag. The fabric ripped, the strap held on by safety-pins, the two-headed eagle that adorns it faded to an obscure Rorschach stain.
"Yeah, that's mine." I say looking at my raggedy satchel bag, "She's been through a lot I'm afraid."
"'She'" Her accent vaguely British, "has a lot of character. Just like 'her' owner I bet."
"..." I glance around nervously and smile back before composing myself. "Thank you and uh, look, if I was single and well, wasn't old enough to be your father I'd um, shit, I mean... sorry, look never mind."
As the ancients of my home land would say - "Smooth move, Exlax."
Instead she smiles at me but enigmatically this time, her head cocked to the side as if studying me and she says - "My father is a much older man than you. In his sixties. But he's big and strong too."
Yeah, well, that's me... or at least it should because it takes me three tries to get the auto-sensor on the supermarket doors to register my presence and slide open. A process that involves me almost walking into the door twice.
The whole time I registered the heat of her eyes on my back.
Four months ago I was the Invisible Man as far as the opposite sex was concerned and unless I'm mistaken (which I often am) either she was flirting with me or fucking with me. I register it the realm of remote but not impossible. Somewhere between secret government UFOs and lizard men running the IMF.
Stepping into the early night, down Buford Highway along the rush hour traffic, the tracks switch on my robo-phone and I'm singing along as I step my way towards the next southbound home. "Sweetness... sweetness, I was only joking when I said I loved you..."
Then I stop. I have to. Because for a moment there I swear I caught a shadow cast off this invisible man from the flowing headlights behind me.