The streets are littered with placards and leaflets describing Valentines Day Dinner Specials noting the most exquisite details of the items listed without spoiling the mystery the price tags carry. Multitudes of the aforementioned have excluded the word Valentine, opting to shorten the holiday to V-day. The more unique of the prior group, the ones pertaining to the night club category particularly, show girls in skimpy dance wear, alluding to a more quixotic true meaning for V-day.
These streets are empty and cast in the darker blues of pre-dawn light. Saturday morning traffic does not exist here save for the tardy bar owners completing the prior nights take. I walk my dog amid the ruin of this new Valentines Day Massacre, knowing this will efficiently right itself, the city sweeping the debris and schlepping bags away towards burials beneath landfills and cremations in recycle centers; clean streets adept for a future trashing of St. Patricks day, which undeniably will be referred to as "P-Day" should trends stay the course.
Cold and exposed, the wind rips my legs and my companion glances towards me, hunched over and doing his business. On the sidewalk, a gorgeous woman in jeans and high-heels compliments the canine toilet as the shame falls bare before us in droves. She clutches her shoulders, protected only by a tiny strap defying logic and holding the ensemble in place. She canters this way and correcting the other through a zig zag obstacle course her drunkenness has created. Her maze carries her around the corner and out of our lives. The dog, placated, begins to sniff future endeavors.
In these details I find my love for the City. I do not fault the City; Soddom wasn't built in a day. I love its unabashed hatred of itself. It spins and recoils and bounces off of itself with a paralyzing ferocity so intensely turbulent it weaves a web of triumph over the deprecatingly lost children dependent and longing for its poison fruit. Living here, in the Center, I have a birds eye view and detach myself like a buzzard with a stomach too empty to land.
The sun is risen and is a welcome guest. Traffic transformed from the garbage trucks to the delivery trucks, one replacing the other and the carnival begins again. I wait for the details of emerging life, for their is truth in the details. Some older folks ascertain the details also house the devil: I tend to agree. The truth and the devil hitch rides on one another, touching each individual in profoundly different ways. Once again, they mount for their daily stroll through our town and yours.
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