son of reveries of a solitary walker

The Moss St. Market is a lonely place without the sugarpunfairy crew, peering at the passersby from behind an army of tiny chibi animals. I didn't see the sausage guy either. ! Maybe he's at Pride.

chromemagpie, if you'd been there, I would have told you ( how much I love the Eels/Two Gallants CD. )

A small mystery you could easily solve for me: in this week's Monday, the Ministry of Casual Living advertised an art fair today, but when I wandered in their general direction, silence, void, emptiness. I expect the ad was run in the wrong week, or the event was cancelled, or some other simple explication. If it was an art project in its very absence, well, that's nicely situationist, although the experience of disappointed anticipation is not as novel to me as I might wish.

The neighborhood itself answered very well as an artwork, though. On first glance it seems heart-warmingly self-sufficient: two grocery stores, laundromat, video store, barber shop, consignment furniture store. The laundromat, though, seems to be closed down, and part of the plastic door has been burnt in a bubbly charred-marshmallow streak. The first grocery store I wandered into had the excellent signage: "Saunders Meat Market. Self-serve. Phone 595-4613." When I stepped inside, I wondered if it were closed; the lights were off, and much of the space was empty, or filled with piles of boxes and disused store furnishings. I think they may have recently suffered a flood, which would explain the empty shelves and general disarray, but not the magazine rack with the fashion magazines cheerfully offering "Love Horoscopes for 1998!" and the equally ancient (though less ephemeral) plastic-wrapped pornography. I didn't look through much of this, though I was very tempted to buy the $2.99 copy of Brokeback Mountain on the rack of bootleg DVDs.

The second grocery store was not as chaotic, and slightly better stocked, though its . The baking section did include some flavoured extracts in glass bottles of a kind no longer manufactured, and the extracts were all odd ones I'd never seen before: Imitation Cochineal and Artificial Extract of Pistachio, which is a lovely shade of turquoise.

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