4 posts tagged “pittsburgh”

[note: Since I post over at Metroblogging Pittsburgh, and because I don't want to double post, I'm going to link to my posts there. Look for the MetBlog tag in future blog titles!]

Link to my most recent blog entry.

A few months ago, I went on a miniature adventure. I walked to Market Square and sat on a bench. I opened my notebook and began to write. I had an iced chai from Starbucks, a pack of smokes, my iPod and plenty of things to write about.

Five minutes after settling in, I was joined by an older man who looked remarkably like Tom Waits.

This is what I wrote:

I'm writing this so this guy stops talking to me - maybe if I stop talking, he'll stop talking. Somehow I doubt it.

We'll see.

He's mumbling something about drugs and market square. Now he's talking about the bus. Wants to know where streets are. Little does he know.

This place is scaring me, but in a good way.

I bet there's a story him him, but I don't want to encourage him by asking about it. Maybe he'll just get bored and walk away.

I have visions of him killing me. A struggle. He's wiry and muscular and he has tattoos. I'm doughy and out of shape. He'd take me. I bet I could outrun him though, if I drank this iced chai first.

---

I want to mitigate the insensitivity expressed in this story by relating my most recent adventure, wherein I dragged a drunken homeless guy out of Forbes Avenue traffic while buses whizzed by students blared their horns at us, but I won't.

Judge me as you will.

---

The first time I encountered Tom Waits was while he was apparently playing a homeless man living in Wheeling, West Virginia. I don't know if it was for a movie or what, but he looked just like he did in Ironwood. I didn't see any cameras or anything, but I swear it was him. He even sounded like him.

There's not much to say about our encounter. Again, I was sitting, but at a bus stop this time, and he was sitting next to me. He asked me for a smoke, and I gave him one, and he started making creepy suggestions about my age.

"What are you, about 18, maybe? You look like you might be a teenager. Maybe even younger than that. Do you have a girlfriend?"

I was 23.

Ok, since that story went nowhere, you can watch Tom himself (the real one) tell way better stories than mine.

You might have heard.

That road you see is the primary artery that takes me to and from the downtown region of Pittsburgh. Where I work. Every day.

The detour goes all the way around the site, and all the way around other sites, and pretty much makes you go a few miles in the wrong direction before looping around and joining the main road again. Imagine all of this, but with Pittsburgh's topography - not a single straight road, not more than a mile without going up or down a hill.

I have to wake up about 45 minutes early in order to get to work, now, and I similarly return 45 minutes later than usual.

It could be worse, though. I could have been under the fucking stuff when it poured over the highway.

I've started going to the Beehive every Sunday afternoon. It's a nice, relatively quiet place where I can smoke and drink coffee and write. I take my iBook, set up a little encampment on one of the big tables, and get to work. I also spend a fair amount of that time looking at people.

There are all kinds of people to look at, too. There is no consistent profile of the Beehive's regular visitors. I think my friend Matte could speak more on that subject, as he was the manager there for a while. Matte would inevitably receive a phone call from one of his employees, and whenever such a call would come in while we were all together, the room would be filled with our impersonations of the people calling him. "Um, what does this big machine do? Make coffee?" "So are we supposed to do something with all of these dirty seeds?" Most of them were funny, despite my examples.

I think I probably fit the profile of male customers, which is a little easier to suss out. I just took a look around; there are four men in this room alone who have beards, long hair, and a little extra weight. Most of them are also dressed like me, in jeans and a nerdy t-shirt.

There are some pretty ladies here, too, but that's beside the point.

My cell phone beeped at me a second ago. I had a new text message. I forgot to put it on silent mode. I got a handful of very nasty looks from people. Bitches.

Someone across the way is looking at MySpace. I want to look through the profiles of people on it and try to figure out which one is hers. It's like some werid social but real-life networking. Give me a second while I try to do that.

It's not easy. There's a lot of guesswork involved. I have to assume her age, or at least a reasonable range. I have to assume she lives nearby, though in these days with, you know, cars and junk she might not be local. She's not smoking, so I can probably assume that much. 38 pages of results.

This is not going to be easy. Though there are some pretty ladies that fit that age range, too. That's also beside the point.

I have superhero stickers all over my iBook. That says a lot about me. I might as well be holding up a sign that says "HEY, FOLKS! I'M A HUGE NERD!" I'm tempted to take them off, so I don't broadcast my juvenile power fantasies.

I've looked through 8 pages. No dice.

I got bored after a few minutes of it.

There are lots of people here now. A cadre of teenagers came in and hooped it up for a few minutes, and left blessedly quickly.

My friends think I come here to meet women.

I've been over that ground before. I don't "meet" women. I look at them, and maybe they look back. That's as far as it goes, which is about exactly as far as terminal shyness lets it go. That's ok, though. If I wanted that to change as badly as I seem to, I wouldn't be on my computer, I'd be talking to people. I would be actualizing my core competencies. I would be proactive, and take a bull by its horns or something. I would try to find more cleches to fit the situation. But I'm too lazy for that. And I think if I Googled "cleches for shy men who should get off their asses and do something about their shyness," I would probably get depressed.

I like the Beehive, but the coffee here gives me the shits. Thought you might like to know that.