tales from an ordinary world

2002-06-02

I spent an entire day in Chapel St, it turned out. Breakfast at Orange - I was early, figuring I'd read my book for a while rather than walk around at the ungodly hour of 10am on a Sunday, when I'd normally just be rising. The others were late to varying degrees, but this is normal, and just fine, since the weekend is all about Taking It Easy. Besides, I had my book for company. We circled the big table at the front, with our orange juices, coffees, eggs and bread and bacon and conversations and the lending of CDs or books - I lent one (my much-prized copy of the thin man bordello) and borrowed the other (Michael's The Atlas of Experience). The cafe crowds ebbed and flowed behind us all morning, a phenomenon I hadn't really noticed before to such an extent, although it's not often that I spend 3 hours in a cafe anymore. A baby stumbled across the stones in the courtyard as I made my way to the amenities. A young couple sat next to each other, reading their respective papers in silence. The music changed, nothing I particularly knew, although at one point two of us figured it "might've been Lou Reed." I admitted a certain disinterest in a new Australian film - having nothing to go on so far but a few large billboard advertisements - because they used an extremely common and rather boring font for all the words on the posters. Later, one of the others admitted to staying up late "playing with fonts", so I didn't feel like I was the only freak in town after all.

We saw Oliver off, to a lunch appointment and, later, back to the northern states. The others wanted to drop into Greville Records, something I happily (if a little guiltily) obliged to. From there, we went further north, to the large shop full of books and music - I resisted the former but not the latter - and then ate nearby, amongst synthetic-clad teens and an old couple who seemed concerned by their teetering teapot. Afternoon crowds streamed past the streetside window. Some Chinese girls behind us exclaimed a loud "wah !" as a girl outside stepped out of a silver Mercedes and onto the pavement. Eugenie gave me a lift home because she wanted to know what my Man or Astroman? CDs sounded like. The whole sci-fi-surf-guitar thing amused her, much as it had amused a few of my co-workers just recently, but then there was a simple text file, the well-planned sounds of a dot-matrix printer, which gave me flashbacks of year 12 assignments, and the time i discovered how to ask the printer to use proportional spacing...