Alone in a crowd

I walking amongst the masses of suits and powersuits and briefcases and shouldpads, the office buildings an inversion of a canyon, with the wall tall and waterlike. The road provides a stone floor.

There is a Big Issue seller on the corner, i dig out a note and buy a copy. Things i have learnt not to talk about on first dates: begging, charity and giving of money. If you try to impress you sound like holier than thou, if you are brutal you sound harsh. If you are honest you sound petty, a man who places one's own dented feelings and material baubles above the very real and very stark suffering of the unfortunate.

Even Jesus sounded like a wanker when questioned about his expensive oil. "There will always be the poor." What a horrible answer, but i can think of no better.

I am meeting S., an old friend and a fellow geek, at one of the pubs in the Rocks. These pubs feel like old sailor haunts, with sandstone floors and rusting iron. One of them still has a tunnel that was used to shang-hai drunk college students into a life of scurvy and sea-sickness. It is much easier to get drunk in modern times without the threat of waking up on a British East India frigate.

S. has asked me for some help on the pedal steel he is building. A pedal steel is a mechanical guitar with foot pedals for changing the harmonics of the strings. Think of a harp with a bendable frame, the potential is about the same. I've never really enjoyed pedal steel, cause they seem overly complicated, and they remind me of hokey style country and western, the type sung by slick-hair'd charlatans who name check Woody Guthrie and Hank Williams but miss the former's politics and the later's viciousness.

As i walk up the stairs, it starts to drizzle, i am running late, but it does not matter. i am now alone by myself, but heading to a friend.