There's a market

around the corner from where I live that's just like the markets I've lived next to for the past few years. It's old and dingy and full of seedy characters buying packs of cigarettes and boxed wine. Next door is a coin laundry mat, where I accidentally washed my clothes with fabric softener and listened to a lady cuss when her clothes came out of the dryer covered in tar. Next to the laundry mat is a dry cleaners that is almost empty, with a strange man who is surprised when I walk in with my clothes. There's a bar, and next to that, a card club where AA meetings are held. I met the lady who works at the bar. She didn't call it a bar; she said it's a restaurant. She also said that the shopping center is going downhill because it started holding AA meetings. It's just ... where are they supposed to hold AA meetings? They're already holding them next to the damn bar.

Don't get me wrong ... I love my new town. Many people don't want the train here, "Because if the train comes here then all these people we don't know will come here." I want to tell them that I understand. I'm just like them, tired of meeting new people all of the time. I used to think that people stop making friends as they age because they become lazily absorbed into their home-lives and children. Now I know that it's because meeting new people, with their layers of neurosis, is exhausting. People are obsessed as they age, with cleanliness and order and worldviews, and I'm no different. I'm trying to do bikram yoga just to slow my mind down a fraction and make myself more likeable. I sweat so hard that it's no longer salty but condensates on the surface of my skin like the inside of a glass shower pane. I walk out of the heat feeling like a zombie, ready to go home and watch some television. Only, we don't have a television.

I pour a glass of wine, and fuck if it's taken me this long to figure out why people drink in the evenings. There are two switches in my kitchen that make it glow, and I'm ready to cook something extravagant and full of rich smells. Cream, and real butter, and meat that's butchered down the road by a man in cowboy boots with a booming voice. Every night, I park next to my neighbor who is on the nod in a parked Chevy. He always waves. I wish he'd get better, but that's his battle to face.

There's these kids with dogs and dreadlocks hitchhiking at the side of the road. I want to give them rides, just to move them out of town. They don't belong here, but they're on their way to where they do belong. It's just that everyone needs a place to feel at home, and I feel at home with my drug addicts and curly-haired bartenders in white tennis shoes and my distant friends in obese cities. I love them. And I don't want to know anyone else.