I wasn’t sure how long I had been asleep for, but it didn’t seem to me that I had missed very much… A breeze creeping in through the space in my poorly-installed, forty year old window frame had probably swept some kind of phantom virus in with it as well… and so then the pressure in my head naturally backed up my theory enough to satisfy the early, yet logical outlook on the reason to why I couldn’t smell my roommate’s breakfast being cooked a few feet away from me. Regardless of what my anti-winter coat might have said about my sudden cold, I had still solved a mystery that, – to my recent understanding – only the landlord’s answering machine was clearly ever going to hear about. The coffee brewed quickly and cigarettes rolled tightly while I gladly accepted the fresh and supposedly organic breakfast burrito that my Dr. Seuss pajama-clad partner in crime had presented to me: Two hundred and fifty degrees of comfort, if just for a moment.
A nearby train slowed underground, complimenting my yawn with a screech while the sounds of that ole’ hip-hop greeted me with a smile and probably also with the cheapest beer that money couldn’t ever buy in its hands. This ruckus might not be what I would choose to listen to every single morning of my life… and as soon as I wake up… but 1B sure openly decides to jam it on a constant basis, and so I’ve naturally adapted the grimy routine as well. Ancient, pre family-oriented Ice Cube is my guilty pleasure, after all.
We will all find rituals through our daily lives, on some level or another, and all of these little things that commonly pattern themselves out probably have more of an impact on how our days execute themselves than we might realize. Unscheduled sounds of car stereos passing by and boom-boxes under the earth while we’re out and about may plant a seed in our brains that we will search for and download later, but there will always be the go-to and often unavoidable sources for inspiration and familiar wake-up bells that will never fail us just the same.
Let’s face it: we all have favorite artists that the people around us have got to be getting sick of by now.
I was on my way to cash an incredibly insignificant check when instead I got stuck listening to this old man at the stop playing a Ruan lute. He looked the part for the sounds that it made, too… Mustaches like the one this guy had have got to hold some kind of ancient, magical power – and judging by how old this instrument in particular seemed to be to me, it probably took him two hundred thousand years to really be able to harness its glory.
Oh, how I do love musically serendipitous days… and I can’t help but to feel blessed in those moments!
When the iPod is dead – a traveling factor that when turned on would otherwise just have me droning around as routinely silent on an everyday trip as the other pile of faces acting the same way, staring downwards – I will always be pulled towards the ambient and common calls of this city and the sometimes life-changing impact of its super heroes.
