5-30-08 Jesus Loves Me (but you may still be crazy)

As I'm walking to work through my neighborhood, a black man on a bike with a leopard print cane stops me. "'Scuse me, but why would you want to live here?" He asks.

We talk about some things, my money situation, my girlfriend, where I used to live, and he offers me advice on not getting mugged ("Don't let anybody take advantage of you," he says, and it takes me a minute to recognize what he's talking about), before telling me about how he and his wife go around talking to people about God.

Just then, a white woman with sad, pious, watery eyes rides up on another bike, and she proceeds to rattle off a string of almost unintelligible blessings: "Maythelordorallcreationbleesyouandwatchoveryouandgrantyouallspiritualandmaterialblessingsandmayyoubewashedinthebloodofthelamb. Do you love Jesus?"

"Of course!" I say, and shake both their hands before walking away into a sunny morning full of light.

5-24-08 Saturday Morning Brooklyn

Nothing says peaceful like a wealthy Orthodox Jewish neighborhood on a Saturday morning. I ride my bike past thoughtful looking, bearded men in furry hats that sit on top of their heads like enormous UFO's, their prayer shawls thrown over their shoulders, and I wonder at their lives.

No cars on the roads, the stoplights signalling the comings and goings of non-existent traffic, but I'm there, and I barely pay attention to the stoplights when there's a reason to, when I'm surrounded by vehicles whose only seeming wish (never mind the desires of their drivers) is to splatter me across the highway.

But at one stoplight, I pause, dismount, resting my feet on the pavement, thinking that if God and all the Jews in Williamsburg can stop for a whole day, I can do the same for thirty seconds.

4-12-08 One block this morning in Crown Heights

An older, glasses-wearing black man in a natty tan suit stands holding a bible next to a woman in a similarly colored dress on the corner, the man in a heated conversation with a thin man in a yellow, black and green dread tam. The dread says to the bible-holder, in a thick accent, "You can't tell me nothin', because whom God blesses, none can curse, and you don't know me from Adam!"

A fat, balding white man lies on the ground in front of an apartment building, passed out, his pate covered in sores, still breathing, so I observe him for a moment and move on. Not ten yards away, the well-dressed folks in their Eddie Bauer sweats line up in front of the newest hip restaurant in the neighborhood, waiting to get in for brunch.