A tangent.

Some of the best moments of my life seem to have felt, in retrospect, like tangents.

Or, something like a tangent...

A sidenote

An interlude

An addendum to the everyday movings i have through my life.
...

You know what i mean!

You've had these days; any kind of day, where for just a minute you're mind can be elsewhere because the task you're involved in is Simple. 

Going for a run.

Doing the dishes.

Walking getting home from work.

Walking in a residential neighborhood to or from the subway.
Getting groceries.
Any of these fit.

Thus far, and most recently, i have two very sweet city tangents i'd like to share, and then maybe i'll talk about the goddamn holidays.

So.
I have a confession to make.
I don't much like the Greeks-
PLAYS, people, Greek PLAYS-
and i never thought to really give them the chance.
Oh, sure, when my guidance counselor told me I had the reading comprehension of a college student (so much smoke up my ass it's a wonder i wasn't made of brick), you're damn right i got a copy of Homer's 'The Odyssey' and try to drudge my way through it.
And i did, and with gusto.
And then i put it down and never after that so much as touched a page of greek verse if i could help it.
I got spoiled doing Shakespeare!
More accessible themes and characters; a sense of goddamn humour i could understand; acting direction written into the text...a metric system that makes sense.
Go ahead, call me a fool and an uneducated surf and tell me that my analysis of whatever is etc.
I am only setting up all of this as a kind of prelude to an apology letter to the Greeks.
So, if you'll excuse me, i'm addressing them now.
Ahem
"Dear Greek Tragedy,
I am Sorry for spending so much of my life avoiding you.
I didn't know.
I had never read The Bacchae.
No one has ever forced me to sit down and actually Try to like you.
And, apparently, that's all it takes.
A little effort, and being cast in a student project centric to a scene out of the Bacchae where a guy shows up, tells the Chorus an immensely disturbing story about a woman tearing off her son's arm and parading his disembodied head around her home town like a trophy.
And then leaves.  The guy leaves.  I leave.
The Messenger just had a MISERABLE day, and he's getting right the hell out of town.
Thanks for waiting until I had the attention span to read a classic,
Love,
Dan

thanks, guys, i think i'm done now.

So, there it is; a new friend of mine(Maridee is her name), in the true spirit of sharing good when good can be shared, is bringing me in to do the messenger rhesus from The Bacchae for an in-class assignment over at Columbia.
And I couldn't be more pleased, but i could've sworn i was going somewhere else with this...
Tangents!
I was coming home from Maridee's apartment, walking a Bronx street i'd never seen before that evening, on my way back to the long ass subway ride that would later take me home, head abuzz (with a new language, a new tragic vocabulary, a new reason to celebrate being so goddamn ignorant that Everything is novel and exciting) when i see, discover, a dancing red on the side walk ahead of me.
The hell?
Looks like the smallest police lights i've ever seen, too close to the dirt.
Mouse police?
Wait, wasn't there a cadre of boistrious young men on a stoop not ten feet behind...oh, it's a lazer pointer.
They're fucking with me.
And, of course, I see that a decision must be made.
Do I, the grown ass man that i am, keep walking and teach these young men that teasing grown ups is inappropriate by simply ignoring them?
Or, do i (of course i do) take this opportunity to play, to encourage a harmlessly rambunctious approach to...
so i start dodging the lazer pointer.
and they chase me.
and i run.
and it was so goddamn fun.
that i almost regret leading them into a busy street to be run over by a toys'r'us truck.
sad coincidence, this close to the holidays...

Tangent  TWO(coming soon)!