eye saw an overweight mother walking down one of our avenues. Beside her, a daughter of perhaps eight or nine years of age.  The mother was heavy though once in possession of attractive.  Plump everywhere, thought kindly, was  the daughter. Past obese, on her way to fat.  While at that age you can easily be transformed by a lucky blossom, a passion for sports, both the mother and daughter were holding hands, smiling and happy together, as is...as they were, where they were...

in a big city and universe where skinny is the currency of happiness, I grew agitated, internally.  The mother had to have been injured by the most awful slings and arrows of the world's impartial, unforgiving dislike for all things that were not pitch perfect.  Agonies that children are often the object of the subject of verbal water boarding by bad gene bullies were surely yet to come!  Why did she not as a mother, protect her daughter's future and have her avoid the pressure of a world that pretends to celebrate diversity, but truly loves only the infirmity of acceptable uniformity? Diet, execise, caring, mothering, something!

why did she allow, permit, nay perhaps, encourage this child to mimic her thus? Was it a caustic indifference, a simple misery needs company?

of course, it could have been genetic and I'm just another overwhelming overweight ******* too.

But twenty fours later, I saw them in my mind's eye clearly - holding hands and happy together, and I forgave them my conditioned trespasses, but remained worried about the many nights of tears that no prophet was required to predict.

eye did.   As my prejudices expected, the odd assortment of "characters"were all present and not to be unaccounted for...a romantic comedy on a good Friday, attracts the believers, the well wishers, the ones who think if only the world was.. and I was not re or so tired of life, unemployed, lonely, damaged in some manner of being...

not too many young, just a few... theater darkness is a masque, with a risqué chance of oh no, I've been witnessed by the non-believers.

the infirm with their mobile caretakers and paraphernalia were there.  Odd couples, were there.  If there was one unifying common characteristic, I selected this one.  We all needed haircuts. eye don't know why but it made me think about going to get one's haircut, and the rituals that requires....and it is and is not a bit like being in a almost totally private world inpublic, where you, the individual and some outside force majeure, hairdresser, movie screen engages and temporarily transforms you.  That is why, I, went to the movies on a Friday afternoon, to be transformed and not reformed, in public, in private...

eye am out on a rainy weekend day, feeling  the compulsion to escape the imprisonment of one's living quarters reflecting off of the rain puddles slicks on black city streets, that shine bright like an addiction's craving. For   Single people in a city that values personal beauty and anonymity simultaneous means entering the outside world of a drizzling, more like misting, gloom and be outside dressed as if going to,  and indeed, perhaps some were actually going,  to the gym though for most, off for a Starbucks moment of community.

all dressed to code.  The code says all black, hooded yoga clothes, exercise uniforms of various sort, special string chain mini-pocketbooks  to hold phone of just in case, always all black always, all  of no color, except, by code, by some global understanding of a legislated law, somewhere on the body must be a splash of pink or a luminescent pastel.  

Usually it's the sneakers, but not necessarily. Some pinks streaks were observed in the drawstrings that pulled the hoodies tight around the face or just the laces of the black sneakers...there are rules in the world that must be obeyed though they are never legislated or indeed, never spoken...this is one...the coda of black and pink splash.