Approximately One Hour, Mostly In Simple Senses

• The noise of the street is already great, even though it's early afternoon. 
• I park the car and walk into the repair shop, which has television chatter, many mechanics flitting about, customers everywhere, the phone is ringing. A nice man talks to me, forgets me, and then remembers me. There is the heavy, heavy smell of vulcanized, processed rubber. It's a smell that is at once dirty but also fresh and new. 
• Walking down the street a few blocks, the smell of the Salvadoran food truck spreads for over half a block. Hungry or not, it's enticing. How can it overpower all the exhaust and asphalt and people? 
• The sun is warm, and I again wonder if the nature of the light here is somehow different, somehow stronger and more immediate. 
• The wind is chilly, especially in the shade and shadows between buildings. I feel my hair blow sideways and criss cross and know I will look a madman before this brief trip is over.
• An older woman waits at the crosswalk with me. When our light comes up, I am halfway across the divided street at and the island before she is even 3 feet from the curb. I look back, several times. I don't think I can help her. If I offer to carry her bags she will likely think I've thieving in mind. I trust the gods of pedestrian traffic timers to get her across safely. 
• The store has no smells,  and this part of the street is always dark this time of day. The shop seems that it should be oozing medicine: camphor and eucalyptus and menthol. The man in front of me has a small arsenal of vitamins for purchase, garish labels of orange and orange-yellow on a brown plastic bottle that is probably supposed to pass for old fashioned glass, but doesn't. 
• I buy a soda, more from habit than anything else. But it's cold and that's nice. A sip or two before the walk back.
• The furniture store is cramped, stuffed with sun faded floor samples. I wish I had come here and bought one of these smaller futons. The shop owner is polite, but seems weary. I bet she's ready to go home.
• Passing the food truck again. Maybe I should have waited and purchased a drink from them, just for the chance to stand a little closer and savor whatever dubious recipes are boiling on their hotplates.
• But it can't compete with the smell of the new tires, grease, oil--a vague smell of too hot metal in the back. It's a few minutes more, and at first I stand, leaning over a salacious magazine. 
• Suddenly, I am very weary. I settle  into a plastic chair that is requisite level of discomfort for these establishments. My pants don't fit correctly, because my pockets are filled with things that should be in my car, but aren't for the moment.
• A young girl sits next to me. She's largely unadorned, and has the pretty freshness of youth and good skin. While skimming through another magazine I use my infallible secret opening line.
• We've both recently relocated from the South. She tells me her hometown, and I ask her if she's ever heard the lovely Mason Jennings song of the same name.
• She is a Psych major and as fate would have it, our favorite PSY course is the same: Forensic. I recommend a book, we chat about sociopaths. I'm having one of my moments of conversational brilliance, because she leaves and comes back and our convo picks up without a missed beat. 
• My car is ready and I must go. We part and exchange names in that strange, backwards way life somehow works out sometimes. 
• I ask the repairman to give it to me straight, change my mind, and ask him to lie to me. He tells me they have placed 8 new tires on my car, three of which are already bald. I tell him I'm thrilled to finally have an all terrain vehicle. These words flow out of my mouth, but I could be anybody, anywhere, anytime. 
• I drive home with no radio, no iPod, listening and feeling for any changes in the ride with the new tire. I know it's my imagination, but it looks so much bigger than the others. I am mostly distracted by the sound of an engine in the traffic ahead of me--it sounds exactly like my old Honda did when in Reverse. I cannot determine which car is making this amazing noise. My gut tells me it's not the SUV.

Suddenly, I'm weary again. Goodnight.