Made the neighborhood rounds today. Nothing special. Went to Barnes and Noble where as usual I tried to be focused on what I was there to do and not get overwhelmed and distracted by the abundance of merchandise. Riding up the escalator, doing an overview of the 40 foot high bookshelves, it seems as if everyone in the entire world has written a book, except me.

I would like for Barnes and Noble to throw a grand cocktail party one evening where they have the authors of every single book in their store hanging around reading them aloud. All at once.

People were sitting about doing their homework or whatever it is that they bring to do there; it looks like everyone is studying for their S.A.T.'s. I saw an Asian kid with a really cool haircut; it was just an outline of a haircut. His head was a line drawing; closely shaved but with a quarter-inch margin of neatly mowed hair left all along the edge. Sort of like a reverse Harold and the Purple crayon in a way. Did my business, walked out, observed an aborted shoplifting on the way.

Went to a nearby food establishment to get something to eat and read the New York Times but it was really uncomfortable, with very cold air gusting out of the vents. They had changed the way the food was displayed since the last time I was in there and it wasn't very inspiring. Everything was too out in the open and breathed on and there was stuff arranged in such a way that I didn't know if it was a prototype of food, like the plastic sushi in Japanese restaurants where you're supposed to order after viewing it--or like ordering a Volkswagen Bug after seeing it in a showroom--or whether it was the actual physical food, to be selected and taken away. I was not too committed to resolving this conundrum and since everything appeared to contain gobs of fat anyway I left and walked across the street to the soup place.

This was a better situation except for the fact that Elvis Presley was on the sound system but I was determined not to let it get to me. They had maybe a dozen cauldrons holding different kinds of soups and there was a sign board listing the names but there seemed to be far more soups than names of soups and this was worrisome but I looked over the few names that they did have and chose Minestrone Pesto.

Customers who, like me, were faced with the problem of indecision could get a sample of any soup--an effort to ease the selection process--and there were a few standing around slinging it back out of small plastic dose cups like it was the local methadone clinic. There were three different size possibilities: medium, which was an optimistic name for 'small', large and extra large. The soup dispensing girl asked me which size I wanted and I replied 'Small, the smallest one' and she said 'You mean a medium?' and I didn't want to get into a heavy semantic argument so I went along with it and said 'Yes, a medium.'

The soup was too hot and I didn't want to have to sit through an entire album of Elvis Presley and I spotted a freezer that was set up with containers of frozen soup 'To Go' and figured nobody would mind if I just placed my small medium cup on the icy rack inside to chill it up a little. No one noticed and only a few arctic minutes did the trick.

This soup place has a nice school lunch feeling because you get to select a piece of fruit to accompany your meal and you also get a cookie in a groovy, ecological wax paper envelope back-to-the-future kind of thing and some hearty white bread cut into an Oliver Twist industrial size chunk. The whole shebang, along with the small medium large extra large soup cup is put lovingly into a brown paper bag which you can stare at while you do your consumption thing but I was disappointed because this was not a paper bag made in a factory where the person who made it, 'with pride,' stamped their name on the bottom.

I like reading those names, which always seem to be solid and upstanding generic American salute-the-flag Christian names like "Mary Johnson" and often they are two first names like "Robert Thomas"--as if a real last name was forgotten at birth and I always wonder if these are real live flesh and blood people or if they are just personified code names for assembly-line robots. A middle approach, like when you have a little ticket that falls out of a new sneaker and it says 'Inspected by #23,' gives you the idea that there really is a cognizant being behind it all making some kind of decision about something but no pretense is made to humanize anything and there's no get-friendly business.

I bought some non-flesh-colored Band-Aids at the pharmacy where all the products are arranged according to the parts of the human body and went back to my house to sit in front of the computer where I belong.