so i went to prospect heights to see ashley talk softly and be kind of pittsburgh working class humble. she's very nice and if i didn't know better i'd condescend horribly to her and sometimes i fear i still kind of do. she has a roommate who's kind of cranky. later when we were talking about their OKcupid profiles she said that when she was herself, was honest in her little self summary no one contacted her. she's snarky and practical. ashley's spectacularly practical. their house is a humble little thing, it smells funny and all the rugs are so sad. they took the tupperwares from my takeout dinner and that made me respect them enormously.

then i biked home and on the way home rasko (sp?) halpern biked up beside me and biked along with me over the brooklyn bridge because he said he didn't have anything better to do. his bike was much too small for him and his t shirt was ripped around the shoulders and he wore a stained hoody around his waist. it all looked like stuff picked indiscriminately from the salvation army. his words got rounded and indistinct with saliva, it sounded like, and initially i thought he was mentally handicapped. so we biked over the bridge and i asked him questions now and then and he was spectacularly laconic, like some fucking flannery o connor character. he was magical. i asked him what the most romantic thing he'd ever done was and he said "bought 'em gold." he never said anything, apart from asking me to buy cigarettes, except if i asked him a question. he mostly responded with yes or no.

he REALLY wanted me to buy him some cigarettes, or give him money for loosies. most everything i know about him and will write is cobbled together from his extremely minimal statements. he said he was the youngest of 4 brothers, each 3 years older than him. he said he'd graduated from high school early, this past winter. he said his parents were physicians assistants. they'd sent him to a psychiatrist who diagnosed him with bipolar and prescribed him lithium which he stopped taking because it made him fat. he said his parents were stupid, that they'd done that to him and all his brothers. he said all this with no extra word. and really just amused at the silly stupidity of other people. he said he'd first had sex when he was 10 and first smoked weed when he was 3. he grinned a lot and looked like a fucking idiot with his buzzed hair. but his speech was so guardedly spare. everything was just head-shakingly stupid to him, in afunny way. he liked math. he said he was thirsty as we were biking over the bridge. i asked him if he drank beer and he said yeah, that he'd just drunk 50 minutes ago. and i said how and he said his 30 year old cop friend. and so i bought us a 40 of budweiser at the deli and we drank some of it at hudson river park where i played frisbee everyday in high school.

he said he didn't do anything. he said his parents were retired and didn't do anything. he said he might go to hunter this fall. he wants to be a doctor. he hates doctors because they do everything wrong. they gave him the wrong pills. lithium was wrong, apparently. he's never had a curfew. his parents don't care, but this came off funny. everything came off funny. eventually he left and he just reaffirmed the directions back to the brooklyn bridge and biked off wordlessly. i sat there and finished the 40 and watched this guy sprinting back and forth across the field in the dark, in the dark it looked like his limbs were churning insanely fast, but maybe that's just what the darkness did. then i biked back and passed a guy on his bike singing and a jogger singing in a breaking little voice 'LET'S FLY, FLY FLY AWAY" that frank sinatra song and it was totally surreal. rasko really wanted cigarettes and i didnt get them for him and i kind of regret it. he was such a fucking weird kid. he said he smoked 2 packs a day and claimed to have not eaten in 3 days. but this was all so nonchalant. so nonchalant and funny. how do i express that? that nothing he said was something he would have said if i hadn't asked him. it was all just stuff to feed the meter, if i was the meter my questions the quarters/hour. yo weird as hell.