I hate those blind "overheard on the train platform" items that populate all the shittier, lazier, more desperate publications around town. Nevertheless…talk too loudly in a public place and your shit may just find its way…[cue music]…to the Internets! [Danh-danh-dannhhh!]
At Tompkins Square Park earlier today. Sipping the best coffee in Manhattan and reading D.T. Max's piece on the late, great David Foster Wallace in The New Yorker, while also doing my No. 1 favorite thing: minding my own. Young woman, not unattractive though dressed in a black and gold "I'm corny, or lazy, or both" tracksuit, sits three benches away, and makes a phone call. Shrill voice, volume set at STUN, with accent, possibly Australian though hard to place:
"Ooh, I miss you already." [pause] "I have separation anxiety already!!!" [pause, then half-sings the next line] "Did you really have to be there at 10 or are you a liii-ar?"
I'm no expert in dating but at this point I could hear him checking for the fastest routes out of town. And who could blame him? (Or her.) Because if that wasn't enough:
"Ooh, I just ate the most yummy pork sandwich from Porcetta, OMG."
She did say "oh-em-gee," by the way. And had some pork on her tracksuit, and her face. It's hard to say this made her any less attractive.
Trust that I didn't want to hear any of it, but she forced it upon me (and a few others, so there's a good chance this isn't even the first blind-blog-item about it). But for a brief few minutes I was made to reappreciate the single life.
