People you see in JP on a sunny Friday afternoon.
Guys with braids on bicycles.
Guys on those tallbike things (when tatts and dork glasses are just not enough to announce your demographic niche). Guys riding up to other guys with braids and slapping hands as if to say, yo is your band playing tonight, and did you see my girlfriend's knitted bike cozy she is selling on Etsy. No? Then check my Tumblr. That sort of handslap!
People going into the corner store for cigarettes and chips and cheap beer and money orders, and people going into coffee shops to co-work on their code for that site about crowdsourcing social change they won't finish before they head off to grad school.
Big Latin guys headed to work out with weights at Mike's Fitness. Little hippie non-profit women headed to work out with weights at Mike's Fitness.
People headed to the co-op store for whole grain bread and hemp soap. People headed to that Meatland store for pork sausage and the joy of shopping at a place called Meatland.
Parents taking their progressively-named children to Music Together classes (Emma Mae, please hold hands with Linus and Deliverance). People on their way to their Tribal Dance or Belly Dancing lesson (Note on schedule: *Students must buy finger cymbals and a 3 yard silk veil from Susi to participate in this class.)
People headed to the Irish bar, the other Irish bar, the other again Irish bar with the mural and corned beef hash and eggs on Sunday, the Scottish bar, the bar in the former brewery that sometimes has a gay line dancing night now, but no more bowling.
Who you don't see: the invisible people, who invest their lifeblood and InDesign skills in all those free newspapers stacked in the front of all Jamaica Plain businesses, toiling away in their mysterious dens somewhere, delivering their precious freemedia to the careless masses until they can no longer carry on and throw themselves from the top of the Brewery smokestack or move to New Hampshire to become Republican lumber yard owners.* (* theory)
Yes. It is a July afternoon in Jamaica Plain, and though I could muse upon the rivalrous charms of my own dear Roslindale, I am going to go to the Scottish bar instead.
