Surrealist Fridays with Eric Yates

a) There is a bar on Washington Place that has the weirdest bathrooms ever. It's all late 90s hearthrobs. My roomie Gill and I never see each other any more so we met up on the upper east side at this bar that was yuppie business dudes, which quickly debilitated into us leaving for NYU territory. I played a hunting arcade game, the whole time Gill and I were wondering if the intensity attached to the action made us bad vegetarians. "The dual nature of human beings" we resolved. Arcade Fire came on, I sang along, and was guilty and missing everything up till then, but when I started singing, my missing streak ended and I shot everything. In triumph I put the gun away. Gill looks at me and says "you got better when you started singing."

A small room sat a large woman sitting in a chair looking at us, her office plastered with old ads and paraphernalia, a radio and security monitor with static glowed onto her shirt. I recited to myself "Worst accident I ever seen, gasp". She watched us. I silently screamed. We escaped.

b) I woke up to NPR this morning on the alarm clock. Beautiful. Civilized.

c) After realizing that it was late and we needed food, Mamoun's. Always Mamoun's. An ancient line of youth established in the 70s forever onto every 4AM to come, protruded onto MacDougal. We got a booth, and sat down next to a giant poster of a scene of "What Could Be". Thousands of people eat falafel here every week, but I would bet you no one ever read this thing. It's like it will be there forever watching us, laughing at us for enjoying falafel and not realizing "What Could Be". It says "Feed the children of the world instead of fihting [sic] like children." One side depicted the apocalypse and mountains of limbs. The other side, serene nudity and fellowship with animals. The Middle, a mushroom cloud and apocalypse cities. And scribbled there, an epic, capitalized, ERIC YATES. The dual nature of human beings.

Staring in tahini slathered stupification at "What Could Be", a construction worker said "Got you lickin' it off your fingers huh?"
"Things happen", I responded
"Gonna happen here soon, ha ha ha!".
We finished the hummus and escaped.