A Night in the Life

Dear Katie,
There is a tradition in poetry to write poems based on a snippet of one's daily life. Keats used to write odes to inanimate objects, and Frank O'Hara is famous for his lunchtime poems that were written during his lunchbreak. Shocking, right? On Saturday night, I had to cab it home alone from the UCB, and since I didn't have anyone to talk to or anything to distract me, I had time to really absorb and appreciate the scenery and people around me. In the spirit of Keats and O'Hara, I want to recap for you what I noticed on my ride home, but being only a mediocre poet, I will take things to the twenty-first century and blog it out.

Nothing really happened until I got to Brooklyn. I was over the bridge in ten dollars, which is always exciting. On the corner of Myrtle and Flatbush, I saw a real life prostitute for the first time, or what I assume to be a real life prostitute. She was wearing an itsy-bitsy, teeny-weeny, yellow bikini top and matching yellow (insert German accent) booty shorts. She was leaning down into a car with tinted windows to make what I assume was a real life sex deal.

A couple blocks after the prostitute is the laundromat that either burnt down or caved in or self-destructed before it even got the chance to take down the grand opening sign, which as long as I can remember, has read "And Opening." How appropriate.

The last thing that caught my eye was an ad for Seagram's Gin on the back of a pay phone. It featured a silhouetted drawing of a dude with a fro in a barber chair holding a bottle. The tagline was "Snip. Snip. Sip. Sip." I was completely perplexed because the ad is wrong on so many levels. 1)Who drinks gin while they get their haircut? 2) Who drinks gin while they get their haircut at a barbershop in the hood? 3) What does hair have to do with Gin? They are both dry... And finally, was this ad strategically placed on Myrtle Avenue (once called Murder Ave.) because it is home to a lot of black folk? Isn't there some sort of racism hidden in there?

The first thing the cab driver asked me when I told him I was going to Brooklyn was, "Is it a long ride?" and at risk of sounding cheesy and trite, it most definitely was.
Love,
Brianna

PS-This has been edited after Laura Radcliffe dusted some cobwebs off the part of my brain that remembers poetry.