In Which Your Faithful Narrator Gets Noirish

tonight, after work in the library i sat in my car and flipped through my book of cds that resides, currently in said car. i flipped through that bastard three times and couldn't find anything that really said "oh, listen to me!" i had a rather frightening thought: i've moved on. most, if not all of the cds in that book are from college and some from high school. its a combination of rock, alt rock, and some hip hop. i listen to it and become nostalgic. i actually felt a little sad about the whole affair. so, instead of listening to a cd, i turned on the radio and let the sounds of bee-bop jazz take me through the cold, misty streets of indy.

the streets of indy have a weird light to them at night. particularly madison and meridian. there is a certain amount of creepiness that exudes from those streets. i'm sure it has something to do with the neon lights from the bars and clubs, but also from the steam that rises from the manhole covers that dot the streets. tonight, in particular, was strangely weird. i could see the images of people on the sidewalks, but not the people themselves. i saw a blond standing next to a stretch humvee, but it wasn't a person, no, it was more of an anomorphic image. an extra, if you will, in a noir film that i happened to find myself in. the stop lights glowed menacingly and the steam blew at me in shifty clouds. i was safe in my four wheeled capsule listening to bee-boppin dizzy gillepsie. i felt like i needed to bottle it all up, to save for later. to re-experience it, to unpack it and view it from different sides. i was in the scene, but not of the scene. it was a weird discontected feeling.

maybe it was the music that made the scene. maybe it was my far away thinking the caused it. i wasn't thinking of anything in particular, just kind of going with it, if you will. i felt like an observer, not an interactor.

as soon as i got passed the lilly pharmacutical headquarters and continued south the spell was somewhat broken, but it nagged me all the way home. it became stronger again for a while when i got into traffic and i became part of a group waiting at a stoplight. images flashed at me, not in a schizophrenic way, but in that weird unfolding way. it became spooky for a while. but just as the images washed over me, they left. i was part of it again. whatever "it" was. it wasn't a scene. it wasn't staged. it just was.