Must be lonely, being angry, feeling overlooked

So the Somerville Theatre has a gender-neutral restroom. It's on the first floor, right past the main house; it was part of the original women's lounge when the theater was built in 1914, got converted into an additional men's room during the renovations in the '90's, two years ago was reclassified gender-neutral with the sign beside the door to prove it. I am sometimes in this restroom. The other night I am in this restroom and in the next stall a guy is talking on his phone, which is already a strike against him even before I process what he's complaining about: "I just don't know why girls would want to be let into the men's room. Like, are they trans, are they perverts?" At this point my brain occasioned a slight record scratch—perverts? Dude, are you in 1963?—and I failed to open my mouth and startle him by reminding him that he could always use the actual men's room downstairs if he felt threatened by non-men using the toilets around him, since nothing about the layout of the Somerville Theatre legally obligates a dude to use the gender-neutral restroom. I feel bad about not startling him. It would have been morally good for him and maybe he would have dropped his phone down the john. But I didn't, so it's three days days later and I am still annoyed with him for his fundamental misreading of concepts of public space. The gender-neutral restroom is not some inherently male space that women are forcing their way into. "Gender-neutral" doesn't mean "men-plus," as if it were one of the languages where a mixed group always defaults to the masculine gender. I suppose it's illuminating that he thinks so and that he's territorial about it. But the concept isn't new and neither is the sign on this particular restroom and I hope nothing went right with that guy for the rest of his night.

To end on a nicer note, because I have to try to sleep somehow: I walked around this afternoon and took pictures. I got flowering trees, fire escapes, rubble heaps. Here's a steep angle on the Knights of Malta Hall, across the street from the ex-warehouse. The colors came out the way they looked.

And, Amorite or Eremite, or General Averagee

Yesterday while out with my camera, I took a picture of the chief rubble heap remaining of the Reid & Murdock Warehouse not just because it was post-industrially striking, but because right smack front and center was a fractured street number on a piece of pale stone and I couldn't have dressed the set more poignantly if I'd had a budget.

Today while on my way to catch a bus from Highland because I had no chance of making my doctor's appointment if I waited for one of the buses that ostensibly run past my actual street, I saw there were three backhoes on site busily clearing away the last of the rubble, the heap I had photographed yesterday among them. A man in a safety vest and hard hat was standing on the far side of the chain-link watching them, I figured the foreman. So I crossed the street and asked if I could ask him something about the demolition and he said yes and I told him I'd been hoping to get a brick from the site because I was fond of the building and he made one of those hold-on-a-minute gestures and walked over to one of the smaller piles of dirt and wreckage where they'd been pulling up the foundations and felt around in it for a brick and brushed the worst of the dirt off and handed it across the chain-link to me. "It was pretty old, huh?" he said sympathetically. "Built in 1929," I said. He had sunglasses and a mustache and between that and the hard hat I am not sure I'd recognize him if we met in street clothes—dark, stocky, maybe ten years older than me—but I might know him if I saw him again at the site. I thanked him seriously. He said the Knights of Malta Hall would be fine. A car honked at me for technically standing in the street and I walked away up School Street carrying a ninety-year-old brick and singing about half of Kipling's "A Pilgrim's Way," which was suddenly and I don't care if over-aptly in my head. I wrapped the brick in Kleenex while waiting for the bus and eventually got a small brown paper bag from a 7-Eleven to slide it into for safekeeping. It's old red brick, partly powdered and crusted with mortar and concrete dust and I guess the archaeological term is crud? The backhoes were stationary by the time I returned from the doctor's, the foreman nowhere to be seen, although some official-looking people in windbreakers and shirtsleeves were conversing by the tracks. I regretted not having a camera because of the afternoon shadows the fire escape of the Litchfield Block was casting on its own warm rose-brown old brick. I got home and put my brick in its bag on the dining room table.

The people, Lord, Thy people, are good enough for me!