Thursday, November 08, 2007

In Memoriam - Paddy Black: Captured at the Central Berkeley BART Landing

This is a memorial post.  Black cahiers notebook, we had some good times together - too few, too few.  I’d barely gotten seven or eight pages into you, and I’d just written some great notes in you about some cool things I’d seen while waiting for the train, and then I was on the train and blast my absentminded soul but I left you there on BART.  I had laminated my phone number inside your cover, so if anyone had wanted to return you to me anyone could have.  But no one did.  (I’m looking at you, anyone.  For shame.)

So now I’ve had to move on.  I am lucky enough to have a little stockpile of these superior and excellent memopads so I’ve broken out a replacement and we’re off and running.  However, in honor of all the harebrained notions I done thunked up in that book but that will, with its loss, never be re-thunk again, I will present my best reconstruction of the last two things I wrote about: Two Things I Noticed In the Berkeley BART Station

As a trademarks and logos geek I couldn’t help but notice the flashy German Adidas bag.  I wanted to suss out the tag line and have a close look at the layout and design choices, but it didn’t seem appropriate under the circumstances.  The bag was slung over the shoulder of a hot pouty girlwoman about ten feet to my right.  She dawdled on the landing like a petulant child, but she swung her well-formed hips like a centerfold.  The Adidas bag dangled low across her groinal zone.  I really wanted to take a closer look at the bag but I figured she probably wouldn’t accept that as an excuse for me closely scrutinizing her goods - even to the extent that they were independently trademarked.

***

Grandma looked a little stressed.  She held grandson, age five or so, by his hand, fording their way across the landing to a good spot for them to wait.  It was October 29, and grandson wore a t-shirt, jeans, and plastic vampire teeth - the classic hinged novelty dentures.  He was having trouble controlling his giggles and wanted to wander away on his own.  “Oh no you don’t,” she admonished him.  “But I have to scare people!” “Well you can scare people right here.”

Another random commuter wanders up, looking vacantly into the tunnel ahead - a woman in her 30s, sensibly dressed with understatement and tidy hair.  Grandson reaches forward, takes her hand.  She glances down to him, surprised.  He gapes his jaws for her, displaying gruesome Draculoid choppers.  She gasps.  Grandson laughs out loud as the woman tells him how he scared her.  Grandma can only look away, shaking her head. 

So long little memo pad.  I hope you are being used richly and appreciatively in some faraway, better place.  I will never forget you.  But, you know, whatever.