Smell of Trash at the Muddy Cup

"Albany is a great place to be bored," Aranha said with his Brazilian accent. His voice is low and monotone, as if he were all bass, no treble. "If you want to be bored, come to Albany."

Poor guy. Poor Albanians. My friend Ilir is Albanian (as in from the country Albania), and Professor South beats a dead horse with his joke that Ilir is the only true "Albanian" in Albany. I sit here in this coffee shop called the Muddy Cup, which has postmodernist persuasion radiating through its red-painted walls and oddly matching furniture that all appear as if picked up off of street curbs thrown out by graduate students moving out of the city and gettin' the hell out. It's open mic night tonight, and some English masters student is chanting some bizarre incantations into the mic.

For some reason I smell the rotten smell of trash from somewhere...and this isn't usual. No, definitely not usual. And now comes the last song.

I run into people often here at the Muddy Cup. Lately the small talk I've been having with the people I run into has often been "man, that was such a great idea to take a year off and go to Thailand! I wish I'd done that." We then go on to complain about Albany and how much we want to leave before all this Imperial architecture and rhetoric (Empire commons, the empire region, empire plaza, the empire state...okay okay, we get it we get it, major superiority complex okay) consumes us and we become robotic-like Imperial guards. "I think I'll just finish this year with a masters degree and then bail." Yeah, no kidding they'll often respond. Get out of here while you can!


Maybe I can make it out of Albany at least treating my time here as ascetic practice. In other words, as long as I go through the suffering with purpose, purpose inscribed into every moment, every decision made, from whether I hit the snooze button or not, to the way I cross the street, to the way I complain about the smell of garbage at the coffee shop on my blog, it's like we are our own directors of our own movie that we are living and 'acting' every day. Tragedies can be good movies too.