Brick Lane

This is an adaptation of a thing I wrote at my creative writing workshop at Eastside books on Brick Lane. I was pretty happy with it off the bat--maybe its better read aloud as it was with the first draft--but now I'm feeling like it needs a lot of work. Brick Lane on a Wednesday night is a world apart and twelve senses removed from the Sunday morning experience.

Brick Lane is proof that ugly can be good. People don't love Brick Lane despite its ugliness, but because of it. They love it because it is a million contradictions crammed into a few blocks. You've got beautiful old factories that were never built to be beautiful, but they've got these old windows with a million little panes, and detailing in the pollution stained brick walls. Stick a neon sign on top of one of those walls and there you have what makes the place: something old, ugly/beautiful mixed up with something new, ugly/beautiful. Neither object is worthy of remark on its own.
The people here hold the same appeal. For kids and artists this place is a playground. They dress with a precise lack of style: big hair, bulky down coats, skinny jeans and track bikes. Throw in a mustache, here or their. Make it look easy, but know that every overpriced thrift store's been combed to come up with that perfect ensemble. These kids will catch your eye like a fluorescent stripe on a ski-vest circa 1991, they steal the show. But its the other people here, the ones who are almost invisible but not quite, that make the show. They work in shops that acquire their goods by faxing shipment orders to places that haven't yet caught on to email. They're the reason the convenience store is stocked with cardamom seeds and cinnamon sticks.

Les Canards

I fantasize about ducks, not so much those that paddle around in filthy municipal ponds back home, chasing chunks of bread thrown by bored children... They sort of disgust me, those ducks.

I'm more thinking foie gras, duck confit, magret. I'm addicted. Yet, with all that goodness and fat, eating them makes me ache with guilt sometimes. Its not guilt because I feel like I should go to the gym, but guilt because it can be too much of a good thing. Too much of things that are only mediocre make me feel that way too.

Oxford street in London makes me insane. I swore, after my first trip to Oxford street that I would never go back but somehow I find myself there regularly now. I've sort of gotten used to it, I wish that I hadn't.

Back to ducks. I imagine myself raising them, being followed around by ducklings on a daily basis. Somehow, the unglamorous task of raising them, having them shit on my boots, and then the gut-wrenching job of killing, plucking, dissecting them might make up for my indulgence. That is my fantasy.

Is this a mere canard?

ca⋅nard:

1. a false or baseless, usually derogatory story, report, or rumor.
2. Cookery. a duck intended or used for food.
3. Aeronautics. a. an airplane that has its horizontal stabilizer and elevators located forward of the wing. b. Also called canard wing. one of two small lifting wings located in front of the main wings.c.an early airplane having a pusher engine with the rudder and elevator assembly in front of the wings.