Weird Day

Today has been strange. It started out strange and it just seems to be continuing in that direction. It began unusually in that I had to get a ride to work; I managed to get my car locked into my works parking garage (long story that ends with me hating the metro). So I arrived in the Hollywood area about an hour before I had to be in work, taking advantage of the situation I went to get some breakfast and coffee. While walking to work I had one of those weird moments that seem to only happen when something has broken your standard ritual and is causing you to see an area or situation in a slightly different way then you normally do. I was standing on the corner waiting to cross the usually busy street near my office, when all of a sudden I realized that it was quiet. Ok, for people who do not live in cities this might not seem odd but having spent a lot of time in this given area, I have never seen it quiet. There were no loud tourists, no cars racing by, no wind, nothing just silence. It seemed like a city at peace. But despite this comparative silence there were still people walking around, the area was not deserted and this made the scene (both in the visual and auditory sense) seem even more exceptional. I'm sure it only lasted a second or two but in that moment it was like the silence between inhaling and exhaling.

I don't know if it was the moment that was unusual or the fact that I noticed it but it left me with a feeling I could not really identify. Neither good nor bad. Just different for having experienced it. The rest of the day went by fairly normally except for the fact that I kept feeling like I could not settle into a normal routine. For the most part my day is spent doing the same activities while at work and I am only passively involved in most of them; basically it's the epitome of going through the motions. But today I was out of sync.

The final event of the day came when I heard that someone had fallen from the shopping complex across the street, from the 5th floor onto the sidewalk. Hearing about an incident where someone has passed away is always disturbing but when it is in a close proximity, the affect always seems magnified. Though I could not see anything other than police cars, ambulances and cordoned off sidewalks from my office building the incident was still very visible. The power of the internet being what it is, I got more info from that than from the fact it happened right across the street, in a building my company owns. Via twitter I saw that it was a suicide. One of the street performs that dress up as characters on Hollywood Blvd; this particular person was one of the 2 or 3 spidermen who are here on any given day. Obviously, I can't be sure, because whenever something of this nature happens there is always gossip, but I have a feeling I might know which person it was. I know it's completely selfish to turn someone else's death into something about yourself but in all honesty I think we all think about death (and most other things) that way. As humans the things that we experience and observe are from the standpoint of how does this affect me, even if we never consciously think of it in that way.

This was a person I most likely saw everyday and while I never talked to him, and probably more because of that fact, it's a strange feeling that comes over you when you realize they are gone. It has manged to truly wake me up from my routine, where I would observe but not really think about most of the things I saw on any given day.

Now I am off to watch Lucha VaVOOM. Did I mention it was a weird day.