THE ONE ABOUT THE DUDES

*photo unrelated entirely to anything, as though you expected anything less.

file this one under: "life mysteries, solved!" 

so. some evenings, unpredictably, when huck and i are coming home from who knows wherever we've been that day, we'll happen to walk home through this whole huge horde of dudes. i am talking dude-dudes. all twenty-something, all wearing scuffed work boots and baggy trousers, a lot of hoodies. occasionally there's a token female there but not usually. a lot of the time they've formed a long line at the hot dog guy up at the corner. when this happens, this phenomenon, it renders any trip to duane reade completely impossible. all these guys swarming all up in the joint, buying up all the chips, it's crazy. once, when we were walking home, we watched as an entire city bus stopped at the corner, opened its doors, and then! unleash the dudes! guys started pouring out of the thing, dude after dude, sooo many dudes, like a dude clown car, like a dude factory shaped like a bus. sometimes we see them and they're all milling about all over the place, not really doing anything, these funny random patches of dudes, and we weave around them on our scooter and sometimes we get stuck behind one or two (they walk so slow, and with such a wide stance... being a guy must feel really weird), and other times we get there and they've all formed a line, one long, snaking line of really rather large guys, guys who look like sports fans, all down the side of one building. sometimes when we pass they're actually going into this building, one at a time, through one little blue door. bloop!bloop!bloop! is the sound i like to imagine they make when they go in.

what on earth are they doing here? is it some kind of convention? it's all mysterious, all the time we talk about it. we can never predict when we're going to see them, which lends this weird, magical quality to the whole thing. sometimes they'd be gone for whole months at a time, and i'd forget all about them. and then! there they were again! are they working the night shift? are they sweat shop workers? are they taking tap dance lessons?

sometimes i liked to imagine we were witnessing some cosmic, earthly event. you know, testosterone being the crucial element here. maybe it had something to do with the migratory patterns of dudes in the wild. maybe it was beer-related. or construction-related? (see: scuffed boots. all of them! scuffed boots!) was it like a guy bermuda triangle? like these guys were being drawn here, ooh like that scene in hocus pocus! all in a trance, they don't know why, they only know, THEY MUST GET TO THAT BUILDING. AND STAND IN A LINE TO GET IN. OOH BUT FIRST I WANT A HOT DOG. i mean, you can see how this was getting out of hand for us. 

anyway. we were needing popcorn. special popcorn, this is how this all went down. we'd ran out of popcorn--i'm talking breakfast lunch and dinner some days, this popcorn--and i'd been to all the duane reades in the area to find more (not surprisingly there are at least 7 duane reades in this one 10 block radius), but none had any any in stock! it was super frustrating. kind of like when we go into the starbucks to get a two-pack of black and white cookies to share and there aren't any left, because we've already bought them all. 

so we're pulling into our last duane reade of the day before i come to my senses and realize it's just popcorn and i'll get on with life, and it's one of those nights where the dude population is soaring mysteriously, when suddenly, there they are! the popcorns! it was a very serendipitous moment for me. i get on the line to buy my six bags of popcorn (i don't know, is that overkill?), and there are about five dudes in front of me and five dudes behind me, and i finally think to myself: ok. this has gone on long enough. matters, own hands, blammo. so i asked one of the guys what the hell they were doing here and why the hell there are so many of them. nicely, though! i'm pretty nice. and the guy goes, "oh, it's trade school! electrician stuff. every night, 5pm." and then i thought about it and, yep, it was at about 5:00 every night that we'd see these guys, and somehow i hadn't noticed that bit before. and then he looked at all the popcorn bags in my hands, but look, they never have the popcorn i like so when i saw it and it was on sale two-for-one, my brain sort of blitzed and i stopped making rational decisions. 

so then he said something about how the term was almost up and there aren't any classes over the summer, and he ended with this: "yeah, somebody should blog about it." this struck me as sort of an odd thing to say. doesn't it? but then i thought, hey! turns out that's something i can do! 

so... i did.

anyway, mystery of the universe: solved.