depending on your perspective, this is an entry almost entirely - or only fleetingly - about food

brooklyn, money, the pros and cons of pot-bellied pigs as household pets

So even though I went to the city yesterday for cake day at Atlas (cancelled! no new cake!) and some sweet action at Dick Blick (where I am now a "preferred customer" via my expired Columbia ID), today I really truly had to pick up a new brush at the Pratt store (where I also discovered aluminum clamp lights, "plum" twintip Sharpies and a Tria brushpen six pack on clearance... I swear, that place will be the ugly, premature death of my "independent wealth.")

I continued my walk down Myrtle, then along Washington down to DeKalb. I was planning to get a late lunch at the excellent Pequena, but instead opted for a simple iced coffee at Tillie's. I hadn't yet been to Tillie's, which I'd read about as "continuing the writerly tradition of Fort Greene" or something equally presumptuous and pretentious. Now here in the story it should be noted that I was wearing my massive sunglasses, the ones I wear when I care not to be fucked with, and the ones I usually do not wear when exploring new places, as they more or less make me blind. So I did not notice until I was halfway through the door that I had not, as I'd previously suspected, stepped over a very rotund dark gray dog on my way in. No, no - I had, in fact, stepped over a very rotund dark gray pot-bellied pig. On a leash. Just when I noticed, an older man walked by and remarked loudly, "Damn, that's nasty." I presume he was talking about the pig and not its petite blonde owner, who was quite a nice-looking woman.

So despite my surprise, this is apparently not entirely uncommon, though nothing compared to the "pot-bellied pig craze" of the late '80s and early '90s, when pigs were selling for $800 to $1,000. But I guess that was before my time.