E. Ray
“Not a first impression, but early”
Is the velvet hoodie a late-nineties throwback, or is it of the Kanye-before-Kanye-was-Trumpin’-maybe-Yeezus-maybe-Jesus-still-so-cool and comfortable outerwear line? The bleached gelled hair matches the late nineties hypothesis—Lance Bass when the shy girls had crushes on him, Mark Marnell in my pre-geometry class. Or maybe it’s something coming, his beard is dark still, not dyed, all psychology professorial in coverage and trim, so that’s not nineties and neither is the velvet on the sweatshirt, which is Very This Year; I noticed it this winter, on a girl I thought was her mother because of the high-waisted mom pants and ribbon-thin shoulder-strapped bambi-colored leather purse and the, okay, awkward way her Rogaine-haired dad had his hand on her lower back as they waited for ice cream—but then her mother was there too, stranger danger alarms dimmed (but not totally gone), and anyway, that was why I noticed velvet was in quickly this year, along with the two or three other high school girls I saw wearing it later that week.
He has a pink Nalgene bottle, so I know, along with the way his voice is always gentle and happy sounding when he greets me, despite one good conversation once at a work mixer in the spring and not much after, that it’s probably not the Kayne, or that if it is, he probably has a good reason for it—what asshole has a pink Nalgene?
