Reading: Middlemarch and Empire Falls.

Listening: How Green Was My Valley. When I do walk to work, which I tell myself I'm going to do next week.

Watching: The Gwyneth Paltrow "Emma." Since she and Jeremy Northam are so yummy, I can forgive its being so obvious whom Emma marries.

Moving: Swam something between 1 and 1.5 K

27 July 2002: People are alike all over

I am sitting on my porch swing in the warm summer twilight, keeping one eye on "Emma" and skimming Smithsonian, having eaten a dinner I cooked all by myself (a new dish, to me). A little while ago two coach buses drove slowly up my street. Now, I love my street. I love bungalows. But are our neighborhoods tourist attractions? It's not as if it's a major thoroughfare, or that historically significant.

Anyway, I could see the people looking out the windows at me, and I felt like the astronaut in that "Twilight Zone" episode, "People Are Alike All Over," in which an astronaut winds up in a Martian zoo. That was a spoiler, sorry.

But as I began to type the above, two people walked by, a white woman and a black man, and I could tell that at least she was strung out. They were just in front of my house when a cop car passed the opposite way, and the driver yelled out his window for them to come to him. They did not, and he backed up to keep pace with them, and as I type this the two officers are searching and berating the woman.

Aha, my first prostitute-spotting. They know her by name. Her name is Tina. She's a crack whore, or 'ho, as the cops are saying.

Well, it is a warm summer night, and prostitution is allegedly rampant in my neighborhood. I've been waiting to see direct evidence of it, more than articles in the Post and Westword.

The two cops and the two civilians are inconveniently positioned for me, obscured by a porch column that impedes my eavesdropping. Their tones are kinder now.

I really just expected to write about my own being in a zoo. But perhaps this is just the sort of incident the bus tourists were after?