Oh well. This too shall pass.

The On Display Web Ring has for its collab theme this month, "people-watching".

Something eminently easy to do in summer, with pretty women in shorts and halter tops walking by...

Yet you can only write so long about the beautiful. It's the oddities, the eccentricities, the individual peculiarities that is actually the most interesting to watch....

A tall Amazonian blonde woman, over six feet tall, who works hard to be proportioned, not gangly, is riding the stationary bike in the gym. This is after she does a set of bench presses. Her two-piece gym clothes are pink and black.

"Does this work my thighs?"

The resident buffed-to-perfection ex-athelete says,

"Set the tension up to 6."

"6? It's at 4 now, and I'm straining! Chad, you're killing me! I'm going to give it another minute at 4, then a minute at 5, then a minute at six, and then go back down...make it progressive."

She looks in her mid-thirties, fit, and well tanned. Yet I know she's had one facelift. She is such a large woman, she probably feels she has to keep in shape, or her body will get really saggy. She's in sales and feel she has to be good looking.

Sunflower seeds being consumed as a snack by several males, a gift given by an overweight diabetic woman with iron-grey hair with glasses on and a Winston Churchill type scowl.

She always looks perpetually pessimistic, but she is a den mother to the rest of them, and is actually a very soft touch and a very caring person.

Like myself, she usually has a paperback or two with her. Mary Stewart, or John D. MacDonald, or Marion Zimmer Bradley. She's a reader like I am....uncomfortable unless she has a book with her.

At church the other night one guy got up in prayer and held both his hands up, a long-haired guy who I had never seen before.

Every church has its own decorum, and that is, to say the least, unusual at our church. Obviously a visitor.

Two pews ahead of us, a balding ex-librarian with glasses sits with his latest outrageous jacket, a mixture of explosive colors that require sunglasses. He dresses loudly, and is proud of it. It's his way of standing out---

A human peacock, he is anything but a typical idea of a librarian.

I walk into the men's room at the gym, and a nude man waves, and says,

"Hi!"

I carefully look away while nodding Hi back. I don't particularly like to look at nude men. A sense of unease is always present. There's nowhere to look that's really ...safe.

I suppose some would say that's actually a sign I'm secretely homosexual, and repressing it.

Could be.

Yet I don't like to talk to men at the urinals, or glance for more than a second at the men in the shower.I certainly don't want to appear to stare or take undue notice.

It's the exact opposite of my reaction to nude women, where I have to consciously force myself to look away. (Like I had to do in drawing class in college when we first had nude models...)

I guess that's an example of not watching people.