Sleep has been torture this week, maintaining the conventional wisdom: Anxiety pill = no sleep or very episodic useless sleep. Normally when I quit drinking for a few days I eat like a goddam pig. No such hunger seems to have struck yet, 3 or 4 days into this. But the anxiety has stuck around. Joy. I kept getting jolted awake by what felt like electrical shocks. Finally crawled out of bed around 11am feeling like I’d slept none. Reminded me of the Amtrak days, when it was affordable to commoners like me to ride from NYC to Florida and back on a $5/hour salary. I joked with an incredibly obese woman sitting net to me that getting 8 hours of sleep on an Amtrak train coach seat required clearance of about 17 hours. At that she laughed like the Facebook woman with the Chewbacca mask. We were not exactly counting the cars on the New Jersey Turnpike but she was great conversation. She said she was an NYC cab driver. That was over 20 years ago. It was not until maybe 2 years ago that I ever actually saw such a thing: a woman NYC yellow cab driver. I thought of that Amtrak woman when reading a Bukowski story about his encounter with a woman who was so obese he could not find her stuff. He knew it had to be in there somewhere but damned if he could find it.
Back at the ghetto coffee shop. It was here last time I tried to compose one of these magnificent missives. I had to stop earlier than expected when one of the dudes who works here sat down right next to me. Right next to me while there are 4 or 5 other seats south of here, and the place was otherwise empty. Screaming into his cell phone he sat down here to eat a sandwich and slurp loudly from a canned carbonated beverage. He chewed loudly, he slurped the liquid even more loudly, and he shouted like an actor on a Vaudeville stage with no working microphones. It was a certifiably disgusting cacophony of slobbering and snorting and other delightful gutterae. So I left.
Not that I had dick-all worth saying anyway.
Waiting for the promised rain. Looking at some flowers that grow outside the ghetto coffee shop. Listening to a subway train roll past.
Cleaned a lot today. Scrub scrub scrub.
