A world-historical sleep, maybe eight hours, but, more importantly, a deep sleep fraught with deep dreams. Up at 7 am and feeling pretty good. No time for exercise; Sara’s going to give me a ride to the Skytrain station.
But things start to go wrong. What the hell is this? Can a good sleep cast as dark a pall over proceedings as my usual insomnia? My laptop refuses to connect to our router, so I can’t back it up to DropBox. On the Skytrain, I find just about everybody offends me for one reason or another. At the coffee shop, a woman with no need of a power point, a serial offender, has highjacked my special place overlooking the park. The last time she parked there for two or three hours. I swear horribly, maybe loud enough for her to hear.
The music in Starbucks this morning is pissing me off. People with only moderately loud and self-assertive voices are pissing me off. My tuna sandwich pisses me off. My book project pisses me off.
I tell myself to take a more tolerant attitude toward all else that ensues today.
A gray-haired woman strides past, self-consciously perky-assed in white cotton pantaloons. Clearly she works out, eats carefully. Then I realize I am of a similar age, and a similar disposition, even though I don’t want to be. It isn’t my time yet.
Of course neither is it her time yet. It’s never anyone’s time for this shit. The human condition, eh? Eventually it pisses us all off.
Unless we’re spiritually perfected. Which I’m not.
“Really?” Sara, the perennial wiseacre, has been reading over my shoulder.
coffee-shop meditations
* Starbucks and the social construction of reality
Nice read, as always.
You hit it on the nail there, and many of your readers (including myself) can relate.
Rgds
Kai
Thanks, Kai. Are you maintaining your equanimity? Seems to me you’ve hunkered down in a very nice part of the world, under the circumstances.