This is where I’ll be spending the next couple of days. The gift shop sells a large assortment of hats. I might pick one up. The smaller wheel chairs are much more disturbing than I.V. lines. The amount of Nuclear Imaging and technology in this building is amazing. I find myself admiring the amount of interaction between people and machines. I find myself in shock at the amount of people suffering and the amount of people healing. I counted the masks, there were 27 in my eye view through out the day. For the protection of themselves not of others. Some need not worry about others as they were alone.

I feel comfortable. The estranged imagination of chemicals finds its way into my field of vision. I pattern those modest images into esoteric configurations and relish the unconscious hours. The genius of sleep enters my head and the execution of pain and melancholy lie innards open to the world in its wake. I will exclaim future pleasures and decide on modest endeavours after I lay and sacrifice in a rhythmic measure.

My skin determined to be divided with my body, denotes a devious grin as I read the small initials engraved on my comfort.

You might want to read the first Idiosyncrasy before this one.

Again having to take the car to the shop, I made the walk across the street from the repair shop to the lovely diner with that nice waitress. This time I was not so shocked to see her although I was seated by someone else, I took a quick look around and spotted her cleaning up some plates near where the other lady was taking me. I sat, looked at my menu and contemplated lunch. This time I was a little more prepared. I was hungry for lunch and a meal was in order. She brought me water, and I politely refused having anything else to drink and ordered a turkey sandwich. She asked me if I wanted a soup or a salad. I honestly didn’t want either but for some reason the option of neither didn’t seem like a choice. I had to pick one or the other, at least that’s what it seemed like at the time. I chose a salad thinking it was less costly than a cup of soup and then she asked about dressing. Rather than have her ramble off the five or six dressing they had, two of which were probably ranch, I said, “No dressing”. Not sure why I was able to choose nothing this time but it seemed to make sense. Save the dressing for those who actually wanted salad, as if there were only a few spoonfuls in the back. She smiled politely and made her way to the back to put in my order. I took out a book and began reading. I was reading the City and the Pillar by Gore Vidal. Soon thereafter my salad showed up. I looked at it as if someone had dropped off a physics book at my table. Mildly interested but puzzled that it was there. I wasn’t really up for a lesson on velocity and objects in motion. However I kind of did sign up for the physics so I should at least take a look at a few formulas. I took a few bites avoiding the white parts of the lettuce and, after it looked like I had attacked the salad, I stopped and moved my fork back to the napkin on the table, pushing the salad bowl away to that “I’m done with this” position on the table.

I was sitting in a separated booth. The kind where booths align a center wall and a piece of frosted glass sits between your booth and the adjacent booth. The wall almost always making the other peoples’ head-tops visible so you have an awareness of them and, in combination with their voices, you can figure out how stupid they are. I suppose their voices would do just fine but the tops of their heads are a bonus. Three ladies sat across the wall from me and began to chat about nonsense. I shouldn’t say chat, they began to gossip. I’m not very big on gossip; in fact I try to avoid it as much as possible. It is one of the most dangerous things in modern society. It can turn a single mom into a whore and an effeminate man into a pedophile or a misunderstood teen into a monster. Despite having a truthful foundation or not, the purpose is almost always malicious. As they spoke of ordinary people, doing things they seemed appalled at, their waitress came over. They had the really pretty waitress that looks like she is in community college and making tips to pay for the weekend bar trips. They seemed to know each other and began talking; this is when I realized that all these ladies were somehow related, despite arriving at different times to the restaurant. The oldest had arrived first, then the other two ladies but the other two were wearing name tags and looked like they were on their lunch break. I took a quick glimpse over the wall as if to find out what the GDR was plotting. They were employed at the grocery store down the way. After chatting up the waitress a bit they finally ordered. All three had cheeseburgers medium rare, fries, two cokes and one diet. They all had taken a good long look at the menu as if to contemplate this choice intently. I wondered if they ever intended to get anything other than a cheeseburger. My guess is probably not. What was more interesting was the diet coke. Why bother getting a diet coke when having a cheeseburger, are you really looking to cut calories, ‘cause that is probably not the best way to do it. Maybe she’s diabetic, I thought. After reading a bit I wondered if anyone else in the place had not ordered a soda (I’ll save the coke, soda, pop debate for another day). Water used to be in big fashion but it seems that it is falling out. I took a quick glance around and was slightly disgusted to see every table with a glass half-full of black bubbling liquid. In the corner I saw one that was clear and breathed a small sigh of relief, only to be disappointed to see it bubble too. I made a small pledge to myself not to drink a soda again until I saw a stranger drinking water in a restaurant by choice, as if I had made a silent protest against Coke, Pepsi and all the others. In my resolved thoughts of metaphorically chaining myself to water, my turkey sandwich arrived. The waitress smiled and asked if I wanted more water or anything else. I took her up on the water and declined the anything else.

I forked my vegetable medley, removing the lima beans so I could get the rest down. I ate my food in between paragraphs of the book. All the time trying to block out the inane chatter of the adjacent table. At one point they looked across the wall and asked me what I was reading, apparently one of them was in community college and was taking an English class. I knew that this conversation was either going to be entertaining or possibly get ugly. I raised my book and flashed the cover at them for a few seconds. Not surprisingly, none of them knew the book or the author. So then comes the instigating question, “What’s the book about”, the collegiate asked. I had a simple choice to make, say it was a coming of age tale about a boy in search of a friend or say it was about a young boy being gay in the 40’s in search of his first boyhood lover that had moved away. The first answer would get me a polite response and I could probably put my head down after a few more answers and finish my meal. The second could go a number of ways. Not knowing the outcome of the second answer I chose it, simply because I didn’t know how that story ended. After giving them that synopsis, they all stared blankly at me for a second and then they began to look at their bread plates. The collegiate then asked, “Is it good?” I told her it was excellent so far and that if she was interested in English, Gore Vidal is definitely an author she should look into. She told me she was only getting her Associates in something, I forget what, as it wasn’t very interesting. She nodded politely, while the other two had stopped looking in my direction. Luckily their waitress had come with refills on their sodas. They took the opportunity, as I, to end our conversation. I found the whole thing kind of funny, and I reveled in my intellectual superiority for a second before I though what an ass I was for thinking these people beneath me. They were probably nice people but to me they just seemed so boring and banal that I found greater entertainment in the tops of their heads than any words that ever left their mouths. After feeling bad for a few moments, I returned to my book and finished my food.

The waitress came by again filling my water and dropping off my bill after asking if I wanted anything else. Again declining the anything else, I looked at the bill, which came to all of about seven dollars. I pulled out two peculiarly folded bills from my pocket and after unraveling them found them to be two 20’s. I was trapped in a similar dilemma as before, this time not about rent or selfishness but simple economics. I didn’t have change to leave an appropriate tip but if I paid the bill I would be left with 12 dollars and coins and another 20. I knew the bill was only 7 dollars but 2 dollars seemed like an unworthy tip. I knew it is well more than 15% but I hated leaving tips less than 5 dollars for some reason. So I paid the bill, although this time a different person cashed me out in the front and gave me my change. My waitress was in the back clearing away dishes or getting someone else’s order. After getting the change I made my way back to the table to leave the tip and thought to myself, “What else can I do, I have to leave the 10”. I folded the 10 in half and left it under the untouched, clean knife and made my way out the door. I was hoping to see the waitress before I left but she never showed. I walked out the door and imagined the look on her face when she got to my table and saw the money, similar to the way she looked at me the last time I was there.

The glass door closed behind me and as I walked away I thought about how pretty she was.

Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you’ve got about a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of, babies — ‘God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.’

- Kurt Vonnegut (1922-2007)

Thanks for the Advice.

I was at a rather standard cafe today waiting for my car to be fixed. I had quite a bit of time to kill so I pulled out a book to read and order a coffee and a piece of apple pie. I felt like an early Gen-X’er that was really into Bukowski for a moment, as if I should be writing mediocre poetry into a moleskine. I began to prepare my coffee, one sugar and a plop of cream. The waitress I had was rather nice and projected the kind of character you would only get from a truly good person. I ascertained that she was an immigrant from her accented English and some chit chat she had with one of the other customers about coffee in her country. The unfortunate thing is that this woman was less than attractive. Actually I’m putting that rather nicely but you get the idea. I began to wonder in between bites of my pie if she didn’t get as much in tips as a pretty waitress would. If I had to guess I would say no but this person’s demeanor and attitude were so good that after the initial shock of her appearance she was rather pretty. I took a few sips of coffee and delved into the book I was reading. Chuck Klosterman’s Sex Drugs and Cocoa Puffs. I was reading his justification of pornography as an odd social conscienciousness. In classic postmodern justification he references this as a self justification for watching porn thus almost making it all ok and a little less pretentious. If nothing else his essay on the subject is entertaining. Really the article is about the rapid evolution of the internet and how porn helps the ordinary user understand the internet. It’s a rather interesting read. All the time I was thinking why is it necessary to come up with a discourse around the need for pornography on the internet. Why should it even need to be justified, why can’t it just exist with a simple social understanding that it is available in a split second thanks to the series of tubes.

After reading this and a few other articles I was a little embarrassed, not because I was reading about porn and the internet but because I had been sitting at this relatively empty cafe for about an hour now having only a cup of coffee and a piece of pie. I felt that I was just wasting people’s time, especially the waitress who ironically checked up on me almost instinctively when my coffee was empty. Not when it was half full or when it had been empty for a while but within a few moments of me taking the last sip in the cup. I hate having a refill in the middle of the cup because it throws off the sugar and cream ratio. So after this hour and change I thought I should order something bigger although I wasn’t very hungry. I then thought maybe I’ll get something to go so I could rack up a decent bill in order to give a decent tip to this nice waitress. I felt as if I should pay rent for the table I was at. I used the table for almost two hours when all was said and done. It’s the kind of strange thought that haunts us although no one really cares. A friend of mind when eating alone will dirty his knife a bit so it seems to the waitress that he used it to cut the meal as opposed to the side of his fork. He didn’t want the waitress to think he was some sort of a Neanderthal. Although in reality it’s not about the waitress at all its about the person. It’s more of an internal sense of perception than the external one when it comes to things like this.

The bill came to all of about 4 dollars. So as I looked at the small bill and began to pack up my things, I started to have the internal debate about what to do. Yet what to do is simple: pay the bill and leave a couple bucks for a tip considering I was an easy person to take care of. I’m not a, “Can I have that on the side and no this and no that”, kind of guy. I can take the tomatoes off my own sandwich if I don’t want them. I grabbed my bag and took the bill up to the register, it was one of those kind of places. The waitress was the one ringing me up and I paid with a 20 and she gave me the change. A 10, a 5, a single and some coins. I looked at the combination of bills and folded the 10 in half after looking at the waitress smile and handed it to her. She gave me this look of shock, similar to what was probably my look of shock when I first saw her. She thanked me rather enthusiastically and I nodded in approval and made my way out the door.

Now, did I give her a 10′er because I was paying rent, or because she was truly nice and that was the only thing I could do to show my gratitude. Or was it because I was compensating for her not being pretty so I would not be the kind of guy who would judge on appearance. Does the 10′er make me more evolved? Or does me admitting it make me that much more shallow? Or did I simply do it to have something to write about?

Nevertheless I can always say I had a 13 dollar piece of Pie today and it was good.