This means that the rest of the time, we’re passing one another in our home on different schedules, grabbing for whatever time we can get. (from ” The Faded Sepia of River Mud“)
On these days I feel like I’m operating in a different time zone.
No matter how much I try to let myself sleep in or try and make myself stay awake when I come in from standing 2nd shift watch, I wake up around 10 AM. Today is Flip Day in my schedule… I’m on night watch, midnight to 0800 tomorrow. I try and get a few things done around the house, write, drink tea instead of coffee. I know Earl Grey has caffeine in it, but there’s a little less caffeine in tea than in coffee and I find it easier to lay down and relax after tea. These days are me, the dogs, and an ungrateful, sweater humping cat. I’ve been watching this Netflix show, The Diplomat. Other than fish bowl murder mysteries, classic British sit coms, and oddly unending loops of The Mentalist, I like well written political intrigue.
What can I say? Television fiction is the only place I can find palatable politics at this point in the timeline.
It’s raining and snowing today. I’m putting off what is probably a novella knocking around in my head. I’m not often plagued by longer fiction nagging me to write it, but this one’s been going on for months, since taking the Mayor Andrew Broaddus to South Point. I’ve been writing that story in fits and snatches between rounds and reading Driftwood: A Biography of Harlan Hubbard. I want to get some sleep, but I also don’t like to waste one of my two full days off in the week.
I’d like to say I’m being amazingly domestic while Amanda is out doing the Good Work of the World. But I’m slouching in my very tired wing back chair, feet up on a foot stool, Chromebook perched on my right leg, writing. Season 2 of The Diplomat is on the television. This set up is sort of ideal for most of the writing I do; floating in the middle of things.
I used to haunt coffee shops. When that was a thing. One of those spirits armed with a book, a notebook, a pen. I’d hardly speak to anyone besides the barista. I favored places that still served bottomless cups of coffee; it was the closest I could come to the greasy spoon joints I’d find at two in the morning, sometimes still drunk. Coffee cost a dollar, though at some point some old codger would be there bemoaning used to be a nickle. That was before ‘Fair Trade’ was meant to make us feel better about the blood cost of coffee.
I used to haunt coffee shops, though my second ex-wife would call me rude for being anti-social in a social space. Like I broke the contract I never signed. Though I would step outside to smoke a sometimes bummed cigarette, which I believed counted for something.
There are fewer tables and chairs for ghosts now. Now all the aimless spirits wander digital landscapes with earbuds blocking out the hum of other people’s lives. The coffee is To Go whether I want to go or not. We wander unmoored for the lack of coffee shops and hardly anyone has a cigarette to give anymore.
