Fresh for Eighty Eight

I wake up at seven with my phone jumping up and down on my forehead deleting the dreams about slug-snakes in the garden and violence in the future. And I mumble to the bathroom about breakfast and freedom while the rest of the household goes one by one to work. My day shifts have vanished while the pub suffers refurbishment by pastel-brained interiorists. They're trying to sell it. It's a mystery how much the new paint splatters on all (all) the tables add to its value. I should've paid more attention in business studies. Then I could make the big, lengthy decisions. The biggest decision I make is how many cubes of ice to put in the ice well. Tuesday to Thursday it's about two hundred and fifty, and by Friday I'm usually optimistic and go for four hundred, but Mondays I like to gamble because it's always very quiet and I once got away with thirty, and when the evening shift came in at six there was only one cube left and I felt like a genius from the future. I couldn't communicate my exhilaration. It's harder to gamble with the lemon slice and lime wedge totals because you're better off just lasering up a whole fruit at a time, so every day you start with roughly the same amount and the way to enjoy an element of risk in that area is by offering people garnish where they'd not normally expect it, and they're usually happy to be asked and say yes, I will have some lime for my cranberry tremendous customer service arousal thanks, and you deplete your stocks at an unnecessarily fast rate, becoming insane with delight as the numbers approach zero and the clock approaches armageddon. Instead of all that I've been on the couch.