Upped

The waitress thanked the living shit out of me and insisted that I have a great day, a great one, one of the top hundred days of the ten-thousand seven-hundred and thirty-six-ish experienced so far, three-thousand five-hundred and fifty-eight-ish of which you've pretty much just slept through, you cocky slob, she almost said, and turned towards the kitchen. I looked at her spine and said thanks and walked out with a double espresso twitching against my hangover. The words great day glided into my mind's eye in birthday-banner colours and danced while I looked for somewhere to relieve the despair of standing up and having to navigate through people and their lives and hats. I sat in the park and leaned against a tree that knew nothing of my predicament and tried to read. But the words in the book were moving far too quickly, while great day'd moved in closer to inflict a sickeningly jovial rhumba. I shut the book and closed my eyes and breathed through my nose and exuded slime into my best clothes. I wondered if this counted as meditation. And I thought I should really maybe make the effort again, really again, beyond just a book and one attempt again. Get absolutely off my swede on calmness. And it might help with one or some or all of the things I need help with. And it might make the walls of the house seem further apart. If I can make it back there without dying of agitation.
A breeze cooled the slime and I was seized by a non-specific shame-and-terror or the caffeine kicked in. I stood up and went to a bar and after a lot of humming ordered a soft drink with gin in it.

w/r/t

These people have a David Foster Wallace special issue. I took his book about infinity and made it into a couple of babbling paragraphs. I was also asked if I wanted to write something about the man and his writing and how much of my clothing it's removed, throughout the years, as I kept going back for more. And I did but all I really should've written was: I enjoy his books because they seem like funny sacks of spikes.

Only To Be Expected

Every not often next-door has a party in its back garden and as I exit my front door at sundown to begin another Desecration Wednesday or similar, I find at our wall a shiny young guzzler wondering how close to the right place they are. Very, I say, and while they ask if I've got any phone credit and if yes can they borrow the phone and some of the credit to summon someone from the next-back garden to the next-front gate, I hoist them like a fat baby over my shoulder and through my cluttered hall and thin kitchen to the back door, where they wonder what I'm playing at and I undo all the locks and plod through the shin-deep weeds and hurl them neighbourly over the fence without warning or apology.
Later, at large, as I thrust the empty bottle of anything-over-five-percent into the municipal waste-heap, I feel a vague sense of community.