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She likes my journal !!

They have better beds on the A ward.

Passion

   
On a container ship in Oakland.

August 6th, 2000

In The Refrigerator
I've received two printed notices now, both slipped in between my front door and the door jamb, warning they are coming to replace the sprinkler heads in my apartment. Evidently all of the sprinkler heads in my building have been recalled by the manufacturer due to failures in the field. What kind of failures? They're coming Wednesday and I assume I need to be here to let them in. I say apartment, but they have all been condominiumized and there's no manager here with a master key. I have successfully put off thinking about this, but Wednesday, after all, is Wednesday, and this place needs rearranging, maybe cleaning. The kitchen floor, embarrassing. The bathtub, due. Rearranged to clear the area under the sprinkler heads for their ladders and rearranged to get stuff that might be damaged by water if any of the new ones leak. The flier says they've successfully done this for years. Without any leaks. It says. I'll think about it tomorrow.

I woke up this morning with the back of my teeth aching and I assumed it was the jaw going through another phase in its program to one day hack its way back to life. I forget sometimes, except at meals, that the entire roof of my mouth feels numb and aches, both at the same time, but now the back of my molars hurt. Take some Tylenol. Take a bath. Better. The throat is sore and maybe that's what's going on, the kind of sore you get before a cold and I wondered if maybe running out of vitamin C last week contributed, but no, no use making up stories. I'm not up for a cold and I'm not up for a sore throat. I have a class tomorrow near the Oakland airport, not too far down the highway, and I have to get back to work next week to catch up with whatever has been happening. I'll consider a cold later. (Have you ever pontificated to yourself like this, knowing full well your body maybe has other plans?)

My memories of a cold coming on are about listening to the radio, some impossibly dull subject rattling On a container ship in Oakland. on in the background, a kind of semi-conscious reality where things move slowly just out of sight near the periphery of my vision. A temperature, I suppose, not a great temperature, but a temperature that puts you into a white noise of soft muttering voices, the news on the radio, a discussion of Crimean local politics of the early 1930's. Something about someone who's name seems familiar, whom I would remember with interest, no doubt, if I were paying better attention. I say I can't sleep in this condition, although time gets quirky and an hour can pass in what seems to be three hours or it can pass in three minutes. The cat is looking at me from the foot of the bed. I am looking back, peeking out from under the covers. A night's sleep would be nice except it isn't night and the sun is shining in a bright afternoon. That kind of feeling, which I think may or may not arrive for me pretty soon now; this afternoon, this evening or at the very latest, if it's going to happen at all, tomorrow. That's how this afternoon has been going. Movies on television that you wouldn't normally watch, drunk or sober, but I have them playing, a number of them, because I'm switching back and forth between the channels.

Is OK. Maybe this is just a confluence of events, the management changes at work, the owner of my condominium telling me maybe he's moving back in a few months, the beginning of a new project roll out, people coming, people leaving. A writing project that I cannot seem to get started. Or maybe it's simply my time to get a cold or talk about getting a cold or finding a tortured round about way to skip doing the laundry. I'm glad I did the shopping yesterday, glad I still have a couple of photographs left that I can scan for the journal, glad there's orange juice in the refrigerator. Less orange juice, now, left in the refrigerator.

 
The banner photographs were taken on a container ship in Oakland. The quote under The Sole Proprietor title is by Christina Georgina Rossetti, except the proper quote is "Better by far you should forget and smile than that you should remember and be sad" from Remember, 1862.


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