Saying Grace With Broken Teeth

I awoke at 2:30 this morning.

2:30. What the fuck is happening here? I can't keep sleeping lately or something here? I know I went to sleep pretty early last night, but this beats the fucking cake. I went to sleep at 8:00PM, and to wake up around 2:30, is six and a half hours. I guess that's a good night's sleep right there. Well, whatever. I woke up and couldn't get back to sleep. I turned on my laptop, made a carafe of coffee, and got online.

I skipped going down to get breakfast and lunch from the cafeteria downstairs, because I was just lazy. I'll do it tomorrow. I still had the sandwich from yesterday in the refrigerator. I guess I'm not that big of an eater of good food when I have so much junk food lying about. I'm not too worried about my diet since I know I'm really going to fuck it up when I see DJ Bensonhurst later today for dinner. I wanted to go to this restaurant for the longest time, a polish restaurant that we have been to before. I wanted to try out their Swedish Meatballs. I love the Lean Cuisine Swedish Meatballs, and wondered if these were going to be anything like those.

I took a shower and got ready to go to my doctor's appointment by Seven AM. My doctor's appointment isn't until Nine. I had an hour, so I crawled into bed and rested my eyes only to wake up at Ten. If I jumped up, I could make it to Doc A by Ten Thirty. But there wasn't much jumping up in me. I sat my ass down in my chair and surfed. I surfed the web.

I surf the web, because it's there. It's always there. It's always been there for me. When times were tough, when there were those quiet moments of desperation or despair, it was there. It was there in all of its cold, calculating, inhuman-ness. It was there like a perpetual guardian, waiting with inhuman patience for me to return. And every time we met, every time we came together in cyberspace, it was like an embrace. It was as if I was being folded into lifeless loving arms, that shut out the crowding, corrupt world around me. I was drawn into another world completely, severing my humanity, and joining with millions of conversations, and trillions of goings on. Things were winding up, things were winding down. People were moving here, people were moving there. It was a hive of activity that kept me too busy to measure and weigh the world that I lived in.

Yes, the world outside is not that fine. It's not that fun.

I met up with DJ Bensonhurst at our favorite meeting spot. The Astor Place Starbucks. We did some talking there, but saved the real conversations for the Polish restaurant, with the surprising fucking name: Little Poland. We find a table in the damn near empty establishment and take a set of seats. In time, our waitress, a preoccupied young woman, takes our order, with barely a command of English. DJ and I slip into conversation, gabbing while the restaurant fills. Our enormous plates of food arrive and for some reason, I'm starving. I inhale the entire plate of Swedish Meatballs, which were good, but nothing like the Meatballs in the Lean Cuisine package that I like. I ate them though. Then, I started eyeing DJ's plate suspiciously. He wasn't making half the headway through his meal that I was. In time he had reached his sufficiency and I guess I was gawking at his plate too much because he asked me if I wanted it to take home. Damn straight I did.

I tried to summon a waitress, but ours was busy running around the now crowded restaurant. Another waitress tended to the table next to ours, attentively, coming back time and again to check up on them, and deliver more orders. Whereas ours was not around. DJ grabs the other waitress to order desert, and she walks off, bringing our waitress back to us, who took our desert order of coffee and I had a cherry pie while DJ had the apple cake. I'll be damned if the apple cake did not look great.

I scarfed down the pie in seconds flat and began staring DJ's cake out of its plate. He finished it though, leaving me to order another cake. But this time we had to wait again. This time for an obnoxious period of time. Now the rest of the restaurant was emptying out, with even the table next to us finishing their meal, and we can't find hide nor hair of our waitress, who buzzed around, apparently so very busy as to be overwhelmed by her work, and ignoring us in the process. There is practically NO ONE LEFT in the establishment at this time. What the fuck is she running around for??

Of course this bullshit bothers the fuck out of me, but DJ is not bothered by this in the least. He just goes on with his meal and conversation, while I feel like i have a powerdrill cutting me a new asshole. Where the fuck was this woman a second time. Again, after an impossible period of time to be called service, and our dutiful waitress still running about like her fucking hair is on fire although the restaurant now has about three tables of people finishing up, mind you, DJ grabs the waitress near us again, who goes and gets our ditz. Now get this: this comedy of errors walks up and hands me over TWO. Not one, but TWO receipts with her chicken scratch bullshit handwriting on it totaling way too much money. I was so pissed with this jive batshit service that I was about to complain that she wasn't around enough to be able to charge so much money for dinner. Two people just do not eat that much food without alcohol. It's just common mathematics

I showed DJ the receipt and he looked it over. I was fuming. If he didn't calm me down by saying that it was right, I was about to leave two bills on the table and tell her to wrangle the rest out with management. DJ was nice enough to cover the rest, because I fell short of the dinner. Which pissed me off even more. DJ was smart too. He took the money and receipt and left it on the table near him, because I was seriously tempted to slip his bill away and hand it back to him when we were on the subway. That fucking ditz shouldn't get shit for all of that waiting she caused us to deal with.

I had to calm down. I couldn't even generate the compassion to feel sorry for a poor young woman whose pizza box was knocked from her hand by a passerby and upended on the ground. She stooped down and looked inside the box. Her pizza was fucked, there was no doubt about it, but I could not even generate the IDEA of feeling sorry for her. But then, that was New York, wasn't it. The couple that knocked the box out of her hand continued to walk down the street as if nothing happened. No big deal to them.

I got on the Way and said my goodnights to DJ thinking about that. Have I grown callous that I cannot feel compassion for an overworked waitress? Am I in such a hurry to return to an empty room so as to have to rush her, or not care about the problems of another, as I did with the young girl and the upended pizza? I watched a pair of young children, no more than three or four, play with each other on the train.

When did I loose my humanity, my childlike outlook. Did the Internet do it to me? Or was it the streets?

I watched the children play.

Hobobob