Then I realized my situation: I – a grown man – was standing in the middle of a retail store with an axe in my hand.

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Featuring the cranky little clip-art guy.
[Tom Tomorrow]

Among the little things in life I appreciate are the times when someone arrives at the site thru some out of context search engine referral and still takes the time to leave a comment on an old post.

It (I just finished 4 hours staring at a bright monitor and my eyes can’t focus on distance yet) sits 150 feet away on the patio of an old villa, tan corduroy jacket, black trousers, right leg crossed over left, left arm over right leg, cigarette in right hand, right elbow cupped in left hand (this is starting to sound like Twister): someone taking a break.

I head down the street for lunch. Ramadan or not, I’m getting a sandwich. First to the cash machine. Then to the kebab place. Where the hell is it? Twilight. The light is failing, it’s like late in the evening, but it’s lunchtime. Is this what the end of the world will be like? A femailman says hi as I walk past. Failing light.

The cash machine has an armored glass shield over the controls. You have to wait for it to go up, slowly, after inserting your card into the slit before you can press all the buttons. Only this armored glass shield happens to be broken, so you have to wait for an empty plastic frame to slowly slide up, even though the buttons are all exposed. So I pretend there’s still glass in the frame and wait, then get some money.

Where’s the kebab joint? Heck, I must’ve walked past the place, so I stop at a seafood place instead, they have some good-looking shrimp at the takeout window. Prawns, I mean, not the people working there. There are two women at the cash register, one middle-aged Austrian woman and a young Asian woman, I can’t figure out where she’s from and her accent doesn’t help. I notice various seafood wrapped in flour tortillas with salad and stuff and order one with smoked salmon, and another smoked salmon in a bun.

The wrap was pretty good and I didn’t get any on my clothes, eating as I walked back to the office. The sandwich though. First of all, it was the sort of thing where you bite in and can’t bite clear through the salmon and you’re stuck there holding the bun up to your mouth and face the choice of either gnawing the rest of the way through or pulling it away and risk having a big piece of smoked salmon slide out of the bun and hang from your mouth, half-bitten-throuth.

So I gnaw through. I notice the salmon is getting a little grey around the edges. It looked so good in the window! The color is really dodgy, but I’m hungry. I figure we’ll test my resistance to salmonella.

Then I notice it’s with mayonnaise when I’m already half-done. Quick check of lapels reveals some on coat. How I managed not to get any on my suit I’ll never know. Did they pack napkins? Yay, they did.

At least the bun was fresh. Pass a bunch of school kids with cell phones in each hand yakking away. Trudge back to office, in the dying noon Viennese light.

Miguel: Do you ever feel like just living in a hole in the ground, and just eating the worms that crawl through the walls?
Alpha: Do you want milk in your coffee?
Miguel: With like a section of plywood for a roof, and when you want light you just slide it back a crack?
Alpha: This song on the radio…
Miguel: Lenny Kravitz…
Alpha: Is that… what is that, is that rhumba? Foxtrot?
Miguel: You know, they stick their heads through the wall or whatever they have and you just yank one out and eat it.
Alpha: Rhumba, how’s that go? Long-short-long-short? Is that the one where you go around in a box?
Miguel: You could bring me a cup of tea at night before bed.

Mike needs to be famous… and fast.