Travelogue of a man who went nowhere

I’m now best friends with 3 in the morning, if by best friends I mean bound by sickly smelling glue or tied by old moldy ropes to an unshapely dullard, a pallid streetlamp lit atmosphere and starless sky and a saturnine abandoned campground, a kind of poorly scheduled and sparsely attended funeral where even the recently departed has failed to arrive, a 3 in the morning who soundlessly breathes on my neck, blows damp air into my earholes and forces me with a nauseating gentleness to wake up for a disjointed series of monologues reprising the misgivings and gripes and lukewarm erotic fantasies of days past, the mounting difficulties and obscurities and frustrations of a new job in that ancient industry, an expired occupation for me at least, where excitement for an opening date, the grand unveiling of a quirkily curated and sumptuously stocked cafe, the groundswell of anticipation for a new venture feels to me more like the prospect of cleaning a field of dilapidated outhouses through which a ragtag conscripted peasant army has recently marched, which, now that I think of it, I’d rather do than talk to one more person about syrups or hold one more interview.  

My new best friend, jealous of the thin blank sheet I share with sleep, slips between me and oblivion and waits to hear yet again about how I can’t possibly make all the syrups for both the lattes and the cocktails and order all the coffees, the beer kegs, the tea, the liquors and milks and milk alternatives and paper goods, the cups and sleeves and lids, keep up with the maintenance on ten and twenty thousand dollar machines, maintain relationships with various vendors, the three different coffee roasters and three or four beer distributors, the checks and online payment systems, or hire just the right amount of employees and give them the number of hours that satisfy their fussy interests and fit into their goldilocks schedules, train the employees and charm them in a way that forestalls the indomitable resentment inevitably arising not from particular circumstances that could be mitigated by more conscientious management techniques but from the corroded pit in the human heart that by its nature smokes and belches and irresistibly imagines its leaders as oppressors and its blessings as burdens, preferring over a passage of time to cultivate grudges and sectarian reproaches, perfectly at home in the fault finding beasts that we all are, ill-bred hounds with high octane sniffers for what everyone else is bungling, for all the callous actions and character defects of our superiors and the mental and moral enfeeblement of our companions; my 3 in the morning seaweed shadow wants to cover everything again, not so that it might comfort but because it has nothing else to do and lives only to monitor my anxieties without assuaging them, not even anxiety as that implies heat and speed and blood when it’s more like a refrigerated recounting that wearies almost without an accompanying feeling, an automated process that chugs incessantly throughout the day and now gets in extra reps without any sense of progress.  

Some people become brain surgeons and diplomats and executives and presidents and hold the fates of millions in their rock steady hands while my fingers shake over seasonal lattes flavors and matcha orders, and I wonder how I’ll pay for a new car and new pants and socks and shoes as every pair I own has holes in the heels, though my cat’s rotten tooth has fallen out and she seems fine now; I’ve avoided the expense of cat surgery at least for a while, and maybe my own issues will resolve themselves in a similar fashion with all my gangrenous parts sawing themselves off and I’ll learn to live with phantom limbs and undead thoughts. My impossible soul, the soul of a stationary trainhopper and an illiterate academic, a numbed hedonist and a faithless anchorite in the middle of an urban desert.