And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the train wreck we like to call poker night. You may now ply me with gallons of water and I will be your re-hydration slave.

I guess I am beginning in reverse. As per usual I am not really sure where to start. Friday at work was a bad day. It began with an eight am trip down to a warehouse on Laclede Street – just up from the SLU bar Humphry’s, where Tyler used to bartend and on which the film One Night at McCool’s is based. The writer was apparently a regular. I’ve never seen the film so I can’t comment on any intertext there. Sometimes I find myself in warehouses or factories where things are made or stored and I feel like I am in a grade school field trip, in one of those films Mr. Rogers would show about how coke bottles get filled. So I met the warehouse manager down there to pick up my new desk, chair, and other various as sundries. He opened a huge door and I actually got to drive into the building. I like driving around in buildings, there’s a quality of irreverence for space about it that is hard to beat – I have my car where once the wheels of industry turned and now there is just the immanence of the wrecking ball. We rode up and down in old freight elevators and read the graffiti of previous generations.


Once upon a time the place was a Styx Bar and Fuller (sp?) showroom, before that it was a switching station for the old trolley line. Now it is an architectural dinosaur soon to be purchased, probably by SLU for parking or some such thing. Perhaps lofts. The company that currently has it – Warehouse of Furniture is I think the name of it – needs to liquidate, so we got our new furniture cheap. My “expensive” chair was the one with the least amount of mold and dusk on it. I am eating a great deal of bitter at work lately – that’s what some martial arts instructors call it when you have to suck up shit in the hopes that you’ll be a better person for it – be grateful for your problems as they are your best teachers. My health insurance kicks in the first of July, but when the job stress from the company that gives you the insurance is the cause of the health problems that force you to use said insurance you are something of a hamster in a wheel aren’t you.

So, we’ll make the best of the work debacle – I spend a great deal of time there, but it is not my life. Suffice it to say that not only did I have to put my desk together, I had to go down to the warehouse and take it apart. It’s best not to dwell on Scylla or Charybdis, but instead to sail between them, into the arms of some future Penelope. Right? With my educational and personal debt on the left and my job stress on the right I sail forward in search of..........

Sorry to leave off mid thought, but I am feeling a little green around the gills and must drag myself back to the land of the living through the cunning use of napping, vitamens, & some form of meat. More later. I think I am getting motion sickness from the movement of the cursor – this is going to be a long day (also thinking about my work life is making me a little crazy so let’s just avoid the subject shall we). I made money at our garage sale and I won money at poker, I got to spend a little time with Jen and lots of time with other friends all weekend long – so even if I am down – I am up.