will someone please just reproduce with me and get it over with?

When I stood up, the coffeemaker had turned off again, it's got an automatic shut off which I've never timed- I would have guessed it at 2 hours. The tea in it was hot, though, the bag in the glass pot almost invisible suspended in that dark murk. Fingertips against the outside of the bowl, I turned around and crossed the room on tip toe, the absurd twisting walk of polite heels too early in the morning over hardwood. If i could find sneakers with the sort of soft, comfortable sole these dogs have....

His voice when he answered the phone took me back. He sounded sweet, soft, almost hurt at having been woken up. The clock said 10 to 8 am and I realized my mistake and quickly hung up, knowing I didn't even have the correct voice to make excuses with. Standing there, I rubbed my face and looked down at the phone again, impatient, and saw the long substantial smear of eyeliner on my finger. I was only 2 steps out of the closet of a kitchen right then anyway. I turned back around, poured myself a drink, and wished I was in LA.

I'm the victim of passive aggression- I'd messaged that minimally partial excuse to San Diego earlier in the week. Then I turned sideways and realized all of those ass-crunching leg lifts were a joke waiting to happen.

I only work 2 hours a week. It usually makes me cry, and that's split in two one hour sessions, though they are supposed to be longer (I bill exactly and get paid that way). I go to the shrink for an hour on Tues. That only made me cry once, but he gives me pills that do make me cry, because they aren't the ones people are supposed to want. He calls me a guinea pig with each paper he hands me, and I hope I'm not paying full price, but have to assume without looking that I am. He tells me I can do better on the days when I take my meds before seeing him, which makes me say of course, but he never says that otherwise because he likes to be right. The girl that I assume myself to be isn't the busy counter at the grocery store checkout- I'm popular with the type that doesn't go for groceries much. I'm quite the popular lass among the baggy eye crowd, if only because flirting distracts me beyond cents and digits. Ain't got the rack for more.

Living with fear is no longer a novelty. I don't like to stir up any excitement because there are so many people who live in a state well below excited that getting a good crowd acclimated to the heightened level of tension means suffering too many fools to make the effort worthwhile in all but the most extreme cases. This reticence, however, must be balanced with the required sense of urgency most people have inside of them. I mean, if you turn the light too low, some people are going to fall asleep. It is the required and necessary chore of every person to be weird, wacky, complicated or interesting enough to keep the next guy over from getting drunk, vomiting on themself, promiscuiting all over the neighborhood, or otherwise acting the fool. It's pretty tricky. They call me Tricky Rebecca in some downtown buildings. I currently have no trick.

I turned to the gentleman I was with, by which I mean the guy sitting next to me who'd steered me into the restaurant on the corner, and offered him a piece of gum. I usually consider gum a pretty big life investment for the week ahead, given that I'm really difficult to employ and can't hold a black-ink job for very long. However, I am very familiar with dry asphalt. I know that a piece of fresher gum left on a dry desiccating surface will retain moisture in it's immediate surrounding area for longer than exactly effected areas further distant from the fresh(ish) piece of gum. Given that I was planning to do something similar to putting my lips on his face in the next few minutes, I figured having a piece of gum in that immediate vicinity would make for a more pleasant interaction. All this despite the horrifically synthetic odor wafting from this wad of chew.

I work for a small media start-up in downtown San Francisco, by which I mean not the financial district or the strip where ethnic or flirtatious or extremely consumer oriented people live. The Hawaiian restaurant on the corner has a decent happy hour on two beers but the food is awful- not a fermented thing on it either, and this in California! I know Hawaiian menus sometimes included fermented things from hitch hiking. I'm a little too old for hitch hiking now, though, I believe. I'm afraid someone would try to take me home and marry me now days, or at least try to fornicate, rather than simply asking annoyingly polite questions or reaching for my nipples. So I walk a lot. I walk a very lot.

Given the small population of the office where I work, it's almost amazing how often I walk out with the words 'if I stay here I'm going to break something'. Any reference to a self being other than human flips the trigger for me- You aren't separate from me and your effort to distinguish yourself from my criticism of your actual work is unbearably annoying. I let my annoyance get in the way as often as confidence. That said, I consider myself fairly in need of a rebuild. Still, one of the last men I dated offered to help me with bills but assessed the need to 'clothe it' with a dismissive shake of his head. Things having taken a downturn with the economy and lack of stable work, my boss suggested instead adding some extra fabric to a pair of fading old jeans, though I haven't taken any steps forward on that project much either.

There have been times, believe it or not, in my very own life when things seemed alright. The way environmentalists are dirty-unfair and crack-whores kind, at times I too have had some balance in life, in myself, enough so as to open a raw amoebic edge and say 'will you come with me a little further like this' and I've never once heard 'yes'. Adventures are usually a destination, Cartesian point to point. In cross likeness, lots of people go to the mall to buy Things. Going where your supposed to be, honestly, is sometimes quite a joke of dodging rocks and contrarily racing water- Difficult, combined with the fact of suddenly being where you are and having that new standard to deal with. I could raise my hand for an adventure every time I saw one in the works, honest, I would if I had an excuse, too! The descriptive cliche for that manner of behavior is 'having too many irons in the fire' and I choose to think that's a real old phrase. I choose to believe that goes back to when more than a few people stuck metal in the hot part of a flame and let it cook up till it drips and melts red and rough as the pig iron Mao had his coal miners dig out in China when the coal turned out to be lousy.

Tonight was not one of those times. Tonight may, however, have been an updated version of stasis for me. A gentleman called me and invited me to return his jacket immediately, which explained the awkward situation of too few hangers in the hall closet. I should sell the velvet opera coat and that cashmere hoodie my sister gave me might have fleas, though she's clean as can be. Seeing at meeting in front my building that I was unlikely to be going anywhere, he kindly invited me to the grocery store, a place I can visit more comfortably now that I know I'm not suited to working there. I have a few personality characteristics that make me ill suited to dealing with customers in a rush alternated with those who are needy- these include the habit of not talking, of long pauses before answering questions, of using gestures in a situation in which only audible words are accepted. It doesn't seem like much but I get fired and I'm not going through that again this month. So we went to the grocery and he pulled Thunderhead IPA off the shelf. I'd only vaguely mentioned wanting a beer. That may have been all I'd said in an hour, true, but I didn't mean anything by it. And Thunderhead is for drunks. It tastes like non-beer and itches a scratch no person wants to admit to.

I'd spent the day with family in a mostly silent state, with outbursts when ideas (like dragging my skull along the pavement alongside the car) neared power levels to step towards. It happens- Maybe an iron overdose or chloride deficiency. During better balanced times when action doesn't have the additional counter-strike of economics to grapple with, I can usually anticipate such ill considerations. I'm beginning to consider the place of defenseless puppies within this equation but those aren't readily available either. Unless you are considering kicking one and are willing to negotiate before or after? I'm a little crampy and withdrawled, or I'd trust to fate and good souls. Eureka!