Tuesday, February 06, 2007
Lows and highs
I prised my eyes open and had all of three seconds of grace before the guilt hit me. Nightmarish blurred visions of me going round Grand Cafe making mortal enemies with as many people as possible in some kind of a garish parody of a supermarket trolley dash. Debts of honour to be settled, starting karma score of minus several billion.
Damn, damn, damn that demon drink.
That was Monday morning.
***
24 hours later, I prised my eyes open again.
No guilt, no insistent drumming on the inside of my skull, no leering crowd of bad memories, queueing, jostling to stream into my head as consciousness threw the gates wide open. Life was good.
Life was also pretty cold. For the second time in as many days, I had slept on the floor, one major difference being that this floor was not mine, but Wes's. The host was crashed out, all unlovely, on his double-thick futon; Adam and I were sharing floorspace that was surely never meant for more than one.
When the other survivors of the Monday night shenanigans began to show signs of life, I volunteered to go to the supermarket for some morning essentials. Adam gave me 200 yen and asked for a litre of milk, low-fat; Wes gave me a cool thousand and asked me to get him some toast.
What kind of country allows you to buy ready-made toast in the supermarket? Not this country, as it turned out: the supermarket was still closed, so I had to resort to the Mini Stop by the station. Nothing resembled toast enough to justify the purchase, and buying bread would have been a waste of time as the chez Wes lacks the technology to toast bread. I wished I'd asked for a back-up option but it was too late by now; I'd even commited the cardinal error of leaving my phone in Wes's apartment. I just had to improvise.
If Wes was disappointed to receive Green Tea flavour Haagen Dazs instead of toast for breakfast, he concealed it reasonably well. Adam queried whether this was really a breakfast food, but I pointed out that Wes was perfectly entitled to save it for lunch if he wanted to.
The sun was shining in, I had three kinds of fruit juice, comrades to laugh with and Led Zeppelin on the stereo; I got to thinking that this was the best day of my life. So far.
Damn, damn, damn that demon drink.
That was Monday morning.
***
24 hours later, I prised my eyes open again.
No guilt, no insistent drumming on the inside of my skull, no leering crowd of bad memories, queueing, jostling to stream into my head as consciousness threw the gates wide open. Life was good.
Life was also pretty cold. For the second time in as many days, I had slept on the floor, one major difference being that this floor was not mine, but Wes's. The host was crashed out, all unlovely, on his double-thick futon; Adam and I were sharing floorspace that was surely never meant for more than one.
When the other survivors of the Monday night shenanigans began to show signs of life, I volunteered to go to the supermarket for some morning essentials. Adam gave me 200 yen and asked for a litre of milk, low-fat; Wes gave me a cool thousand and asked me to get him some toast.
What kind of country allows you to buy ready-made toast in the supermarket? Not this country, as it turned out: the supermarket was still closed, so I had to resort to the Mini Stop by the station. Nothing resembled toast enough to justify the purchase, and buying bread would have been a waste of time as the chez Wes lacks the technology to toast bread. I wished I'd asked for a back-up option but it was too late by now; I'd even commited the cardinal error of leaving my phone in Wes's apartment. I just had to improvise.
If Wes was disappointed to receive Green Tea flavour Haagen Dazs instead of toast for breakfast, he concealed it reasonably well. Adam queried whether this was really a breakfast food, but I pointed out that Wes was perfectly entitled to save it for lunch if he wanted to.
The sun was shining in, I had three kinds of fruit juice, comrades to laugh with and Led Zeppelin on the stereo; I got to thinking that this was the best day of my life. So far.
Labels: COMRADES
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Dude, I don't think it's our fault that we get angrily drunk at Grand Cafe. It's the music. Horrendously meaningless Japanese copies of a horrendously commercialized version of Jamaican music actually irritates people with decent taste in music (e.g. anyone who thinks that J-Pop is crap) into a rage-like frenzy.
Case in point: The young lady put on some of the crap in my apartment this morning and I became instantly angry. It was shocking, as soon as I turned it off I was calm again.
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Case in point: The young lady put on some of the crap in my apartment this morning and I became instantly angry. It was shocking, as soon as I turned it off I was calm again.
# posted by 
: 12:02 PM
: 12:02 PM << Home
