I've been meaning to escape the restaurant between shifts for a while.
Today I managed to do so. A quick jaunt to the Starbucks down the street, furtively swipe another fistful of gift cards, then a seat on a barstool at the window. The tables and chairs are all full.
I've a lot of notes to go through. Ideas are plentiful, time is short...
There's an idiot beside me on his cellphone, talking loudly as though he were in a nightclub, I'm unable to concentrate. He's talking about the courses he's taking in University, about the Jane Austin novel he's being forced to read, what he thinks of it (not much apparently, too much detail; did she really need to mention things like 'color'), about what he's doing after Starbucks and I want to smack him for being such a boor..... And at a table next to me, a table I can't sit at because it's occupied, a fat woman with a pram is dictating from her Acer PC in a monotone:
"Love is enduring...love is always there when you need it...true love is unfathomable but ...."
Her friend is writing all this down. And I think that maybe fat chick is dictating some sort of break up letter to her friend but at the end her friend says with astonishment "You wrote this?" and fat chick confesses "yeah, it's a poem I wrote when..." and I'm going nuts in this carnival of idiocy....
Eventually they all shut up and I have a moment to gather my thoughts. Briefly, because I want to get back to the restaurant, have my nap on the sofa in the basement, listen to the mice nibbling on the furniture, then back to work....
But the thoughts, they'll wait, have to wait, because it's late and I've 3 doubles left and am pining for a nap...