Neighbour on my floor pops in yesterday morning, lets herself in, she'd had a bad dream and wanted to consult my dream dictionaries. She's kinda-the-Kramer, seldom knocking, merely letting herself in to grab some coffee, sugar, art supplies, whatever she needs, and I haven't the heart to start locking the door.
Her dream, that she and her brother were in a football game, they lost, and then he killed himself, and it has her all out of sorts.
Myself, this is odd, I'd had a dream that night that I was in airports, missing flights, confused as to connections and destinations, and my sister (young, maybe 10 years old) had taken a dive from a platform, suicide, landed on her neck, it broke and a milky-white fluid poured out around her body and I'm shouting for my father...
As well disturbing, and I'm struck that we both should have had such similar dreams (the death of a sibling by suicide.).
But she's too busy to chat, conversation is not something she does anyways and I have to be kind of grateful, she's looking up the symbols in various of the dictionaries, finding competing explanations, trying to sort it out...
***
The neighbour upstairs, taken the past few weeks to hanging out with a boyfriend she met at the Soup Kitchen, he's homeless, lives out of his car, so she spoils him with bubble baths and home cooking and inane TV and they seem pretty happy.
"We laugh so hard together..."
She doesn't work, too many of these people don't, and so every day it's wake up to the Vodka, have a joint, and the party gets started...
They approach me, they've been drinking too much, they want to start a sort-of mutual support group, a Temperance or Tee-Totaler league, there's no doubting I'm occasionally off the rails but these, these people don't help...
I volunteer instead my free liquor removal service, I'll take all the leftover vodka they have on hand, for free, they can get started on this abstinence binge right away...
"Tomorrow" she tells me, but tomorrow comes and goes and there's no half-empty bottle of vodka on my doorstep.
***
Money has started to stick in my bank account. Partly because the restaurant is that little-bit busier, and - more largely, because I've been buying the native cigarettes. They're terrible, but the whole smoking thing is terrible, and the savings is enormous. The savings is my bank account. And I ask if they have a moonshine or liquor distributor, but they don't, they might get, they've got everything else, "E", "Superman" pills, Adderall, Ritalin, Special K, they're just getting started, their prices are great and so maybe soon...