see, you think i'm listening to you tell me what you think. i'm not. i'm MILES away. oh sure, my eyes look all sparkly and attentive, and i'm nodding and uh-huh-ing at the appropriate moments. this is calculated, a posture, a pose. my mind is on other things.

there's dan and how we had to fire him and how i don't feel very good about having to do it, even though it was jimmy who pulled the actual trigger. (soon as the dinner rush was over, took him downstairs to the office.) we told him over and over and OVER and over: you gotta straighten your shit out. but he didn't, and was getting worse. the camel's-back-breaking straw came in the form of saturday night, him yelling at the parents at table eighteen for not controlling their children. yes, those parents are terrible, and yes those children were out of control, but NO. no you CANNOT tell parents they are not good parents. ESPECIALLY after you have royally screwed up their order. screwed it up to such an extent alan woulda went 'damn.'

mind's on how alan just by default lucked himself into a saturday night shift. right now we don't have anyone else who can take it. i don't much like being in the position of rewarding a fuck-up, even though you'd think i'm used to it by now. we'll give him third, the front section, in an effort to minimize the havoc he can/will surely wreak. i'll seat people in the back two sections. hopefully we can make this work. (crossing fingers, beseeching whatever lord or god ...)

a while ago we fired a waiter named will. will the shrill. (he had a high-pitched voice.) we fired him cause he called a customer a complete fucking fag. (another no-no.) jimmy took him down to the office, will told him 'yeah, hey, no sweat. i was gonna concentrate on my standup, anyway.' that was a little over three years ago, and he is now famous. oh, sure, it's on an extremely localized level, but if you visit a bar just a bit to the west of the el tracks between fullerton and belmont, where every tuesday night is COMEDY NIGHT, you'd know who i'm talking about, and you'd be all like, 'you know will the shrill? oh my god, he is SO fucking funny! SO fucking funny!!!' but that's only because COMEDY NIGHT also happens to be TWO BUCK DOMESTIC BOTTLE AND WELL DRINK NIGHT and you are no doubt drunk off your ass by eleven when the shrill takes the stage.

some time in march, i'm gonna hafta crawl under the back patio and get all the muckety-muck outta there. the gunkety-gunk. it will stink to high heaven, the clumped clumps of god only knows. i'm not much looking forward to it. jimmy will be there helping, as always, but as always, it'll be me doing the grunt stuff cause i'm skinnier than him and can mostly fit under the boards as he tells me he'd do it better. (who says my life ain't a glamorous one.)

you are right now trying to sell me something i will never ever buy from you. (one of the things that flummoxes no end is when a salesperson will call or pop in, tell me they've given my 'situation' considerable thought, though it's clear from the get-go that if they'd given my situation any thought at all, they'd realize i don't need what they're selling in the least.) in this instance, you are trying to sell me tommy bahama rum. tommy bahama rum is not good rum, gimmicky and overpriced. me still listening to you is me extending to you a professional courtesy cause i like your cousin.

i missed three whiskers at my right-side jawline when i shaved this morning, and it's making me crazy. wondering how visible/noticable they are, how'd i miss 'em in the first place, cause god is my witness i looked in the mirror and my face was baby's bottom smooth. (oops. you just caught me pick/pulling on the whiskers. and ... yeah, and now you're looking at the whiskers i missed when i shaved this morning.)

that regina really shoulda saved my ass by now. called me over to her end of the bar with some pressing, urgent but entirely made-up matter. like the nozzle was clogged or she forgot what goes in a jack and coke or something, ANYTHING to save me from you and your way-too-big tommy bahama rum display. thing's so big i'd hafta rearrange half the bar, and there's no way in hell i'm putting myself through that when tommy bahama rum sucks and we already have too many different kinds of perfectly good rum.

that hopefully, you are almost done with your sales pitch. i've been nodding and uh-huh-ing for ... a while now. it shouldn't be so involved, selling rum. good rum should sell itself. that's my two cents, anyway. and by the way, your cousin could sell tea to a chinaman. he woulda had me down for ten cases by now. 

one of our regulars is nicknamed scarfy. his son also is a regular, of sorts. his nickname is artboy. while scarfy isn't what you'd call a BAD guy, he ain't a GOOD one either. in fact, he's a bit of a stroke, but he drops a lot of money in our neck of the woods, so we tolerate him just fine. we hadn't seen him in a while, since october or november. he stopped by last night. turns out his wife left him. he came home to the proverbial note on the dining room table. one part of me thought good for her, cause it's something she shoulda done years ago. another part of me felt ... well, not compassion, but ... SOMETHING for scarfy. they had been married for ... shit, eons, and it's a brutal way to learn the 'you've been taking me for granted' lesson. he didn't look so good. broken or hollow. he looked like shit, and when he spoke, it was barely above a whisper. PLUS his wife's already found someone else, some city honcho kinda guy who artboy thinks is pretty damn cool. which's gotta be a tough thing to handle. (scarfy will hafta search far and wide for someone willing to tolerate scarfy. i should think the pool of willing candidates is indeed a shallow pool.)

once, an ex brought her new 'paramour' in for dinner. hadn't seen her since we broke it off like ten years previous. i did the chit-chat pleasantries thing, and as i was walking away (regina was smart enough to save me that night), i heard him say 'him? that guy? THAT'S the guy?' that was nice to hear.

jimmy's femme du semaine is a lovely woman named nicole. she's smart and witty and attractive to the point of distraction.  that she can ALSO drink with the best of them only serves to improve her standing in my eyes. (she's the whole package, that's for sure.) if jimmy pulled his head out of his 'derriere' for more than a second, he'd see that she more than deserves to be promoted from semaine to ... vie or annee or at the VERY least mois. he should give her a chance is what i'm saying in an albeit slightly contrived/convoluted/french way.

there's the guy in the mall by my mom's, the guy who works in the piano and organ store. membering how i walked by over the holidays and he was playing the organ. how that made me quite sad, him playing to no one in particular. dunno why, cause usually i only get sad when i'm hungover like a bear. that day i was fine, but for whatever reason, the sight of that organ guy was one of the more tragic heartbreaking things ever. (i can't imagine how you'd sell too many organs or pianos, ERGO each and every day would be fraught with worry over your bottom line and/or future, but ... what the hell do i know.) the organ guy was quickly supplanted on my tragic heartbreaking list by the guy a few stores down, the murphy bed salesman. alone at the desk, perfectly alone, just ... flipping ... through ... a ... magazine ...

now recalling how one of dad's odd jokes went a little bit like this: 'what's better than daisies on my piano? tulips on my organ.' and how mom didn't much like him telling that joke, which only made him tell it all the more. for instance, when we were at the block party and he was a few sheets to the wind. (glen and i found this joke bring the house down hysterical, but we weren't even teenagers yet, so ... still kinda funny though. in its way.)

how i need to more often remind myself that my circumstance is not a bad one. all this woe is me bullshit i do is ... bullshit. i don't have it half bad at all. i'm just a bit chicken little, that's all, and next time i have the urge to moan and whine and piss, i will resist. (ah, who'm i kidding. no i won't. by tonight when someone prank calls a to-go order, i'll swear the world's coming to an end cause we just wasted two pork chop dinners.) 

that i think you are finished now. and i have no idea how to let you down. usually, by now, i have some bullshit excuse, because for whatever reason, i feel too guilty with the honest, blunt 'we don't need any/we're not interested.' but i've been spacey and daydream-y all day. the time i shoulda been coming up with something i've spent ruminating in my drifty way. so now i just gotta wing it.

oh well. here goes ...