eugene stickland  

This is the door to my apartment. 507. Sometimes I wonder when I shut the door if another entity identical to myself takes over and lives his life in there. What if I open the door suddenly and see myself sitting at my table drinking a coffee and working on my computer? What then? Best to move on . . .

I take the elevator down to the ground floor although I often take the stairs. I have mild claustrophobia so I don’t love elevators. If there’s going to be a ghost in a building, that ghost won’t be a stranger to the elevator. Sometimes you might be on it and it will stop at a floor and the doors will open. What then? Well, any reasonable person would get off at that point and take the stairs. Now you know.

Caffe Beano, where I like to start my day. I write a daily journal or I work on the novel I am writing, usually in here. Sometimes I talk to friends. Today I talked to a few friends and got about 450 words written in my novel. I don’t know why I do that here anymore. It’s not like I’m waiting for anything to happen to me, like meeting a perfect stranger or whatever. Maybe it was about that at one point in time. Now I just find it’s a place I can create which is good enough for me.

I ought to quit smoking. I ought to do a lot of things.

Is this what I look like? Is this really me? When did I start looking like this? When did I grow so old and severe? Who is this man? He’s me but he’s not me. When I close my eyes at night and think of me, I don’t see this man.

Came home (507) to make sure my parallel persona was not trashing my place and to check on my blog stats. 18 for the day. 18?!?! It doesn’t matter because it’s not attached to anything, it’s not like some dripping rich oil company is paying me to write this blog, it’s pure, it’s just a number, and the number is 18. 18?! What’s with that??

The C Train. Because I don’t have a car. I don’t have a car because I can’t afford one, really. But now that I don’t have one, I realize it’s better for me personally and presumably for the planet not to have one, so even if I came into say $800,000,000.00 tomorrow I probably wouldn’t buy a car. I would buy all the readers of my blog a car, all 18 of you, but I’m OK on the C Train.

I worked out on machines similar to this. Ouch. Oooooo. Eeeee. Eeeek. Why? WTF? Actually it feels good. I lost 4 pounds this week!  At this rate, in a few months I will have disappeared entirely! Will I think I look good then?

While I was working out, aliens as big as fir trees descended to the earth. Although they could crush us like ugly bugs, they choose instead to play and dance all day. They are here to remind us to be gentle and kind.

I looked up at this big beautiful building where the geniuses congregate to figure out how to get oil out of the ground and further poison the planet. They all drive nice cars. Something is wrong!!

I picked up my dry cleaning. The Indian woman in there, Shulli, comes from Tanzania. She was a school teacher but when she got married, she had to work for her husband’s company. They sold salt in a small village. Salt, in 100 pound bags. She had to keep track of the bags as they got loaded onto trucks. So dry cleaning doesn’t seem so bad to her. She thinks that teaching was the hardest job she has ever had which probably means she was a good teacher. I like her, and she likes me, although she thinks that I am a bit lax in attending to my dry cleaning. Now I have my favourite shirt to wear again. It is light blue and is made by a company in Amsterdam called Scotch and Soda. I got the shirt for $22.00 at Winners. Life is good.

I went for a quick beer and talked about everything under the sun with some friends for 44 minutes. I guess I’m an old school 50’s guy, I like that happy hour transition from day to evening. Sometimes you are sitting next to a thug, sometimes a saint. You never know, though you may often be deceived.

The entrance to my apartment building. Sometimes coming home depresses me, some nights I am extremely lonely. But other nights I am relieved to get back here to my own space and have some time to myself. You can’t have it both ways, I guess. For the most part, I can live with myself.

This is Hobbes waiting for me to come to bed. Got a problem with that?

This is the book I am currently reading. At first I wasn’t sure, but the more I read, the more I like it. It’s really very good. I’ll read for a bit then I’ll sleep, never enough, and then I’ll get up and have a another day quite like this one.