year of the cat

and it's all the same, the day in day routine, but occasionally i hear a song that reminds me that there was a time when i was full of hope. i had never heard this Al Stewart song until the first month after i moved to Madison. i was getting out late and was still full of vigor, and this came on out of nowhere.

beautiful.

seven days

was all she wrote...

*

my friend said, "make a list. just do this. and stick to it." so here it goes...

1). stop smoking. that unopened pack of winston lights is killing me. literally.

2). stop drinking. what else am i supposed to do? oh yeah, get a life...

3). stop feeling sorry for yourself. this year has sucked the life out of me in more ways than i can count. i need graphs. but i'm moving beyond this idiocy. i think.

4). be a better person/manager. it's ok to do shit, but remember that there's a reason and purpose. they work for me for a reason and i need to find it.

5). just learn how to be again. simple.

whatever. stare at yourself in the mirro and see what you come up with...idiocy.

inn town

excuse me if i break my own heart.

*

days like this, out of the ordinary, throw me. gotta get certified, says the company. so i do. two days of classes, today and tuesday, and it hurts my head, because when it comes to food we are so dumb. usda doesnt inspect. plants dont get shut down, and people die.

listen: you will always be better off eating at home. it's cheaper, and god only knows its gonna keep you alive til the next election.

but i always feel this way after this kind of class...WASH YUR HANDS!

i don't ask for much. self-respect if anything.

and i'm shouting at him through the tv, say something, anything, raise the black power fist, do something, but all i can do is break down...he stood there, proud, with medal around neck, and all i can do is feel the utmost pride for a country that i'm waivering on.

6od Bless Jamaica. someone needs to do it.

bron-yr-aur

i like the olympics. always have. it's idealism at it's finest, just look at the modern start of the mess that the ioc gets itself into repeatedly.

in other words, read up on how it all started again in 1896, see hitler '36, see london '48, see mexico '68, see munich '72, usa v. russia, atlanta '96, and especially china "08.

but you know, i find myself on all their sides. jamaica won. china is winning, the usa is losing but may make the one of twelve cut. (diving, 30m) i'm so happy i could cry. U. S. A. love it or leave it, and i love it because i can say this shit. i want to see other countries, people, and abilities. the olympics restore my faith in humanity every two years, and i missed them the last two times, back to SLC02'.

they, and i mean all of them, make me want to be a better person.

heart shaped box

i do love the new phone. it's almost as good as a real pc.

*

i do feel lost sometimes, mainly when my staff decides to listen to soft pop instead of mexicali gangsta hip hop or just the hispanic radil station. the idiocy of the songs that i grew up with and are now considered "classics", like anything by phil collins or tina turner, just irks me. i heard "take me home" (collins) today and i can't get it out of my head. i was setting up saute and it came on, and my mind just got taken over. i went up and down to the walkin twice because of that song.

it's irritating, though, because i'm going to invest all this time in these guys for nothing. the company's gonna move me on and all it't going to prove is that i can control the situation. but i guess maybe that's the point.

*

i am, in a way, moving on. my old chef in NYC said the night out with my x and her boi was short, indecisive, and to the point. i found this all out while talking to him after i put a deposit down on a place that is seven blocks away from work. he himself was at a loss, simply because she said she never talked to him regularly and that she never really did all those things to herself earlier this year. i laughed, because this is the way it goes.

*

so i did make this investment, and i told them my credit sucks, and it's not a worry. shortest app i've ever filled out. one page, double spaced. and i've got a view of the skyline (from an angle).

circles

i don"t mean to walk around in...

*

i'm not to be the next guy. i'm to be the future guy. which is not a problem, they're willing to invest in me, i'm willing to invest in them.

idiocy is still a problem, but the language barrier is the worst. my kitchen is a disaster area in the morning. this will be taken care of, but accountability sucks. moving to the next level really hurts. iwould like to be here...but i have Atlanta or even Vegas to look forward to.

*

as Dave Lowery said, I want everything...

sick again

numb. can't even begin to describe how i feel, and the fact that i can't breathe only makes it that much better. been popping off-brand sudafed since Tuesday nite and dealing with reality since last nite. hate everything and love nothing, and sleeping inbetween.

i did look at a few places around town last night, and i figure that moving into someplace permenant will help me move on. the front runner is $100 more than i want to pay but it's perfect. just need to get my ass moving and join the rest of the human race.

all apologies

and after all this, there was the engagement.

*

i first met sara when she came back for her fourth term in my restaurant. she left the first time because of school, the second because she needed to take care of her family, and the third because she moved. and now she's back.

not that i'm concerned, she's smart and cute, but i don't talk to the servers that much. but she got under my skin somehow, all because of books.

one thing led to another, and she went out with one of my cooks for a few months. funny how these things happen. one moment i'm sharing a smoke with her at a party and the next i'm making a bad pass at her. we play it off but four months later we're on the road to glacier national park and eating each other up, making fun of all our exes on the way.

"what do you really want?" she said one afternoon in the middle of hiking up Marais Pass.

i thought about it for a few steps, and it had been rumbling in my head for a while. "i wanna be salinger, or heller, one of those guys who essentially write one book that everyone will read. either because they have to or they think they have to because everyone else has read it." i thought again. "something that captures the spirit."

we didn't speak for the rest of the day, i think mainly because we scared each other. we know what the other wants. coupeland came to mind...

we moved in together a few months after that trip, and everything was blissful until the day i got back from work and she was home. but she was supposed to be at work herself but instead was on the bathroom floor. passed out. holding my Henckels paring knife in one hand and several parrellel cuts on the other arm.

i stayed up for the next 50 hours just to make sure she wasn't going to do that again, pills, alcohol, drugs, whatever. but it didn't make any difference. we still fought, still drank, and i still ended up losing sleep because i didn't want her to hurt herself anymore. but she still did.

i left, finally, when i discovered that she was sleeping with my best friend. i was so incapacitated at that point by alcohol that it didn't even shock me, i just realized my time was up.

three months later, in a war of text messaging words over when i'll ever see that japanese print again, across five states, over all our past idiocies, my ex-best friend tells me that he is engaged to my ex-girlfriend.

so far away

it's painful, the loss of civility, of common decency, the necessity of just being a good person, when you can't even be honest anymore. she sucked the life out of me, and is now intent on taking everything else.

she refuses to send my past mail, which i ordinarily couldn't give a crap about but there are two checks there worth over $1K. i think that's enough to get pissed about, especially when i offer to split it with her and i still get nothing in response.

and the worst part is that she is using the spreading of her mom's ashes as an excuse for not taking care of this. and of course she's trying to say that i owe her past rent, which is also bullshit because i don't owe her, i owe her mom. who is dead. and left her daughter a little under 100K.

i'm trying to be sympathetic but can't find the heart.

your black hearted ways

and i watch all these movies, things that came out in my freeforall time. three movies for the price of one. i paid for transformers once last year but saw it three times. not in the same day. you get the idea. it was all or nothing.

*

i've resolved myself to asking the doc out. personal life in shambles, work is working me overtime, idiocy runs rampant, all there. why not? especially because her hair was down tonight...had no idea.

trampled under foot

it was frightening how easy today was. fridays shouldn't flow this smoothly, despite being behind schedule for a 2:30 banquet and stressing about this Irish Fest that we're doing a majority of food for. makes me wonder what to expect for tomorrow, but that's then.

the powers that be were in town and i met the president for literally 15 seconds. these guys never look like they should be running the show. never ceases to amaze me.

*

i think i just need to get my own life under control. it's spirally towards idiocy at an alarming rate and i just don't care enough at the end of the day to change. i'm actually talking to my family on a regular basis, but it's a catch-22. it helps me to be able to talk to them, but it hurts because it makes me miserable. makes no sense.

when jesus walked

and i'm watching this movie on hbo, just married or something like that, the one with the guy from the office and robin williams as the minister. i tone out most of it because i'm doing the ny times crossword (old habits...) but i pick up on the lead girls' name 5 minutes from the end and all i can think about is my mom. my great grandfather engraved her girl scout knife with the same name: Sadie.

fuck this noise. i just got done with inventory at midnight and i get to open at 9 tomorrow. plus i'm off wed/thurs this week and will have the pleasure of coming in on both days because the owners are coming in town and they're gonna want to talk. we've got all costs under control, inventory is down, food cost and labor is down, and we continually exceed our bugetary sales. nothing rocks my world like going into the weekend being up in food sales and almost 3 points down in labor.

but i'm done with the numbers after the last two weeks. short staffed, idiocy running amok, 86ing food that we have no reason to be out of, i'm done with it. at my last job i worked hard to just get our inventory down to 13k. i've been finishing out the last two weeks at barely over 10k, and we do twice the amount of sales here. can't do this bs anymore, and i'm really getting tired of being the second bananna.

there has been no forward progress in my elevation to exec. chef, and if i'm going to be responsible for it there needs to be the payoff. i'm not going to put my job on the line for something i'm not truely responsible for.

i sleep in your bed tonight

but i never find you home.

*

i'm back in the same mode, existance, but with a twist where i do try and take care of myself. the insanity of this year has forced me into it. you don't grow younger.

*

you're givin' me crooked answers
i'm crackin' your little code

*

one of our j-1s asked me how i like it here tonight, and luckily it was before i got into the idiocy that she lost intrest. the x doesn"t even pop into my head these days unless there's something that pertains to her situation, which is rare. but it still happens. i realized that a year ago we were looking at places to live and it just broke me down. we ended up in a apt that i had looked at two years befoe and had wanted but was rented the next day. but i still had it, at least for a while.

*

i"m learnin' another language
so full it's about to explode

*

i'm done. tired. 32 and spent. out.