A late night return. The neighborhood is quiet. Two months with this address to my name, and there's still an unfamiliarity between both me and the neighborhood ( Read more... )

I'm in the galley preparing a coffee service when a customer comes up beside me. This isn't anything new, especially since my preparation space is so close to the bathrooms, but I could sense that he was watching me. Half a minute passes before I glance in his direction. He's an older guy, wearing a hat: virtually nondescript ( Read more... )

I stood in the hallway of my potential new home, speaking on the phone with property management. "Moving... service," she asked as if she'd never heard of such a concept ( Read more... )

The Earl. One of the few haunts that's stayed the same over the past decade. You could say that it's frozen in time but the opposite is true: It's open to time. It remains steady while everything changes. This was the first venue I visited upon arrival eleven years ago. Other local venues have shut down. Other local venues have remained open ( Read more... )

Telling myself to take things easy, to relax, enjoy the day, to sit in meditation and reading rather than the daily eight mile walkabout, to calm the insatiable and impossible task of keeping up on all the people, locations, and experiences of life (one might call it an omnipresence of the past; an omnipresent-past-tension), to focus on developing ( Read more... )

At this point, after months of early mornings, late nights, all-nighters, and daily multiple shifts in different time zones, my body has loosened itself from the moorings of a traditional circadian rhythm. Times are numbers. I rest when I can and stay awake when I can't ( Read more... )

By the time the crew bus departed for Paris, my circadian rhythm had begun a new day. I could stay awake for another twenty-four hours. Or, more likely, I could spend that same twenty-four hour period of time in a state of near-comatose sleep. A few fellow coworkers had already taken the second option, forgoing the view of our entry into the ( Read more... )

All flights back to ATL were canceled. I was rebooked for a red-eye at midnight but there was no guarantee that I should even try to make that flight since the congestion in my sinuses and ears was still present. Weakened but present. Hell, I still couldn't even hear correctly from the flight yesterday, and the additional pressure of another ( Read more... )

Coughed out into the world, I practically fell forward from my apartment and into the park, horizontally propelled and pulled at the same time. The vibrant greens and patches of sunlight were almost startling in their beauty. Is this simply a visual relief from not being in my apartment all day? Did the fevers burn away junk cells in my brain ( Read more... )

Finally, that grocery run. A former workplace with acquaintances on every aisle. Shopping takes less time than catching up with people, and I've had "shopping" sessions last two hours. I've even stayed past closing, checking out groceries with the staff like old times ( Read more... )