Fresca Flowing From Fountains

It’s my fucking birthday again tomorrow.  I suppose it's better than the alternative, but it still bugs me. 

Am I 50 yet?  

No, not quite. 

Couple years to go….

All week I have been waking up in the middle of the night screaming. The kittens are getting used to it but still they just stare at me like, “Dude, chill.”

Traditionally I wake up screaming due to one of several recurring nightmares:

• I am being chased by ZOMBIES and one just got snotty blood on me. 
• SAND WORMS are eating my house and the whole thing is about to get sucked down into sand worm hell. 
• I have lost my JOB and have to become homeless and I can’t afford cat food. 
• I am almost 50 and am a big ass failure and have nothing to really show for being on this planet for this long.

That last one has been more frequent that last couple nights.  Usually my heart is pounding and I am covered in sweat.  It’s between 2:30 AM and 4:30 AM.  As I try to calm down and go back to sleep I usually try to tell myself that I am probably not that big of a loser.  I have traveled a good amount, right? That counts for something….right?  New York, London, Paris, Italy, Hawaii, Hawaii, Hawaii, Hawaii. 

I don’t know how to explain this psychosis other than to say it is an ongoing feeling that I should have accomplished more at this point in my life.  I have always felt this way I guess – even at the MERMAID when I was staying at a swanky hotel in Miami and buying dinner for famous New York architects.  All I did the whole time was ask myself why wasn’t I doing this 5 years earlier. 

Well, we all know the MERMAID messed me up pretty good.  AMAZON did not help either. Having finally gotten a BIG JOB at the AIRPLANE FACTORY and then realizing it was stupid and soul killing has left me weirded out.  Thus the screaming I think. 

So now I am at my dream job. I make plenty of money, everything is wonderful, yet I am still waking up screaming.  Clearly there is only one thing to do.  

LOBOTOMY.  

I probably should document a bit more about the new job before the lobotomy as I don’t expect I will be all that good of a writer afterwards. 

Some initial thoughts:

The building is amazing.  It’s so nice to be someplace NEW.  By design there is a ton of natural light.  The bathrooms look like spas and there are PRIVATE civilized toilets like they have the UK.  When I leave the parking garage in the evening I simply swipe my badge and all the traffic lights up the street turn red so that I don’t have to wait for the normal people to get out of the way so that I can make my right hand turn on to Mercer.  It’s the little things like this that give me a warm feeling.

The food in the cafeteria meets my expectations.  Normally I have a salad of baby arugula, sprouted faro, fresh organic pea vines, and baked curried tofu, then tossed with a light champagne vinaigrette. There is a wood fired pizza over, but you know, carbs.

OMFG did I mention what it was like on the first day here?!?!? First they had buckets of champagne just sitting around so we could take a little nip, at 7:00 ON A MONDAY MORNING?!?!  Then they had waiters walking around with trays of mini breakfast burritos filled with tiny scrambled quail eggs and little chunks of local goat cheese, then eensy beentsy  pancakes with apple chutney or smoked salmon, then small corn muffins filled with little eggs and little bacons, then really petit French toasts, then tiny tofu triangles dusted with pistachio pollen. PISTACHIO POLLEN PEOPLE!?!?

At each desk was a gift box with a laptop holder, a reusable QFC shopping bag, a pound of MERMAID, a coffee mug, a wireless mouse, and gift certificates for neighborhood businesses. 

There are really good coffee makers on each floor that grind and brew your own personal cup of MERMAID for FREE, but if you want to pay there is a coffee bar downstairs with a CLOVER machine.  Did I ever bitch here about the old fashioned pots of FOLGER'S that sat on burners all day at the AIRPLANE FACTORY?  We were supposed to put 50 cents into an empty FOLGERS tin each time we have a cup.  I always just dumped out the coffee and turned off the machines.

Back to the new job.  If you get hungry outside of lunch time there are bowls of organic sustainably harvested dark cacao chocolate or potato chips sitting around all over the place.  There are also soda POP fountains with DIET DR. PEPPER (unbelievably satisfying) AND the world's most perfect liquid, my most beloved FRESCA!  I work at a place where FRESCA! literally flows from fountains!?!

And then there are the people.  Everyone is so nice.  People actually make eye contact and say hi to you in the hallway.  They hold doors open for you.  Best of all my boss and my boss’s boss use the F word (i.e. FUCK) in every other sentence.  I can’t tell you how much I support this kind of behavior.  The F word (i.e. FUCK) is my favorite word, really.  This reminds me of that scene from Sex, lies, and videotape:

                  

Why do you have to say that?

Say what?              

You know what. You say it just to irritate me.       
       

I say it because it's DESCRIPTIVE.

I just checked and I can go down to the parking garage and make all the nearby stop lights turn red and I don’t even have to move my car!  I am going to go do that now. 

Happy birthday to me!

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