Real Life at 9%N

The phone chirps. I reach for it, punch buttons, open my eyes to read the message. Unuh. Dizzy, cotton mouth, can't focus. I squint, make out a message from my prof in San Jose. Manage to send an OK and click off.

Feel horrible. Grippe? It's going around. God, I hope not. Tomorrow is New Year's Eve.

Maybe toast and coffee. I manage to reach the kitchen, holding onto walls. First toast. Skillet for toasting bread is is full of yesterday's chicken soup. I dump half of it into the 1 quart saucepan, wobbling the other half over the edges of the saucepan into the sink. So far today my best move has been to put the pan in the sink before pouring: My number one rule of life. I wipe out the skillet with my damp dish-washing sponge. Cut bread. Good Fench loaf from last night's outdoor market on the sea wall.

Where the cheese guy was selling brownies with 1/8 gm. Marajuana each, tiny brownies, 4 bucks a brownie. He said. Some fresh faced young blonde pony-tailed tourist and her giggling friends bought the whole bag. Fifty bucks. Great marketing technique, right? Cops in uniform by the dozens.  Pot brownies, right out in the open. Later I watched him take some out of the “normal brownie” bag, cut them in half, mash them down, wrap them in plastic and refill the pot brownie bag.

I had a slice of pickled mango from a community pot. Interesting texture, chewy, but it tasted sour more than anything. Mangoes shouln't taste sour.

Fry toast in fresh butter.

Now coffee. Pour soup from saucepan back into skillet. Scoop overflow soup and veg from sink back into pan also. Sounds yucky but... Last night I picked a dead fly out of the soup and ate some anyway.

Circumstances alter cases? I've always lived like a pig?

Skillet back into fridge. Why? To keep sink germs and fly poop from growing?

Wash saucepan. Put water on one-ring hotplate to heat for coffee. Prepare coffee maker. A wire stand onto which a sort of sock-like bag hangs,( chorreador) Coffee grounds (1820) a local brand, into The sock. Cup under the sock. Pour boiling water into sock. Out comes excellent coffee.

Still dizzy, but a little better. One by one I carry the toast, coffee, paper towel, to the front porch. It is surrounded by tropical growth. Birds whistle and sing as if their lives depended on it. Maybe it does.

Cars pass outside the gate. People passing speak softly this morning.

I bite into the dark brown, buttered toast and sip the rich coffee. The compound dog begs toast. The compound kitten runs when he sees me because I squirted him with a water gun last night when I found him on my kitchen counter.

Suddenly, up comes the coffee and toast. I make it to the kitchen sink before spewing toast, coffee, bits of chicken, pickled mango and nastiness.

Now WTF is this all about. Was the pickled mango bad? The pizza afterward at Miquelito's? Surely not the dead fly juice or the scum from the sink? 

I retreat to my indoor office to work today. Close to the bathroom.