A number of months ago, I dreamnt –
I’m at a production of the rarely-produced L’Arlesienne, and as the play ends it's night-time and two women advance back up stage left between small buildings raked to make them look larger, as they proceed to the background and talk and then turn to the right to go down the street there, as the music plays.
. . .
(. . .)
1) Across the street at the house of the old (hippie) who passed, with its green siding and green lawn where the bushes were taken out by the new owners, a bright red cardinal flits and sometimes sits, including on this small tree in the front yard that has purple flowers in spring, so it’s this backdrop of green and grey and grey-ish green, and bright purple, and a spot of red.
2) On the front house’s back lawn by my cottage in the late afternoon, in the mid-spring grass that’s getting tall, a fat brown rabbit that’s on the young side, calmly eating and not seeming all too bothered, even as I go to my front door and then stop and watch him.
On a late afternoon in early spring when I go to the nearby bus-stop to take it in to go to work, at the edge of the apartment building parking lot just north of there there’s a(n older) (fat) white homeless person laying on a mattress-like mat towards the back of a parking space on the far edge of the lot right by some bushes, with a sleeping bag pulled up around him, in this otherwise residential neighborhood with maybe a few churches here and there but nothing with a shelter or soup kitchen or whatever.
…at the one (Irish-y) burger joint in the first floor of a historic hotel, that I now work at:
1) My one (white) (young) (gay-ish) (ponytailed) coworker who grew up a town over says that he will never eat at this one major national pizza chain, because in high school he worked in that particular pizza chain back in the town that he grew up in and it was filthy there, and though it’s probably a “there” thing and not representative of the larger chain, it still left such a bad impression on him that he just doesn’t want to eat there anymore.
2) When there’s reception leftovers and I don’t want to overclaim but I also will take anything that’s left over that people truly don’t want, I explain that in so many words, and then my one (eccentric) (blonde) (semi-manger) coworker tells me not to worry, *nothing* like that ever gets thrown out where we work, “because we’re all trash pandas here.”
3) When I go behind the bar for a soda refill very late at night after the standard soda machine is shut down like I was taught to do during training, I go to the one not by where the one (bearded) (bleary-eyed) (goateed) bartender with (mental health problems) is making some cocktail, but then he comes back by there and tells me to get out of his way, although he later apologizes, and he says why didn’t I see the stuff out on the mat there – like some shot glasses laid out and stuff – but I say that I don’t know what’s going on, I’ve never tended bar in my life, maybe that’s end-of-night stuff when they’re breaking everything down, I don't know.
…on the bulb-lamp in my dining room:
After an evening jog I get home and it’s dark now, so I flick it on and it’s like half-dim, so I flick on the kitchen light to see if I’m at half power, but I’m not at half-power there, it’s full power, so I go to remove the bulb and water sloshes out of the side of the rim as I take it down, and you look up into the LED part and like half are shorted out and portions of the board look damp there.
. . .
(My landlord came and looked at it and replaced it… I had screwed the bulb-lamp back on but it fell off and broke, probably from the water wettening the grooves that would usually hold it in place, and I laid towels on my kitchen table underneath the lamp-less fixture in case any more water dripped out from the continuing rain before he was able to come, but that never got wet, and between that and the rust that seemed to be mounting in the LED panels, we came to the conclusion that this is old accumulated water from before he got the roof replaced last year, it’s not like some new leak or something.)
Is word spreading around town that there’s two brothers who are waiters in 2 different restaurants?
When I began my new job, I had prepared for people from the last restaurant recognizing me, and then in like my first month at my new job a (trans) (STEM) customer asked me when I was serving their table if they could “ask me a weird question,” and when I said yes, they asked me if I used to work at a (Thai) restaurant, and I was like, “No, that’s my brother, he’s the hippie vegan one.,” and then they were like, “Oh,” and it seemed like they really didn't know what to think.
In retrospect, I should have asked that guy if my brother was a good waiter, or if he was “judge-y” when people ordered meat.
…from the (Irish-y) burger joint in the first floor of a historic hotel, where I now work at:
1) “That’s not enough protein!”, a (white) mother says to her (late middle school or early high school age) son who just wants to get like french fries and a grilled cheese for his food.
2) When it’s slow at the beginning of shift and I wash the huge front doors and windows, I make sure to open the door for any customers going in or out, and later I go help one of those entering groups by stopping by and getting someone a refill or whatever.
“I’ll do this for you,” I was like, “because you were nice and didn’t smudge my windows.”
3) After I finish the windows, I’m just full of myself about how good they look, and so I not only (selectively) show them off, but I also comment to people how I’m showing them off after I show them off.
And, when I say that latter bit, the one (short) (perky) (daytime) manager tells me that you should have seen her after she de-limed the dishwasher, you couldn’t shut her up for days.
4) When this one big and chaotic group in the back dining room that was handled by someone else and who had some of their separate checks already cashed out gets the rest of their checks, a few items are misplaced, but since the POS is a POS, the task of reassigning things which is already hard to do is somehow made even harder because you can’t unmerge the separate checks due to how some have already been paid.
And, the one (athletic) (Asian-American) (semi-manager) tries to help me, but after spending like 5 to 8 minutes and realizing that one check that was already cashed out already included some misassigned item, she says it’s good, just run the credit cards that we have and give them back their bills, but don’t include the itemized receipt with the stuff that you hand back to them unless they ask for it… The one bill in particular was the problem, but the amount we were charging her was less than she should have paid, so it was just better all around to have her pay less and pretend like everything was resolved properly.
So, I did that.
5) One (young) (hiply-dressed) (black) (male) customer who’s in with a (mixed) group of friends makes a joke about one of our salads that has a name like Ghislaine Maxwell and calls it the Ghislaine Maxwell salad when he finds some reason to talk about it, like, asking people if they had tried it, and I hear him doing this, so I tell him that it’s “criminally good.”
6) Back in one lounge there’s a group of young people, including one (fatter) (white) (young) (gay) guy who seems vaguely familiar from my last job, and when I’m by there he asks me if I have a brother who works at the one (Thai) restaurant that I used to work at.
