Nighttime noises.

In my little back alley cottage, some mornings like 4am I think on Mondays I can hear the dumptrucks come.

Since anyone can come by and walk around my house, too, I always make sure the blinds are closed, and one night when I was up late reading this summer, I hear like four feet behind the head of my bed and past the wall and in the sidearm of the yard a sharp noise like someone suddenly falling on their knee on the ground just outside, and so I quickly turn off my bedside lamp and stay still, and I don't hear anything afterwards, though I'm very alert and am trying to hear anything.

Honestly, that house, if there was any sort of zombie apocalypse, I'd be fucked. Lots of windows that are chest-height evenly spaced all around, and just the one door.

The best I could hope for would be to lock myself in the central bathroom and hope they can't get through the door, before I could somehow open up the ceiling drywall and make my way to the roof.

Even then, though, what would you do? Make a distraction and get down to the ground on the other side, but then where would you go?

It's not like you'd have a lot of options.

A dream of fields and an enchilada and burrito place.

Like a month ago I dreamnt -

It's a sunny day and I'm in this house in the fields and it's all surrounded by crops and solar panels, and I need to go meet some people, so I hop on a motorcycle and go up the country highway through town, and I get worried because I'm off the main drag and it's not on the usual route and I'll have to pay attention to where I'm going if I want to get back, and then I start to pass through a small town, and there's an enchilada and burrito place there that's set up on top of but also kind of next to the road, and since it's open air with like a lacquered wood and glass entrance area that goes up a small staircase to like a half-enclosed sun-bleached wood veranda area with seating and a bar and like these huge large barrels set up here and there amidst the tables as kind of like rustic style-setting tables, I figure it's safe to eat there, and so I go up there and it's this (white-bearded) (older) (white) (very white-skinned) guy with glasses whose place it is, and as we're talking about business hours and what good business he does, somehow I'm back towards the entrance door with him, and when he tells me that he opens when he feels like it, I notice that on the glass door there's window decals saying SUN MON and the like all the way through SAT, seven days a week, and though those are faded, the hours next to them are not only faded but also scratched out, since that's what he must have done to them since he really doesn't have any hours any more, and any hours that were once there on the door just aren't applicable.

And then, I wake up.

. . .

Mark of shame.

Last winter and this, sometimes I'd set water to boil in my one big white enamel pot, to humidify the air while I was home and up and about doing stuff.

One night like a month ago I got home and the apartment air was super dry, so I filled it up a ton and set it on high, and then I put my stuff away and did like ten minutes of yoga.

All of a sudden I smelled something, and the water had boiled so hot that all of it had disappeared, and the pot was just sitting there heating up!

So, I turned off the burner and quickly threw some water in, but the water must have been too cold, because the metal contracted and the bottom enamel actually suddenly broke up into large shards and started flaking off in the center, like a handmirror breaking or something like that, only not the whole bottom of the pot, just the big white enamel layer on top of it.

And, since that happened, and since the top was also missing its handle and had been for some time, I set it aside after it cooled down to go throw out in the big dumpster in the alley that's behind this big apartment building there.

And, I did that, but like a week later after trash day, I noticed my pot just sitting out there beside the dumpster, beside the big rotting tree stump there.

Either the garbage men didn't want to put it in the dumpster, or the (wizened) (old) hippie had fished it out and set it there.

And now, it's just there, for several weeks now, as a mark of shame, and every day I see it.

Maybe I'll have to go fetch it and drill some holes in the bottom and try to use it as a pot for the avocado seeds that I'm trying to sprout.

Barbership conversation.

The other week when I was at the barber shop, the one (late middle-aged) (pot-bellied) (bearded) (kind of local stoner) barber guy who runs good masking policies was there as always -- I think he's the only barber -- and I was telling him about my realization that the acronym for Thai iced tea is TIT and so I shouldn't write that on take-out cups.

"But what about orders to make them there," he was like, and I explained that we had to make them up in-house for people eating in-house, too, and I had just been using that acronym on my little notepad for myself without thinking if I had to do that, and the computer system that you punched in the order on had the full name or something like that, when you printed out the bill, so you never ran into that problem there.

He then said he was confused, since his wife works at the local steakhouse "where you can make good money" and up until like a year ago, everything was handwritten, even the orders to the kitchen and the bills, so he was thinking that overall it was that type of situation.

"A lot of places just don't feel like paying for the monthly software," he was like.

He also was saying that business was slow that day, and he'd been watching The Glass Onion in the back, and he only had a little bit left.

He was a big fan of Knives Out, too.

Three recent restaurant moments, all on the same day.

 1) This (late middle-aged) (white) couple doesn't finish their chicken satay, and I offer them a box for the lone piece of skewered chicken left on the little platter.

"Oh no, we're good," the lady was like, "And it was good, but we just can't eat anymore."

"Are you sure you don't want to take it home?", I was like. "Like, if you don't want a box, maybe you can slip it inside your coat?", and with that, I mimicked opening up a coat and slipping it upside-down into an inside breast pocket, so like you could maybe haul it out by the stick later and eat it, if you were hungry.

"Oh no!", the lady was like, "But good idea."

2) When I went to get some fried veggie potstickers to take out as an appetizer, the one (Pentecostal) Guatemalan who was plating them was like, "Un momento" or something like that just as I noticed one was missing from the plate, and he bends down to the floor and picks up a potsticker that must have fallen off it and onto the dirty red tile in the narrow little corridor where everyone walks back and forth into and out of the kitchen all the time.

And, he goes to the deep fryer, fires it in a basket, and puts it down in the frothing oil for like ten seconds.

Then, he pulls it up, pulls it out, and takes it over and puts it on the plate again.

"Now, ready," he was like.

3) A lady calls on the phone to let us know she'll be noticeably late picking up her order of tom kha gai, but she'll be there.

Then, when she comes and turns out to be a (white) (plump) (blonde) lady in her (mid-50s), I thank her and tell her that if she ever knows sooner, if she calls ASAP, sometimes it's not made up yet and we can put a delay on it in the kitchen for her.

"Oh, thank you," she was like, and then she said it didn't matter anyways since she lives 30 minutes away in a small town, and everything gets cold anyways by the time she gets home.

Then, she told me that she's been trying to make tom kha gai soup at home with the coconut milk and everything, but "it's just not the same," so she always has to pick some up whenver she's in town for something.

Restaurant encounter: Intense undergrad.

A few weeks ago at the (Thai) restaurant where I now work, I was working an evening shift and this big table of undergrads that was mostly girls came in, of the size where you have to go and seat them at one of the few places designated for parties of five or larger.

And, they were chatting and having fun and stuff and looking at their phones, and laughing, and I had to go check on them a few times, and this one (cleancut) (seemingly biracial Indian - white) guy with a surprisingly deep voice was very indecisive with the menu and couldn't figure out what to get, and wanted to know if he could substitute shrimp for salmon on the salmon salad, so I had to go ask about that, and then I recommended another, different shrimp salad, and finally he ended up doing just something simple with noodles, something very standard like pad thai or pad see you or something like that.

And, they were just all there for a while, laughing and eating their food and being a small little source of happy chaos.

Then, finally, after they were all done, I broke up their checks and gave it to them, and I said something like joking there'd be a surcharge for the guy who asked so many questions about a shrimp salad but never ordered it.

"I'll have to come back and try it," he was like, in his deep voice. "When do you work?".

And with that, he looked me directly in the eyes for a number of seconds.

. . .

(!!!)

Addendum.

When I was telling him how responsive the university had been to my collections acquisitions requests, too, the one (Caribbean) guy told me that it's not surprising, since it's a public, they drill into all of them that a huge part of their constituency is the broader public of the state, beyond whoever is narrowly surfacing in their classrooms.