Walking on Broken Dimes

Only two, possibly three of you will get why that title is funny. Or rather, will remember knowing why that title is funny.

Anyway, this sounds terrible, but I don’t remember which of my many amazing male friends was with me last night. Well. I remember two of them, but they showed up later in the evening. In fact, I don’t remember whose house it was. That’s….rather shameful, actually. At any rate, whoever it was has a lovely girlfriend/wife, and I don’t know about her, but I don’t feel *particularly* bad about leaving him (whoever he is) out of much of the evening’s licky activities. I know he enjoyed himself anyway, so that’s okay.

After we got out of bed (she and I), we walked downstairs and up the street to the bookstore, where we bought coffee and sat down to chat. She had some errands, though, so she left, her close-cropped white-blonde hair visible up the entire street. Dangerous Dan (my co-worker) was serving coffee last night, so he refilled my cup and asked what it was I was working on, since I’d come to the office so early/late and was sitting in front of the window instead of at my desk.

I showed him what I was working on; it was a book manuscript. One that I had written. And I’d written it between the covers of my great-great grandmother’s cookbook. Dangerous Dan and I talked for a while about book displays and planning for the next couple of weeks, when I chanced to look outside and noticed a couple of clowns terrorizing the people on sidewalks, sitting peacefully on patios, and staring from the windows of street-side businesses. Their teeth were sharpened and glinting in the light, and they did this…thing…with their tongues.

I groaned and slammed my hand down on top of the manuscript. Dangerous Dan kept an eye on the clowns, and thankfully the kind man did not keep me up to date on whose viscera they were tearing out; he just told me when they were gone. But it was some kind of crazy Earth Day Parade (the clowns must have broken in) and some jerk in a weird combination hovercraft/dirigible was driving the thing too low and far too ramshackle for my comfort level. He hit buildings and tore awnings, bending trees nearly to their breaking point.

It was like the time that guy in the ‘States stole a tank and drove it…well, it was a tank, so he drove it pretty much wherever he wanted for a couple of hours and caused all KINDS of destruction. It was like that, except with a dirigible, so not the same kind of destruction.

Until he pushed it up against the window of my office. Between the dirigible and the glass was a young boy, caught off-guard (not expecting to be pinned between a dirigible and the glass window of a shop that doesn’t properly exist). Contrary to what I thought would happen, the dirigible kept advancing. I saw the window bend in under the strain (glass is a liquid, after all) and finally shatter (it’s a very solid-like liquid) inward, showering me with shards of broken glass and an entire seriously frightened young man.

I collected my wits about me (they’d been sent in every direction by the explosion of the glass) and ran after the dirigible, snatching my manuscript out of the shards. Halfway up the street, I realised i was barefoot. Dangerous Dan was there beside me as a strange man emerged from a business up the street.

He offered me a shiny coin in return for what the dirigible had done to my office. I told him to go eff himself and this crazy circus would be hearing from my karma toute suite, and then I marched back up the street, across layers of broken glass.

I spent the next several minutes pulling glass out of my feet. It’s really quite amazing how painful this is, particularly when you’re angry. When I was *mostly* finished (mostly), Dangerous Dan and I went to Broadway Avenue (which was, of course, just around the corner from 11th Avenue and Cornwall) and found my friend who used to own the video store I managed.

He’d just moved his video store (and by ‘video store’, I mean ‘bookstore’) further down Broadway Avenue on the south side of 8th street. He’d bought the new storefront because the rent was cheaper, and because the wood inside was ‘Boston Fir’, which apparently is better for the books. We chatted him up for a while, and his brothers, whom I’d met at his wedding that I’d never been to, and then, and then I woke up.

Because I was tired of having glass in my feet.

And it occurs to me now that this whole thing started in a grocery store, where a woman in her middle-earlies and I were slicing soft cheese from huge blocks and her redneck husband kept making passes at me.

Maybe I should *start* smoking something before I go to bed…