Saturday, December 14, 2013

Café

I got a new job the other day being a waitress in a café.
The customers come in pretty much one demographic and nearly all of them look like this:



They cluster in little immobile groups and croak and chirp for hours. I've been to this café with my own grandmother. That was the day she told me that her naked body looks like one of those flayed roast chickens that hang in butchery windows.

Before I left for work the other morning I was chock-a-block busy trying to not howl in the foetal position (had been circulating the lower pole of my dual-polar feeling disorder) but once I was given the task of feeding these shrunken pudgy white people I felt so much better. Probably because they say "thanks darlin'" or "thankyuh sweetie", and some of them tell me about shark nets and ask me where I live. An old guy was even quite angry, but I didn't mind because at least he felt something and said how he felt. The middle aged couples who come to roost at tables don't have such interpersonal skills. They nest amid a little bank up of paraphernalia they have bought as Christmas gifts. They concern themselves with a newspaper or staring.

On my lunch break, I noticed how the ground was constructed of tiny little pebbles all glued together and thought that was curious. I saw a tree branch waving in the reflection on my phone screen. Little bits of nature all abstracted were silently poking their nose into the artificial compound of the shopping mall in which the café is positioned.

So, even when I'm working cash in hand in a soulless temple to consumerism and slapping off nasty hormones to avoid becoming a bowl of tears, there are things to be grateful for. Older generations who have more manners than mine and weeny little rocks with polished noses.


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