One's Photographs
A vertigo morning. Up an hour later than usual, a leisurely bath, a late breakfast across the street at the hole in the wall burger place - the waitress asked me, as I sat down, "over easy or over medium?" which took me aback, as I haven't been in there in weeks and I rarely visit. The lone other customer chuckled and made a comment to the effect she had an incredible memory and could actually remember I'd ordered bacon and eggs on my last visit. At my very best, head straight, honor bright at the age of eighteen I couldn't have remembered the color of my watch without a glance. Anyway, I always have them over easy with whole wheat toast and I ate them as I read the paper, the room moving up and down, slowly, like a moored boat.
This is both bad, this vertigo business, and good, in the sense I can, for the first time, feel some, I don't know, "change" inside. The ears will occasionally not "pop!", exactly, but crackle, in a less violent release of interior pressure and my overall feeling is similar to the feeling I get when a cold is breaking up, the ears unplugging, something like that. That and feeling tired. Is this good? Is this vertigo an infection that acts something like a cold? Can they last this long? Or am I grasping, looking for something, anything good to come out of this? Well. A phone call to the doctor tomorrow. Burn through the medicos while I still have insurance.
Meanwhile, however, after breakfast, back at the apartment, I stretched out for an hour to finish the paper, take a bus downtown to hit an ATM and join a group of twenty other malcontents for lunch. Friday is the last day for those of us who got their pink slip, package and sixty days notice in February and we were sending off three of our own in the traditional manner at a local restaurant. Over fifty people from our office, all of them with many years of experience, none of them deadwood. Management is shooting the dice, they don't have a clue about the unique company knowledge these people are taking with them, but, as happens with crap shoots, the dice eventually come to rest and things are revealed. We are all, down here in the trenches, curious to see how badly this turns out. Not unlike a blind man with a pistol. Sometimes you shoot a foot.
So, I sat at Dim Sum eating lightly - the late breakfast, you understand - watching silently as the restaurant rotated around me on some unknown axis. There's an aspect to the vertigo that's similar to some of the recreational drugs, a feeling of tingling elation, tired well being and the thought you may well fall off your chair or slump forward face down in a plate of sticky rice. I shot some pictures at the table with the F3, a nice small camera with a sharp as a tack f 1.2 lens, useful in bars and restaurants. Rice on the face is no excuse, one still shoots one's photographs.
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