...
Yesterday was too full of worrying about everyone's safety and finding out about all the suicides and dead bodies and cop convoys and traffic accidents and homeless people and thievery and callous/moronic/despicable responses to all of it.
I realized I hadn't gotten enough sleep and could tell what sleep I'd gotten had none of the good kind in it, so even though I was ready to drop at eight, I took a chill pill to make sure I didn't just drop and get right back up again. I made sure I was going to get my sleep.
I took the chill pill and switched on some Joe Rogan on YouBube, turning it down low, so it could just be something like mostly men talking downstairs when I was a kid, or out there when I was inside my mother, to keep whatever neighborhood noises from grinding on my sleeping nerves, and bonk. The sandman bludgeoned me on the head and I was at Joe Rogan's house.
He was talking to some guy and I was sitting with someone, who turned out to be my sister, and it didn't piss me off when I noticed this. I kept having a question to ask him and he wouldn't stop talking to let me do it. I kept going, "Joe..." to signal him to stop for a moment for my question and he never did. He was oblivious to me.
So I got up out of my chair and went over and touched him on his knee, "Joe...." Nothing. He still kept talking. My sister got up — this was when I realized she was my sister sitting with me — and handed me this little pink and green floral purse with some money in it. I took it and went and put it in my big tote full of miscellany and very little money and stuffed it into a cupboard in the other room.
When I returned to the first room, nobody was there. I could still hear Joe talking, but he'd moved to another room. I started off toward whatever room that started to be and this turned into a long stretch of more and more rooms with different people or things in them and a hallway that kept getting longer and having more staircases. Joe would not stop talking. It was getting on my nerves.
I would move down the ever-lengthening hall at speed, with my eyes closed, getting from one place to another. Sometimes seeing Joe holding forth, or his wife, or sundry of his friends, but I couldn't get him to hold still or to shut up, couldn't get my question even asked, let alone answered. So I decided to just leave, went for my tote and it was gone.
So now I gotta look for my tote. More running blind down the hallway and staircases, more room to room, more Joe talking and talking and talking and talking, and I think someone handed me a wad of cash, but I was busy trying to find out what happened to my tote.
Nobody had actually responded to me at all this whole time. They might register I was there, but if they said anything it wasn't to me. The women were all middle-aged hipster broads in stupid dresses. All very self-assured and acting as though they belonged wherever they were, and I was feeling ever more like I didn't, and just wanted to settle the tote thing and get out of there. Finally, I'm back in the main room and there are a few people in there talking with each other while Joe's still off talking in some other room.
One of them was Redban, and he looked up at me and addressed my problem.
I went back to the cupboard and my tote was there, minus the girly purse and some other things. I went back into the room with Redban and the others, pulled a wad of cash out of my back pocket and asked who'd given it to me so I could return it. It was Monopoly money. The bills were play money. Everybody was giggling. Joe was still talking.
always and any time....
