(chris’s) blog

Where I kill(ed) time
Originally uploaded by Simple Dolphin

I’m chugging coffee at work. I’m chugging black coffee at work. I used to hate black coffee. I would fill 1/4 the cup with milk. Now I fill 4/4s the cup with straight-up, black coffee. It’s gross at first but you get used to it, at least I got used to it. It’s much cheaper than sugar-coffee (mochas and the like) and doesn’t contain sugar and fat like most milk-coffee concotions. It’s bitter.
I remember my first coffee. It was my freshmen year of high school and I was meeting my then-girlfriend Tina at a football game. The cup she offered to me was full of sugar to cover the bite of espresso. I didn’t take to it immediately, but immediately it seemed special. It was different than anything I’d had before.
Coffee isn’t a juice or a soda, or milk or water really. It seems like a really strong tea perhaps, at least it’s similar to tea in that its brewed, but if you drink coffee and tea you’ll find little similarity beyond that. Coffee is special. Coffee is an adult drink.
Fourteen in the world of high school dating, drinking coffee: a suburban mama’s boy sort of rebellion.
Twenty-one and the sugar is gone, gone missing around the same time the sweet scent of childhood stopped following me. This is adulthood and adults have to work. It’s a bitter life with bitter work that requires a bitter drink. Right.

I don’t know if there’s a correlation between aging and drinks tasting worse, but my first beer was far from delicious.

I have been alone since my roommate left for China, but I have not been absent in the presence of life.
I was laying on my bed reading “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close” when I noticed my blinds swaying with the air. They sighed gently, in and out like breathing. Through my window, the room breathes, through its lips, breathes in air to sustain me, and I as its symbiont keep it clean and dwell within.
The stairs outside my room extend through the wall to act as my neighbor’s stairs too. When they march up and down the stairs, the wood underneath buckles and moans, moans in my apartment too, as though a ghost is living with me.
A talking ghost, if you listen closely. I’m less than a mile away from a 9200 watt radio transmitter. With such proximity and power, it vibrates the wires of my stereo, even when not plugged in, and I hear the faint murmurs and whispers of voices singing songs; of a ghost, off the stairs, singing songs even when I’m not there.
So as you see I am not alone.

Deviantart has this neat page of photos of people taking photos.