I slept the sleep of the dead last night, it's been a while; my mental furniture is being moved about, the nights are filled with the grinding and creaking of wants and needs, the dusty halls of my primitive psyche are buzzing with demands for immediate satisfaction. Desdemona dusting me down, picking through the crevices of my mind like mental floss, finding hidden pearls and waking dormant desires. I am divided, unstable, yet content that my once, supposedly stable platform is being rocked. Life is happening.

I was talking to Tom Waits, right there, shooting the breeze. His voice like warm meat , freshly ground, the smell of whiskey permeating the smoky air. Dark and dimly lit by the overhead, shaded lamp carving a neat line in the black background, swirling pillars of blue smoke, alive and dancing disappear into nothingness. We talk about St Christopher, the drunken piano, Romeo and the fact that he’s bleeding, we talk about the girl with the sun in her eyes, and he tells me my heart was not meant to be tamed. I believe him.

‘Can I kiss you, and then I’ll be gone…’

-----------------o0o-----------------

I woke this morning feeling rested, ready to face the day. The days that have been grinding me down, inch by inch, battering at my spirit with a wrench, twisting me every which way, cranking me up to maximum torque, ready to strip my thread and come undone, then loosening its grip, on my reality, so far that I spring a leak, spray my feelings in all directions and I feel like I’m going to burst like a whistling boiler, steaming and screaming and dreaming, burning, red hot, like a pressure cooker ready to splatter everything in sight with bits of me, my very fibers left scattered, floating in the air like a million feathers, swept every which way the furious winds that blow command them to.

And I said I woke this morning feeling rested. In some bizarre way, all this turmoil is revitalizing. Maybe even some day, I’ll understand.

-----------------o0o-----------------

Croissant and Coffee...

I went to Carluccios for breakfast this morning; I was hungry and felt I could actually eat something without wanting to wretch from the anxiety that has consumed me. The place was disorganised and if I worked there in any authoritative capacity people would be crying, flying out the door, doing the 100 m hurdles to the nearest job centre; there would be sackings. The world has gone soft, soft and fuzzy.

It's past 8am. Usually the nice lady from Sanremo is there to ease me into the day, tolerate my broken Italian as I ask for the usual, Caffé Latte Milano and a Croissant, the only variable being the ham I choose to have on it. Usually the fridges and deli counters are packed, handsome and inviting, berry tarts, cheeses, hams and salami call my name, the Mortadella, however, sits there like an orphaned, unwanted lump. The nice lady from Sanremo is part of my program, she helps smooth over glitches, patches any cracks that may appear, makes me more compatible with the day ahead.

She's not there today and the counters are missing the usual medley of meats and cheeses. No mini calzones and pizzette to tempt me. I stand and watch two Muppets fumble with the coffee machine like two gas station attendants confounded by the pump, like two plumbers attempting a hip replacement. It’s all out of kilter and I think maybe they ought to dose themselves with some of their own caffeinated beverage, and lots of it, double it up… By the looks of the service staff, the human sales interface needs a pipe shoved in their arms, drips of pure espresso squeezed into their veins, a bus parked outside with jump leads ready to be applied to their chests and a few thousand volts rammed through their listless bodies until they scream, scream ‘service anyone?’, until their consciousness begs to serve those who pay their salary.

I finally manage to get one of the plate-carrying camels’ attention and the Gaggia coffee machine is still getting the better of the two fools trying to get it to work. I’m already dreading the coffee I’m about to ask for, but I need it, gasoline. I’m tempted to suggest that the manager buy them a Meccano set to help them learn simple mechanics of how to get the coffee into the handle and the handle into the coffee machine in less than 20 steps.

I ask the plate-carrier who’s now addressing me where all the meats are. She tells me they’re in the fridge. I’m tempted to ask her what they’re doing there, and instead of mindlessly standing about looking for the long lost brain cell that oozed out of her. Why doesn’t she wake up and get the meat from the fridge into the deli counter? Maybe so that I can see it? Maybe so that I can have some? That is, after all what’s supposed to happen here. My grandmother moves faster than you, and sadly she’s no longer with us, I want to tell her. But it’s not my job to tell her that, it might well be my duty to tell her manager, who I recognise as just another comatose crocodile basking in the mellow glow of her own stupidity. All sign of life has been doused by the damp blanket of below average intelligence.

I can see the clockwork ticking over, the rusted and broken gears of her thought process stammering into place, slipping back, jerking forward, 1 jerk forward 2 slips back, clunk-eek-clunk, the dimmed glimmer in her eye, like that of a dead fish, the smile on her face, not because she’s feeling particularly perky, it’s one of blissful ignorance, people who grin for no reason are either cooling their teeth or are not up to the challenge of thinking, much like a dog moronically bearing it’s teeth for no reason with a look in it’s eye, searching and pleading for meaning, ‘please tell me what I am, please – help me make sense of this, give me context, give me a purpose and a reason for being…’

She’s not aerating her teeth, because it’s not hot today.

I order a croissant with baked ham. She begins by playing some kind of snap with the colour-coded cutting boards. There’s a white one, a brown one and a yellow one. I can see the point of the white one, it’s for dairy, brown, ok – it’s for cooked meat. But the yellow one, it’s for raw poultry. If I saw one of these supremely uneducated and unqualified deli farm-hands cutting raw chicken here, I’d break out into a venomous rant. She then decides to clean the board with cheap, bleached paper toweling, at which point I’m intrigued because now she’s on auto-pilot and doing things to fill in the vast chasmal nature of her consciousness. It’s almost very good artificial intelligence, almost.

She retrieves a croissant from the pastries tray, which is about all there is on display, and places it down on the white cutting board. I can see confusion hit her and it’s the last thing she needs, she stares at the croissant for the better half of a minute, wondering how she’s going to go about this. She’s got two items to consider; a croissant and ham, and I think maybe I should encourage her, with her severe lack of mental capability to make a list, because mentally, she’s a black hole, dark matter and I slowly step back, step away. What if it grows and becomes all consuming? Anything more than 1 item is a list my dear, croissant, ham. Mise en place.

I make my presence known, it’s hard not to when you’re waiting for a fucking croissant and a coffee and you’ve got Tweedledum and Tweedledee behaving like stone-age man over the coffee machine whilst Gaping Chasm of infectious dark matter stares at the piece of layered, crispy basked pastry in front of her, as if it was an alien life-form.

The sprockets move and clunk once more, clunk-eek-clunk. She picks up the croissant and moves it, now you think I’m joking, but I’m not. I was beginning to think that maybe it was an intelligent croissant, well, it’s more intelligent that her anyway, but maybe the croissant is intelligent enough to open itself up and invite the baked ham in to peacefully co-exist as a delicious combination, it’s purpose, by design to fill my stomach before it fucking eats itself and I collapse in a shrivelled and spent heap on the floor of a trendy London Italian food store. Imagine that, dying of starvation at the hands of someone with an anvil for a brain, on the floor of a food store. Marvellous.

I catch myself being infected by the dark matter, I was right, it’s infectious. I step away.

‘A knife’ I tell her, a subtle hint as I don’t want to be too direct. I could see her contemplating using her two left hands to open the croissant. Had this happened I would have gone berserk and would most like be in prison for Grievous Bodily Harm.

She turns, looks at me and I sense the mildest panic from her, this must be one of those moments when the gaps in her consciousness narrow and she can almost think and realise that she’s not coping. She leaves the croissant and I’m making a treaty with the vehement torrent of hunger brewing in my stomach. She’s in the fridge now, but the fridge where the meat shouldn’t be, now she’s doing what she should have done 45 minutes ago. I wonder if I could cram her in there, maybe if she knew how it felt to stay there over night, she might have a better understanding of why to get the meat out and into the deli for display. She finds the baked ham I’m after and lifts it up onto the counter. She dumps it on to the yellow board. Now I know you don’t know what that is, you scavenger, but it’s not a live fucking chicken, is it? She then moves over to the meat slicer and I’m filled with two emotions, depending on which way this goes, one is to leave; in which case I would be filled with rage because I’m just never going to get what I want, the other is to witness the death of a black hole by her becoming tangled in the wheel of a fast spinning blade; in which case I would cheer out of sheer delight as justice would have been done.

Is this what I want first thing in the morning?

Believe it or not, but the two fools all the while have been trying to make coffee.

I am about to leave because it's going to be messy, I had a good night's rest and had this been any other day, something would have happened. Tweedledum leaves the coffee machine because for some inexplicable reason he can tell that she's not coping. She looks at the slicer, and I think that if she is incapable of fathoming the croissant, well, using the slicing machine would be as easy as piloting the Millennium Falcon into infinity, at the relative speed of light.

Tweedledum is managing not to prepare himself for inspection under a microscope and I see reams of ham fall from behind the blade. One step closer on the evolutionary ladder, I think to myself. Gaping Chasm is back, staring at the croissant, she sees a rack of knives in front of her, stuck on a magnetic strip screwed to the wall and pulls one down. I know knives, sharp knives, I’ve nearly lost fingers many times over and the fact that I’ve got fingertips left almost makes me believe that there is a God with a big bushy beard and a penchant for flowing robes. I can see the knife is not the right implement of destruction to be used on something as delicate as a croissant, something serrated would be more appropriate. She is going to use the knife on the pastry and I’m about to have a heart attack; imagine you go to the hairdresser and she’s wielding a pair of garden shears, well that’s how my croissant is feeling, remember this is an intelligent croissant, it’s beginning to shed it’s layers, like a lizard loses its tail, it’s hoping to distract Gaping Chasm in hope that she’ll go for the quivering flake instead.

There she goes, like a lumbering fool, cutting the croissant and I say to her ‘You might want to consider using a serrated knife on that!’ she turns and stares at me with dead fish eyes. She turns what remains of her attention to the croissant and proceeds to hold it down, making sure it does not escape. ‘You’d be better off using the back of the knife’ I tell her, she turns and smiles, she thinks I’m joking, Jesus, she thinks I’m enjoying the demolition. That’s my fucking food you’re assaulting there! She doesn’t understand that in order to get any use out of a knife, you need to slice, back and forth, not push, don’t push, a croissant does not require brut force.

At this point the chef appears and places a plate of roasted peppers and tomatoes with basil into the deli counter fridge. ‘Chef’ I say, ‘you need to give them a serrated bread knife’ – he stares at me and I can see he doesn’t understand me, I’ve stepped into the twilight zone, they’re zombies, all of them. Chef leaves, and I see that Gaping Chasm has opened the croissant, much like one would open a baguette with a blunt spoon. It’s been mauled and molested and I see her in a new light, she’s a croissant pedophile, she’s just raped my croissant and it’s lying there sobbing, defiled and dirty, damaged and beyond any salvation.

She stuffs it with the ham, wraps it up in a warm paper blanket, as one would a rape victim, some comfort that is! Tweedledee has managed to magic up a coffee and I just want out, get me out of here. I pay, Jesus, am I soft, I pay? I leave, confounded.

Who would ever think that buying a croissant and a cup of coffee could be so difficult? Please, Ms Sanremo, come back!