What's the deal, small person who normally sleeps in the other bedroom but felt perfectly within his rights to poke me at 4:00 a.m. yesterday morning so I'd scoot over? Well, I'm the sucker who did, after all, I gave you the benefit of the doubt (we've had a streak of post-Halloween bad dreams) and made room.
I think it was around 6:00 that I finally drifted off again, so naturally at 7:00 you fit your knee squarely in my ribs and told me that Mitchell's brother Matthew told you that if you put a piece of candy under your pillow the Candy Fairy would take it and leave you a toy, and I needed to come with you to see if the piece of licorice you put under your pillow was gone!
To be fair, when I said I needed five more minutes you shut up and gave me three. When I told you that part of being quiet is BEING STILL you gave me another two, but there was no way I was going to get any more sleep, so we got up (candy still there, no toy) and I made the first of several coffees I'd drink that day.
So when the sun went down and my body cried, Soon, SOON we will be blissfully inserted in bed between several layers of magazines, newspapers, and Ben 10 toys! and I had to be all, "Uh, no, we're driving to Los Angeles so I think I better have another cup of coffee." Normally I'm reluctant to drink anything with caffeine after, like, noon because it makes it hard to fall asleep even twelve hours later, but safety first/down the hatch/etc! I wasn't about to get all fastidious about my wakefulness when getting Alice safely home was balancing in the balance.
The good times kicked in just past Oxnard and dear Alice and I yapped all the way down to LAX, pretty good for two women who had already spent nearly every waking moment together talking and working for the previous seven days.
But almost as soon as I left my friend at the curb on the departures level, my vision began to dim, my shoulders slacken, and I knew there was no way in hell I'd survive to tell the tale of another hour-and-a-half pushing a car up through the inky, grave-dark, sucking black hole of Highway 1.
Room service at the Radisson LAX promised a 45-minute wait for a New York steak and a split of Piper-Heidsieck, so I went back down to the lobby, fought my way through a convention of Indian anaesthesiologists, bought a six-dollar Heineken from the bar, and went back to my room to fuck around on Flickr until my dinner arrived. That last Harry Potter movie wasn't really very good, I'm afraid (the book was better), but it got me to the point where the caffeine was out of my system and I could pass out for a solid seven-and-a-half hours.
At 9:00 a.m., the Starbucks in Trancas that used to be a club where Jack once played with Little Feat had the most perfectly dressed frumpy chic Sunday morning white folks I've ever seen in my life. Whoever styled that fifteen minutes while I waited among the most expensively rumpled people I've ever seen in my life, I want you to shop for my entire existence, please.
Today's NoBloShoeMo entry:
Well, you know, black is so practical. Bought simultaneously with the pinks, they're a little Mary Richards for me, but they do come in handy on those rare occasions I need to look businessy.