Grey Light

On mornings like these I wake up at 6:30 for no reason at all. Then there is a debate in my head: do I make coffee or try to go back to sleep? Usually, I roll my nuts for a second and smoke a cigarette before going back to bed, but, no, today I am staying up, getting on with the day, making things happen.

Right now the sky is greying with light. For some reason the grey light of night turning to morning always reminds me of harder times. Every day and week and month is hard in its own way, but there are always the years that were hardest and there will always be years ahead that are harder than what we once presumed to be the hardest. That's a pretty cliche thought, but, eh, I've only had one cup of coffee. Let me be concrete.

When I worked nights at the hotel, I lived a life of grey light. During the winter, I went to work in the dark, and walked home a dawn. Then I'd try my best to get my ass to sleep so I could go do that again. Nothing all that subtantial ever really happened those mornings, but when ocassionally I would think of interesting things that happened in grey light. The time I worked that night job was a pretty dark point when I hated "the man" and spend a lot of time boo-hooing to myself about how I wasn't on the inside circle of other grad students who had teaching assistanships. So I lived in my mind for the most part. I recreated memories of bends in rivers that I love to fish. I recreated parts of France and Italy I like. And maybe it was because I saw so much grey-dawn that my brain resorted to thinking fondly of memories of grey light. The one that comforted me the most was also one that represented a hard down turn, more wandering into the bad.

Between 2004-2005 I was risking a pretty bad gambling habit. I was working as a bartender/ cook at two really successful bars in Kansas City so this meant I made a lot of disposable income that I could blow. Dropping three hundred bucks at a casino really wasn't a big deal because, on an average night, I'd make more than that. At this time, The Point in Kansas City was a premiere bar and everybody who was anybody in Kansas City would show up. It was pretty common to walk out of the bar after close with five hundred bones in your pocket. Five hundred bones to toss at a black-jack dealer. Wow, I am rambling and rambling. Let me get to the point.

My favorite memory of grey dawn was when my brother and I were leaving Harrah's north of the river in KC. John won three grand and I won two grand. It was summer. We were absolutely drunk and rich and in a cab. In our minds, we'd finally beat the casinos. In reality we'd scaped back probably a fourth of what we'd blown, at best. But in that moment, in the cab, anything was possible, and because John and I both blew money as if our hands were fans, we wanted to spend it. We wanted to do something wild because we could. We had the money, so why the fuck not?

We decided we'd have the cab take us to KCI airport so we could hop a flight to Chicago. We decided that since we had the money, we'd go to Chicago to eat hotdogs and get haircuts. The cabbie was pretty unimpressed with our idea, which made us think maybe it wasn't a good idea after all. Logic started coming back. We ditched the idea of going to Chicago. We had the cabbie take us back to my brother's pad.

I always like thinking of being in that cab deciding on if we should go to Chicago for hotdogs and haircuts. I represents the true silly and like all silliness represents an aspect of life that is truly stupid, stupid. I've done shitloads of stupid shit. I like to think that's what makes me a pretty empathetic person. But that just might be me thinking too highly of myself. I think there's a poem fumbling around in these fumbling words of this fumbling entry.