a concrete canal in mortopolis
Imprudence during the holiday scheduling scramble bestowed on me a graveyard shift New Year's Eve followed by an afternoon shift on New Years day. Home after my night shift, I slept unsteadily for only a few hours because Sunday I had stumbled in two hours late and today feared that I'd oversleep and leave the same guy stranded again. I dawdled then started wandering, an hour to kill before work. I stalked the trajectory of my regular bus downtown, waiting for it to catch up with me. After I lingered briefly at one stop and began feeling stagnant, I boarded an unfamiliar bus just to be in motion. I got off on the far side of the cemetery adjacent to the hotel. My plan was to cut through and loiter about, reading the headstones as I made my way to work but its area is surrounded by an eight-foot, razor wire-topped fence. The place is enormous in a way that can only be realized when trying to get around something. It is a city for the dead with parks, skyscraper tombstones and mausoleum condos. Through the center runs a shallow drainage canal, a damp concrete arroyo Styx. It seemed somehow appropriate on this gloomy first day of a new year to be sleepwalking around an immense graveyard. But instead of just groping my way around the fence line, I should have dived under the fence where it met the canal and ran down its breadth. That would have been the cool symbolic gesture that I was looking to start the New Year with, but it didn't occur to me until I was halfway through the lobby. Damn. Oh well I guess I'll just ceremoniously burn something. *love, r.