I hit the road for the Downtown Meeting today, sheets of rain threatening to rip my hat off my head and fling it over some highway overpass. I was not in my usual fine morning mettle. I had some mettle but it was not well organized and it faded as the morning preceded. I don't have a great idea as to why my mettle is fine sometimes and completely lacking in others. My mettle was out the window today and coffee - normally a powerful mettle-enhancer - did nothing in the mettle-boosting department.
I'm in the corner of this old church basement, the Undercroft so to speak - big room, high ceilings - and there was a woman sitting catty-cornered to me. She's often there - doesn't talk or join in at all, which is fine. She's not on my Irritation Radar normally and it is goddam easy to get on my Irritation Radar. Today she started to rub at her eyes. She took a little compact mirror out of her backpack - an odd item to be hauling around on your back - and used it to really inspect what she was doing. She rubbed ferociously and for a long time, switching eyes, peering into the mirror. It really got on my nerves. I can normally ignore stuff like this but in my mettle-less state I was drawn to it like a drunk to lager. I couldn't see how it was possibly helping the state of her eyes.
Then a guy sat down on the other side of me. He's usually at the meeting as well. He pulled a little tiny chocolate cupcake out of his backpack and started to eat it. The problems for me started almost immediately as he did a lot of lip-smacking and loud-swallowing and Adam's Apple-bobbing. It took him several bites to consume this tiny one bite chocolate cupcake: a pop-it-in-your-mouth, chew-twice, and swallow cupcake. Moreover, he had an apparently endless supply of these cupcakes in his backpack which he ate in a deliberate, noisy fashion.
While I did appreciate the distraction from the eye-rubber the lip-smacking started to get on every single one of my easily irritated nerves. He might as well have taken out an amplified bullhorn and aimed it in my direction on full volume. I was focused on the smacking and the rubbing at the expense of the people who were sharing their experience, strength, and hope, allegedly the reason that I walked down to the meeting in the first place. I have little idea what any of the speakers said what with the smacking and rubbing noises reaching a Niagra Falls crescendo of wet, mucousy sound.
I projected into the future – one of my all-time favorite things
to do – and holding hands with these two good folks during the closing prayer was dancing at the periphery of my vision. Normally projection doesn't do me any good
but today it had its benefits. I left a
few minutes early and headed to the bathroom, where I washed and washed and
washed my hands, using a concoction of lye, bleach, anti-microbial cleanser,
and soap, which I applied with some steel wool I had in my bag.
A guy that I knew but had never spoken to came in. We started talking about the weird mental blank spots that all drunks seem to have from time to time concerning alcohol. He had shared this great story in the meeting about a visit to one of his customers who was an employee of a microbrewery. His customer had a full mug of beer with a head of foam sitting on his desk. It got in my friend's head. He couldn't keep his eyes off of that beer. He knew he couldn't drink it but he thought maybe he could just smell it. He leaned over and took a deep whiff of a novelty candle in the shape of a mug of beer.
We laughed about that for a while. '
I didn't shake his hand.
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