Wednesday, March 11th, 2009.

Last night I slept with my cell phone turned off and outside my room, as the old man in my dream suggested. My sleep wasn't palpably different, but I brought it up to Miss Kay today at work. (A little background information on Miss Kay: she used to own Zenith, years ago. She's really my kind of gal - vegan, clever, extremely well-read, skeptical of almost everything, and yet still very open-minded and conscientious and forward-thinking. She's perfect, really. I often wonder what it would be like to go back in time and meet her. I bet she was beautiful. She still is; thanks to her healthy lifestyle she's aged very gracefully.) I told her that I turned my cell phone off last night and slept without it in my room - didn't bother to tell her about my dream several nights prior - and she said: 'Oh, yeah. My brother, Tom, has sleep apnea and they've done tests and found out that your cell phone actually sends, like, transmissions that can absolutely disrupt your brainwaves and your sleep.' Then we talked about the all too obvious, yet somehow widely unnoticed decline in the sanity of the masses. About that she said: 'Well, it's just like any other group of animal that becomes densely over-populated - they all start losing their minds. There's just too damn many of us.' I felt like she'd read my mind, or my stomach tattoo. Despite my being several decades her junior I think I might be developing a crush on her. There's something about her that's so alluring. It's as if she really has it all figured out. She's got this kind of resigned wisdom to her, it's very groovy, very attractive. Not to mention, at one point today she bent down in front of me and I was able to steal a glance at the depths of her cleavage and her breasts still looked quite firm, unaffected by age or the common stresses of daily life. Her vitality amazes me and gives me hope for my own eventuality.

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There's another man I work with - we'll call him Mr. Ron - I'd like to tell you about. Mr. Ron is a cuckold, or at least that's what everyone says. Apparently he lives with his wife and his wife's boyfriend. He looks it, really. He's a dish washer, has been for almost twenty years now. He can often be seen aimlessly pushing a gray plastic cart through the kitchen, talking with himself, with a broken gait, as if everywhere he went he had to drag this life of failure behind him. Black hair, despite his age; misaligned teeth, and a voice that sounds like Kermit the Frog's. Today Mr. Ron stopped his cart in front of me and, even though we'd never said a single word to one another in the past, said: 'Don't date a school teacher 'cause she'll grade ya at the end of every month. Don't date a policewoman because she can arrest ya for loitering. Only date big girls because they earn their keep.' And then he pushed his cart away, leaving me stupefied beside my overweight female co-worker, Christina.

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Today's Passage of the day is actually a prose-poem by Charles Baudelaire, not just a passage.

A hemisphere in your hair
From Paris Spleen by Charles Baudelaire

Long, long let me breathe the fragrance of your hair. Let me plunge my face into it like a thirsty man into the water of a spring, and let me wave it like a scented handerkerchief to stir memories in the air.
If you only knew all that I see! all that I feel! all that I hear in your hair! My soul voyages on its perfumes as other men's souls on music.
Your hair holds a whole dream of masts and sails; it holds seas whose monsoons waft me toward lovely climes where space is bluer and more profound, where fruits and leaves and human skin perfume the air.
In the ocean of your hair I see a harbor teeming with melancholic songs, with lusty men of every nation, and ships of every shape, whose elegant and intricate structures stand out against the enormous sky, home of eternal heat.
In the caresses of your hair I know again the languors of long hours lying on a couch in a fair ship's cabin, cradled by the harbor's imperceptible swell, between pots of flowers and cooling water jars.
On the burning hearth of your hair I breathe in the fragrance of tobacco tinged with opium and sugar; in the night of your hair I see the sheen of the tropic's blue infinity; on the shores of your hair I get drunk with the smell of musk and tar and the oil of coconuts.
Long, long let me bite your black and heavy tresses. When I gnaw your elastic and rebellious hair I seem to be eating memories.