happy tampa

starbucks isn't legally allowed to sell you more than ten shots of espresso at a time. the time limit is three hours. you buy ten shots, come back three hours later, you can buy ten more. never knew that til last night. my friend Rachyl who used to work there told me that.

someone got arrested at work yesterday. one of the employees. Mark, a heavyset black guy who was in charge of refilling salad bar items & such. it was probably for drugs. i saw everything through the glass window when i was in the office in the middle of counting the register drawer. suddenly i heard "put your hands on the table! i'm not gonna tell you again!" and i thought "wait a minute, who talks to someone like that?" and i looked up and Mark was being handcuffed and then taken away. ....i'm rather neutral towards the whole thing. i had nothing against him, but i wasn't overly fond of him either. he was always trying to get me to go out drinking with him and i would just politely blow him off but the whole time i just wanted to yell at him, "you're too old! it's not gonna happen! give it up, fuck off. this is getting creepy."

work all night on a drink of rum, daylight come and me wanna go home.

i've been so happy and jubilant these last two days. i think it's just because of having spent a week in tampa. the sunlight did something to me. i remember being down there and waking up in the morning and being SO HAPPY to be alive with the sun shining and the palm trees swaying and i just wanted to give the whole world a big hug or something. all the bad things, wrong things, corrupt things, fucked up things happening in the world---i felt like i had enough love in my heart that if i could just emanate it towards everyone and everything then it would all be fixed. a couple times i even wondered if it might be possible that i'm the next messiah if i can have this much indiscriminate love for the world.

I've seen cactus growing like ivy, growing in vines clinging to and hanging from trees. i've seen pink fruit growing on cactus. i've seen some kind of weird moss hanging from all the palm trees on Druid Street in Tampa. i've seen a raccoon crossing the street. i've seen little lizards basking in the sun. i've seen blowfish skeletons on the beach. i've seen (and felt) biting ants when i picked up a log that they were occupying the underside of. i've seen what baby coconuts look like. at first i thought they were cumquats or baby mangoes. there were green ones and orange ones hanging in clusters of fifty or a hundred. then i saw another coconut tree with more developed but still unripe coconuts on it. they looked kinda like green mangoes. you can shake them and hear the liquid. then supposedly if you pull off the top green leafy layer then the hairy brown coconut part is underneath.

me & mom had drunken late night talks. she told me she used to be a nude stripper. i never knew that, i thought she'd only been a topless one. haha she said that the nude strip clubs didn't allow alcohol and the topless ones did, and she worked in a nude one and she wasn't stripping without alcohol so she would always just bring a bottle of vodka and keep it in her locker. eventually her boss found out and said "so i understand you keep a bottle of vodka in your locker" and my mom confirmed it and then he just said "are you willing to share?" and then after that there was a lot more drinking going on in that strip club, and business prospered because drunk dancers attract more customers.