I think that my ass has become as numb and lifeless as the stool at the counter of my local café that I’m sitting on. I’m not sure though; let me check.
Yep, not moving.
All sense of touch and potential gropings has been squeezed out of my backside, bled out through a brilliant combination of not-moving and lack of hydration. Well, not lack of hydration so much as only ingesting arrhythmia-inducing amounts of caffeine instead of actual water. Water, while free, does not justify my sitting in a café for 5 hours at a time to the all-seeing barista; that is coffee’s job.
My $1.85 plus repeated fifty-cent refills pays my rent here, not 8oz. glasses of water available free of charge next to the sugar packets and napkins over my right shoulder. I could drink both at the same time but I have a limit to the amount of things I will stack in front of me in a public place and my laptop, coffee and cel phone fill that quota. No water for me then.
So here I sit; jittery and bled of fluid via my coffee enema, numb legs braided around my bar stool like a poorly thought-out friendship bracelet.
I wonder if I can flag someone down –solicit some help in getting off of my perch with a minimum of embarrassment—before I topple ass-over-tea-kettle off of here with a lack of perambulation that would make a paraplegic blush?
Visions of skyward facing feet tumbling leftward in a slow-motion arc, shoes shooting of in different directions as I crash to the ground, are filling my head.
“Shiftless layabout flattens 12 toddlers and a Dominican friar –news at eleven!”
I may be overreacting. I could just reach down and untangle my legs from this not-so-overly-complex single-poled bar stool I’m sitting, couldn’t I? Maybe. That’s the problem when I drink too much coffee: I come up with Rube Goldberg-esque solutions to, say, reaching for a pencil that is two inches out of my reach.
I’ll keep you posted on my progress.
