Yawn

Up too late again. Over the last couple of months, my schedule has been so frequently disrupted that I don't think it will ever get back to normal. I'm gonna get loopy. If I begin to seem weirder than usual, that will be the reason. If I had the time, I might take up computer games of some sort as an escape from the confusions of reality. When I first got Sluggo, there was a copy of Sim City installed, and I played it so frequently that I began to have dreams about it. I would dream that my house had turned all grey and slummy the way abandoned buildings do in the game. It was too disturbing for me, so I got rid of it. Maybe that is why Sluggo hates me. Maybe the game was his favorite pastime. Heh. Sluggo, the escapist computer.

See what I mean about loopy? See what I mean about weirder?

Nostalgic Moment

The image that just popped into my head is of the Owl Rexall Drug Store (long vanished) on Main Street in Alhambra, California. It was a moderate sized suburban store in a busy commercial neighborhood, both store and neighborhood of the type that were common before the age of strip malls and shopping centers. The store shared its block with a Woolworth's, Lerner's, Montgomery-Ward's, Grant's, and a number of other chain stores, and a few local shops. I think it dated from the late 1940s. It had the style of that era, and a smell not unlike a new Walgreen's, except for one feature; there was a soda fountain. It was actually, a lunch counter, and things were cooked there, and the smell of hamburgers and grilled cheese sandwiches mingled with the usual drug store scents.

It was a particular feature of the soda fountain that just came to me. On the back wall, behind the aisle that the waitresses walked up and down taking and delivering orders, and in front of the usual equipment of coffee urns and malt mixers and dispensers for drinks and such, there was a trough a few inches deep with a conveyor belt in it, running back to a small room where the dishes were washed. The dirty dishes would be placed on this conveyor and be whisked away to be cleaned. The trough was deep enough that they could not be seen, except that the straws in the drinking glasses would stick up above the rim. I remember sitting at the counter when I was very young and watching those straws go by. I never tired of it.

Strange. I have no idea what put that image into my mind.