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Coffee: Maxwell House Master Blend, Office Coffee
I skimmed an article about homelessness in Atlanta because who’s got time to pay attention to someone else’s fight? At least not the details. At least not enough to name the faces standing for street-corner pictures. I’m a busy man. I pay top dollar to occupy my time.
I sat in the back with a co-worker who was having a panic attack. She’d just seen a video of someone getting crushed by a an elevator. Later in the day, she called her parents and talked them into taking her six-year old for the evening so she could run a hot bath and have some time kicked back with red wine. But that’s getting ahead of things. In the break room, she was two cents short of herself and trying to come up with it, paying down every fear for her fragile spot on top of a modest pyramid with sweat and tears, red like burnt butter, talking off and on about taking her daughter to school.
I filled a prescription for escitolopram which makes me less nervous. It cost me twenty dollars and would have cost more without insurance. The pills are packed in an orange bottle with a safety lid so kids can’t have them. When you shake the bottle, it sounds like a maraca.
These days, there’s always almost a thunderstorm. But like the man living under an overpass in East Raleigh, it’s never close enough to notice.
Currently Reading: Queen, Suzanne Crain Miller
Support Relief for Family Suffering at the Border – RAICES DONATION CAMPAIGN
One day, Goodman told me that she understood how some people could become homeless and never come back. When we talked, there were long stretches of silence. At times, she fixed on a certain phrase and repeated it again and again: “I’m tired. And when I say I’m tired, I mean I’m tired, I’m tired, I’m just tired …”
Brian Goldstone, “The New American Homeless” in The New Republic, quoting Cokethia Goodman
Livesay Writing 