Barrista Beauties & Fake Limbs

(written July 13th, 2010 B&N Norterra)

Bra strap showing. Limp, straight leg. Fake leg? The Starbucks cafe is packed for a Wednesday night.

It’s nice that Starbucks can still hire good-looking, attractive young ladies, because I’ve got a grandfather crush on one. It’d probably make her puke. And it probably should cause me to slap myself.

Seated near me, there’s an old geezer reading a hardback. He’s got his hair cut short and it looks like beavers have been gnawing on his noggin in spots. If anything screams out for a ball cap his head does.

Finally I’m down to an XL t-shirt, before entering the B&N, I bloused it out like my daughter Aili taught me to. The boy Mainio has been sneaking into my closet and ‘borrowing’ my XXL tees, which are now too large for me.

Lately I scream when I see grossly obese people–not out loud, but I do display a lower tolerance for fat-asses these days.

Norterra Barnes & Noble

One of the very first signs of Alzheimer’s, they say, is the changing in perceptions of smell. I imagine that’s because the olfactory nerves are buried deep in the brain.

I glance at a young girl and guy. Both staring at their laptops not talking. I imagine they’re on a 21st Century date.

The group of six ladies stuffed in the corner are gathering to leave. It seems every one of them is pregnant. And nowadays they are not the least embarrassed of their motherly condition for many of them sport tee shirts stretched as tight as pantyhose over their seven or eighth month belly bulges.

In any case smell is the first thing to change with Alzheimer’s. I tried and tried to get what I thought was the smell of mold out of my Starbucks travel mug. I went so far as soaking it overnight by filling it with Clorox bleach.

This evening, out in the B&N parking lot, I was giving one last sniff test and I recognized that the ‘mold smell’ was actually the aroma of coffee. Coffee!

When I pulled into Norterra this evening, I saw all the restaurant’s lots were full. Which is somewhere I cannot go. Without massive OT I cannot even eat-out once in a while at a place such as Islands or certainly TGI Fridays.

More and more I’m thinking about how nice it would be to earn enough to do things.