Vignettes...

... from my first full night's sleep in a month.

I am sitting on a dirty cement stoop in front of a 15 storey apartment building.  The 30-something guy I met half an hour ago on the bus is whispering his life philosophy to me.   He's wearing a greasy used-to-be-white wool cap over his curly ginger hair; his cheeks are scruffy and weathered.

The late afternoon sun slinks into evening; the sky deepens endlessly.  A series of ever-more inebriated women walks past us up the wide shallow stairs, asking, or slurring, if this is the party for Cecilia, and we say yes.  We should know; we walked her here.

It's dark.  We've wandered deeper into the neighbourhood, on a sidewalk that winds illogically between grimy residential high-rises.  A man jumps out from the shadow cast by one of the infrequent trees backlit by even-more infrequent streetlamps.  My heart skips a beat then double times as he comes at us half-running.  Then opens his arms and hugs my companion.  They exchange loud incompehensible pleasanteries; he leaves.

I'm weeding my friend's garden.  I pull a up giant thistle out and find its roots embedded in the body of a decaying rat.  I gag.  Take a shovel and dig it out.  It's just as visceral and disgusting an experience as you imagine.

On the bus in Liverpool, a woman of impressive girth and height stands, gripping the overhead sling in one hand, the her six year old daughter's upper arm with the other, and argues loudly about motherhood with her sister.  I settle the dispute with Ring Pops.  We listen to the daughter's walkman without headphones, and sing along to Brittney.

Street corner.  Kirk Douglass passes me.  He's wearing a tan raincoat, nice shoes.  We say hi.