Diablevert

Good Morning

First of all, can I just say, I’m pretty sure this bagel I’m eating has baking powder in it. I can’t say it tastes bad, exactly, but it is, quite obviously, an abomination unto bagel, the spawn of some unholy union of bagel and biscuit[1], brought together at the instigation of a diseased mind. Or possibly someone who had had a bagel described to them, with illustrative diagrams, but had never, y’know, actually eaten one.

I’m sitting here at my fairly boring but not difficult temp gig, taking a break from picking wax off my jacket. I had a pint with this chick Natasha and her boyfriend Boris last night, and the table off behind my right shoulder was right toasted, animatedly conversing on a level far above the plain, comprehensible discourse of the rest of the room. Boris said they were Travellers. One of the women chose to punctuate a point she was making by taking the candle—wax, white, about six inches around, on fire—off the table and flinging it disdainfully over her shoulder, not at us, specifically, so much as at a cruel and callow universe as a whole, yet nevertheless, it hit the ground by my chair and sent a spray of molten wax up the back of my jacket before rolling into the corner. So that was folksy. Later they broke a couple pint glasses and got kicked out of the pub, but I can’t really give you juicy details, because a sort of hush had fallen over the pub and I had the distinct impression that my craning around to openly gawp at them would have been…injudicious.

Other than that it was really a lovely pub. I mean, from the above you’d get the impression that it was some skeevy dive, but aside from that one table everyone else seemed but mildly buzzed. The pub itself featured lots of worn wood and old magazines framed and hung on the wall and a trad session in the corner, the guitarist of which was sipping a glass of merlot.

One thing about this temp gig—the firewall they have at this place is hardcore. The woman I’m covering for took pity on me and let me have the secret password so’s I can go on the internet—otherwise all I’d have access to is the company website—but even with that they’re strict. I’ve been sitting here desulitorily poking the internet with a stick, to see which sites I can get to and which I can’t—NY Times, yes, Google, yes, email, no, a lot of the blogs I read, double plus no. But Diablevert.net—yes, indeedy. So as I’m finding it so difficult to distract myself, and have more to tell you, but I think I’ll do ‘em as a series of short posts. Just cause.

Unless of course they make me do work. There have been some interruptions of that nature.

[1] Biscuit in the sense employed in the American South, of course, i.e., a savory scone served with meat and/or gravy, esp. at breakfast.