It’s fascinating to me how many words can start with “s” and sound completely different. My shoe was a sponge for slush. Though I was only permitted two hours of sleep before my day started with squeezing lemonade and making lattes, I was now laboriously marching through slush toward my prospective client who needed to learn long division. My eyes were heavy, but my sponge shoes were heavier as each step found me in a puddle of what I’m sure the Inuit have a word for but I do not. Somehow the threading that kept my moccasin like payless shoes that I bought because there lack of shoelaces seemed like less work than the opposite was expanding and letting in full chunks of snowy ice that immediately melted with the heat of my sweat.

The hour subway ride I had just spent melting had left a puddle underneath where my feet had been, and though I had had Vonnegut to keep me company, I was psyched for the opportunity for a friend that was warmer. A friend that was indoors. I was hoping indoors was my friend.

6:30 this day had started after the last day had ended at 4:30 with a drunken friend proclaiming that a journey for sandwiches was more rewarding than the quick nap I was trying to take before work. I forced myself down the half block to my cafe through a downpour of raindrops the size of a barely pubescent boy’s testicles. Every 40th raindrop was different. Every 40th raindrop was a snowflake. Still disgustingly sized, but falling slower as it liked to take into account the air around it’s demands for it to move slightly back and forth. Below me was a clean sidewalk, but one that knew that soon this surreal mix of snow and rain would turn it into a horrid puddle of depression.

I was now in Bushwick, far from my side of Brooklyn finding each piece of ground I stepped on less sturdy than expected. Men’s size 10 indents followed behind me in the slushy mix of Seasonal Affective Disorder tangibly realized. I had to pee. I stopped in at an autobody shop to call my soon to be client and to release my penis to the wild world of a toilet.

“So where exactly is this apartment building?” I asked on my bipolar phone which decides to cut out as often as I want to use it.

Her description made no sense. There was no Popeye’s. There was only this Napa.

“I’m on Rockaway Blvd.”

“Your supposed to be on Rockaway Beach Blvd.”

The two are an hour apart by subway and I wasn’t making another trek through this slush of sadness. Instead I screamed. I left Napa, felt the cold raindrops of snowish substance on my face and I screamed. I dragged my sixty pound shoes sixteen blocks back to the c train so that I could enjoy the cold comfort of typeface masquerading as my best friend. My book wouldn’t leave me. My book wouldn’t lead me out into a tundra of wet only to tell me that I was in the wrong place. My book was there for me.

I got back home ready to take a nap but realized I had to go out again. My friend had just woke up and once again he suggested sandwiches. I obliged.