A while ago a young hostess at a local Resturant where I live asked me “what are you writing about all the time?”. I didn’t really have a good answer for her, I write about my life and then I write about random situations around me. Sometimes people or the start of a short story. The following were two short entries while I was visiting Kansas City for work.

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‘Reading a book’

I had been sitting at my table drinking my dark roast- over priced Starbucks coffee when I notice in front of my line of sight there is a young blonde woman, she is maybe twenty three or twenty four years old. She is reading a book laid out flat on the table before her. Her hands are folded gently upon her lap, she is wearing a red winter coat ‘windbreaker’ Even though it is not cold in here. Her hair is pulled back in a tight pony tail and her downturned face is easy to see from my vantage point she’s not more than twenty feet away. As she reads the words before her, her face is full of emotions, I am sure she doesn’t realize it is so obvious from my point Ops view. As she scans each line her brow sometimes furrows, her lips pucker and then pout. She sometimes seems to be afraid or concerned and you can almost feel the story written in her face. It makes me wish I could sit next to her so I could read the story along with her because she makes me so intrigued by the face so full of life from the simple pleasure of reading the letters on the page… in a book in a crowded coffee shop.

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‘The bad’

He woke in the morning so full of hope, a day of personal leisure time, without work or the trappings of his home to distract him from his downtime and the enjoyment he would derive from it. It was to be a day of high expectations but it started out bad from the start. It wasn’t anything nor was it anyone in particular that set it on a bad trail. It was just bad, bad weather, bad timing and disillusionment from the imagined expectations that seem to all fall short of the good thing it was to be. Starting out good or at the least with good feelings of it being good and then feeling the sudden bad can leave anyone in a bad situation and this man was really feeling the bad situation now with little hope of improvement as the day draws slowly on into the mid afternoon. So he sips his coffee and stares out the second story window of the coffee shop with people all around him feeling more alone than ever, he stares at nothing to fully appreciate his disillusioned state of the bad affair.