Part Two: Drunk, stupid, and hungry, Whats your fucking excuse?

Part Two: Drunk, stupid, and hungry, Whats your fucking excuse?

"Number sees seestee four"
A stumbling skateboarder strolled past me, reeking of alcohol, he lunged for his order from the window, before the bag was out of the bullet proof box, he reached in, grabbed a handful of curly fries and stuffed them into his mouth as if he hadn't eaten in days.

It was cold and lightly drizzling, the fog was rolling in and the crowd of people were waiting eagerly to order, or to pick up. The 30 or so people consisted of young drunk 20-something last-callers from bars all over The City.

I pushed a large steaming cup of Joe towards the man.
It was cold tonight, one degree above freezing. The effects of global Warming had found its way to Paradise.

"I feel like I'm influencing people, and that's not what I want to do." He took the coffee and sipped it slowly.

"I think, however, that I may be insulting those who truly believe that Heaven is a place that actually exists somewhere out there." He paused a moment and looked up at the foggy sky.

"I was there a couple times on a short visit. It was a wonderful place!" He began to speak in a low sad voice. I was beginning to think he was a hat case short of a luggage load.

".. but I'm beginning to feel like Heaven is really just a fleeting moment in time, a place I used visit in my dreams."
"Do you know anything about time?" He was still looking into the blackness of his coffee.

I eyed him a bit closer now, he wore a drab green Army issue wool overcoat. His Giants baseball cap brim was furled a bit, I tried to see more of his eyes, but his face moved in and out of shadow.
I looked at my fake Rolex again. 3AM, the sweep second hand was frozen. I tapped the crystal with my other hand.
"Damn!!" I tapped it harder to be sure. The fucker was broken!

"An interesting view of time, is that it is part of the fundamental intellectual structure within which we sequence events, quantify the duration of events and the intervals between them and compare the motions of objects." He looked down at the blackness of his coffee and nodded affirmatively.

He sipped his coffee again, if he was in fact speaking to me, It didn't matter. I was somewhere else. I continued to tap my cheap fucking Rolex and occasionally held it up to my ear, hoping for a tell tale tick tick that it would assure me it was still alive.

"Thinking of it in this view, time does not refer to any kind of entity that..." He paused for a moment to find the right word. I'm not sure who he was speaking to though.

" um, flows. Entity that flows that objects move though, or that it is a container for events."He paused again, moving a beer bottle over to his left so he could make some sort of illustration using garbage on the table.

"No, its not an objective thing to be measured either, its more part of the mental measuring system." He sat more erect now. He slid everything off the table onto the ground, the bottles, partial hamburgers and other assorted shit crashed at our feet.

"So, is time a real thing that is all around us, or is it nothing more than a way of speaking about and measuring events?"

I wasn't sure if he was talking to me, the cup of coffee, or just to himself.
I sat and stared, trying to get a glimpse of his face, his eyes. Suddenly, he looked up at me, through the uncomfortable silence I heard myself say..

"Look bud, I don't really care about time, or Heaven or about anything else for that matter. My goal tonight is to get a double cheeseburger and some curly fries, eat them, finish my beer and go home to barf it up before I fall into a deep drunken sleep where life is sweet and ice cream floats down the Candy Cane Mountain." Hmm, I thought to myself. That WAS pretty amusing.

"Bullshit. You care about time! You've been looking at your watch for ten minutes now, its still stopped, No? Do you think its possible time has temporarily paused while you are here waiting for that Burger and Fries? Moreover, do you really believe that your motivation for coming here was in fact the aforementioned food?" His eyes did not blink. He stared right through me.