Neon in the morning

It was early Sunday morning when we awoke with the sun blaring through the small empty gaps in the semi undercovered car park. My toungue felt like sandpaper and my breath was pushing the upper spectrum of offensiveness. My mind was hurting and was screaming at me that it needed some water. My friend woke up at the same time and in the exact same state. I took it upon myself to go hunt for some sport drinks from the local shops down the road. Anything to pick us up from where we were at.

The local cafes had begun to fry up their eggs for the early morning rush. It was 7.30am and the smell of fried eggs almost made me throw up with each and every café I walked past. I must have looked like death walking through those quiet and quaint streets, a look of disgust from each of the local passer-byes. We were in the posh end of town and dishevelledness was not the normal around here. I didn’t care though. I needed my sport drink.

I walked and walked peering into all the coffee shops to look for that magical blue, green or orange fluid in their small bar fridges with no success. It was clear that this town was empty of sport drink. What’s with that? I sat down on the kerb to ponder this and somewhere along the lines of looking at a 4WD Mercedes being parallel parked and the sun sneaking through it’s windshield, I passed out.

I dreamed about the girl that I saw at the Art Deco Festival. She was young, maybe sixteen, wearing a red dress and busking with her violin on the street corner. I didn’t think much of her when I first saw her earlier in the day. I walked straight past her to go visit the local bookshop and to find a quite café to hide in for the rest of my day. Then after finishing a delightful dinner at the local Lebanese institution I went for another walk and she was still there, busking away. She looked at me perplexed.

A local fruiterer whose shop was just opening woke me up. Apparently he wasn’t interested in having a man sleeping on the front of his gutter on a Sunday morning. He was also speaking a language that I didn’t quite understand so I wasn’t about to have an argument with him, although we did exchange some hand gestures. I remembered that I was on a mission of extreme importance and my friend was relying upon me to return to the car with some goods so I picked myself off the ground and off I went.

Bright fluorescent lights were slowly diminishing with the early morning sun but I could just make out in the distance that some of those lights were coming from a supermarket sign. I smiled and then laughed maniacally. This mission was coming to an end! After a five-minute walk I came upon my goal; this life mission; where x marks the spot; gold, jewellery, treasure! To my utter dismay it was closed.

This place really had something against me! First Vietnamese mint, then this! Why? What I had done to them? It was at that point that I aborted my mission; the resignation of pathetic defeat; such a simple task unaccomplished. There had been times that I had been lower in my life but at that exact moment I remembered none of them. I wished the fruiterer would pass me by with a shovel for me to start my own dig.

I know it’s pathetic but I just realised at that point that water would pretty much do the same thing as a sport drink. Don’t ask a visitor to a strange land for some kind of common sense for he would be to busy looking at a bright light in the distance and skipping towards it singing, ‘Sports drink, here it comes, just for me, none for you’. Ioju knows that you have done it yourself so don’t judge.

I walked into a café and ordered two bottles of water, again trying not to throw up. Who eats eggs for breakfast for crying out loud? I grabbed the bottles and ran away from the shop with haste, for I had realised that I had been away for some time, and my friend would be getting concerned. Not that it mattered. When I found him he was snoring away in the front seat of the car. I sat on the bonnet and waited for a while painfully listening to the evil sounds hundreds of birds can make. He finally woke up ten minutes later. I recalled my story to him and he grunted something incomprehensible to me, which somehow seemed to sum up the mood quite nicely. We started to drive back to his place. Not many words were said to each other on the drive home. There were a few grunts though.