a cup of this, that too.

On Sunday in the late afternoon, Joe and I set out for food near Silent Barn in Ridgewood. There's this place called Breakfast Lunch Dinner around six blocks from his house that I really like because the Matzoh Ball Soup is quite good- I'd venture to say some of best I've ever had.
Anyway, the wind pushed us there and I smoked a cigarette under the awning of my hood. Breakfast was over, lunch too, had to be dinner. There were maybe ten people in the whole place, including the employees. We sat in a booth behind an old man hooked up to a respirator that was placed on the floor beside him. It didn't block the aisle though. I faced him, Joe faced me. He sat at the table alone with napkins shoved into his shirt, unshaven, smiling.
We talked about trips and the night before and the idea that to rationalize something in our small lives is to actually ration it, to allocate parts, to divide and organize. Individual importance must be derived from order, from arrangement, from maintenance coupled with a drop of creation. Explanation falls behind proportionality. Do I ration parts of myself for a later date in order to interpret and conceptualize my current actions? This is muddled, I know.
I got the soup and toast with jam, Joe got various eggs and muffins and sausages. Coffee too. The man got mashed potatoes and peas and turkey, which he blended with a fork in order to properly swallow without choking. Plastic tubes in his nose. The waitress kept calling him Romeo and asking him if he was ever going to take her on a date, screaming to him that Valentine's Day was her birthday, screaming to no one in particular,
"Ok, it's time to do some real work now, real work, ok"
"Romeo, Romeo, more coffee?"
"Romeo, Romeo!" like he was asleep or dead or something.
The point of life is productivity not happiness. The point of life is productivity not happiness. The point of life is productivity not happiness?
He twirled his finger at me around his right temple, grinning, motioning her insanity. I started feeling water in my eyes, smiling back, looking down at my soup. A guy came in and asked the waitress for something to go, he milled around the front and looked down at the old man at the table.
"How you been, Joe?"