I Got A Pain In My Belly, Got A Pain In My Head...

...I feel like I'm dying, I wish I was dead"

Those are the lyrics from an old blues song, by Ledbelly I think. I can hear him in my head, playing his 12 string guitar, and singing the song.

Some mornings when I'm at Starbucks, drinking my coffee and smoking one of my hand rolls that refrain appears in my brain. Sometimes the pain is real, sometimes it's imagined. It can be physical pain, mental pain, or emotional pain. In all honesty it never gets to the point of wishing that I was dead. On rare occasions I suppose the thought flits through my conciousness that perhaps things would be better if someone else was dead, or at least elsewhere, where they aren't causing me problems.

So I sit here getting fully awake as the kinks leave my body and the morning fog clears from my brain, reading the newspaper, and sometimes chating with one of the other regulars. The morning crowd for the most part is an older group, not college students like the afternoon and evening people. I particularly like chatting with Douglas. He's in his mid 70's, in great shape, and rides everyplace on his bike. He thinks that the Miami Herald is crap and buys the New York Times every morning. I've got to admit that it is a better paper, with better world and national coverage, and it's not written on a fourth grade level like the Herald, but I mostly read a paper for the in depth local coverage that's so lacking on television news, and the New York Times hardly knows that Miami exists, let alone North Miami.