Have I ever bothered to mention how much I hate Sundays? Can't stand them, wish they did not exist, they are a wasteland of my soul, and any time Sunday wakes me I wish I'd gotten drunk the night before and slept very late and never seen this day.

I feel short of breath and hard of hearing. And it is hard to see straight. And the day, it just seems like it will never end. And I want to talk on the phone, and go shopping, and play the piano, but all these things end in failure. And I don't want to sit down, but standing up is pointless. My eyeballs feel hot, my stomach feels spiky, and every 15 minutes or so I'll do so many sit-ups that I lose count. Before sitting down to type these words I was in the bedroom doing well over 30 sit-ups, which is an awful lot for someone who rarely so much as gets out of his chair.

And here, since living in Atlanta, Sundays are made much worse by a neighbor's habit of cooking something every single week; don't know what it is, but it is putrid-smelling, and its odor gets into the A/C vents and fills the air in this apartment so completely that I am compelled to open the doors to the balcony and blow the smell out.

The smell of that neighbor's cooking makes my eyes water and my throat tighten; it smells like onions and olives and all those foods I so detest.

I've been barfing a lot lately for some reason. Twice last week I laid down in bed, tired and ready to sleep, only to be overtaken by the need to barf. And I did. Violently. No nausea, no warning to speak of. Good thing the bathroom is nearby.

Unfortunately, I think this new brand of beer (introduced to me by Maggy) may be the culprit. Blue Moon beer. It comes in a number of varieties. The one which first made me sick was Belgian White, but the Abbey Ale type also seems to have something about it which does not stay down. And I thought it was pizza.

For the most part, though, when I think of life in Atlanta I think of beer. It is not that I have consumed much more of the stuff here than in New York. I have not. I equate Atlanta with beer simply because no city I've ever been in has driven me so hard to drinking.

Some nights the only way I can get to sleep or face the coming day is with a 6-pack of Beck's Dark and a large, disgusting pizza.

I tend mostly to drink alone, because getting drunk in public is a hugely embarrassing situation for me. It can be, at least. It certainly has been.

New Year's Eve, 1994, I got blitzed to an almost elemental level. I was a walking Long Island Ice Tea, 9 of which the people at Houlihan's were nice enough to keep giving me, and after midnight I did cartwheels right across 57th street. And very nearly got squished by a woman driving a Honda. And squashed a few moments later by a bus. And all the while my friend Dwayne ran after me trying to make me stop, trying to make me grow the fuck up.

Later we got onto a subway and I started pissing all over the goddam place. The train conductor saw me leaking out onto the platform of the 200th Street Station, and she came running. By then the train was empty. It was the A train to 207th street, and it was 2:40 in the morning.

She said "Look, I understand, you gotta go you gotta go, but man, be careful, ok. The door was gonna close and I just happened to see you there."

I never figured out where she was going with that whole monologue, which went on for several minutes, but it sobered me up and we welcomed in the new year.

Was it 1994? Who can even remember any more.

So I decided several weeks ago that for as long as I live in the city of Atlanta, and as long as there are Sundays in this town, then the last thing I should ever do on a Sunday is go out to eat. It is not that I should avoid going out, or seeing other people. Nor is it particularly because I can not eat very well on days like this.

No, it is the aggravation. An average cheeseburger in this town seems to take about an hour from the moment it is requested of the waitperson to the moment it arrives on my table. That is a very long time for a cheeseburger, and at any rate I should also have figured out by now that you just can not find a decent burger around here anyway.

I went out just now. I am very lucky to have been by myself this time because I easily deteriorated into the very type of person I can not stand to be around. After a full hour of reading Spalding Gray's Sex and Death to the Age 14 and waiting for a cheddar burger with fries, I could not stand to read the book any more. I could not stand to sit there, or to not sit there. I just could not stand to be there. I just can not stand to be anywhere on Sundays.

I never got out of the rhythm of getting a cheeseburger at the Green Kitchen on 1st Avenue in New York. No matter what time of day I would walk in I could ask for the usual, read a page or 2 of whatever book or newspaper was at hand, and the burger (sometimes a rather nasty stack) would quickly appear. Ah, life in the big city!

But I really pissed myself off tonight at this seemingly nice restaurant, because I mumbled to myself the most irritating questions. "What is the big deal, all I ordered was a cheeseburger?" "How long can it take?" After 75 minutes into the waiting I wrestled with the question: Do I want to publicly degrade myself by being one of those people who ruins everyone's evening by grabbing a waiter on the arm and informing him "It's been over an hour. Other people have been served. That family of 6 that came in 10 minutes after me has left already. All I asked for was a cheeseburger. WHAT IS THE BIG DEAL?"

But the thought of going home as the person who caused such an ugly scene disgusted me enough that I said nothing. And after almost 90 minutes the damn cheeseburger was placed before me and it was cold and chewy and so were the fries, and the lettuce was warm and flaccid, but I was so damn hungry that I shoveled the whole lank pile of crap into my face, thinking of a line from that Spalding Gray book: "When the world runs out of money and people start using shit, the poor will be born without assholes."