Saul continued writing his slice-of-life writings inspired by his limited reading of Bukowski:
"Another Saturday. I seem to be writing these things on the weekend. Okay. Woke up at 830 or so, well, was in and out of it before then I think. More dreams. I had a dream I was at a bar during a pre-wedding event. I needed to get some kind of drink but the bartender was out of brandy or something like that. Later I tried to get a beer from him and he told me he wasn't serving me. I told him something like 'Fuck you!' and then went to the manager and got him in trouble. I went back to the bar and someone new was there, I guess, and I was told that the original bartender was sent 'North', whatever that meant. I don't remember if I got another beer. I looked across the bar and on the other side were people I knew, though I can't remember who--I think they were the women involved in the wedding event. I went over to that side and Fiona, my fiancee, was there (we weren't there for our wedding--someone else's--I magically knew this). We danced on a disco-y dance floor with swirling lights and there was a mirror we could see ourselves in and we were dancing well (in real life I don't feel very comfortable dancing). We were moving all over the dance floor though, so we were causing other people to have to watch out for us.
"I had some other dream too but it's not coming to me too, so I'll leave it for the moment.
"I had been reading books on Lean Manufacturing, or Lean Thinking. This week I read Eric Ries 'The Lean Startup', 'The Machine that Changed the World' by James Womack and 'The Innovators Dilemma' by Clayton Christensen--the last one is not obviously related to Lean, other than being recommended by Ries in his book.
"So I've been trying to get a sense of Lean and how it might improve my way of doing things. This week I watched a video of a guy illustrating the idea that small batch processes can be more efficient than big batch processes (small and big batch processing I don't think is my own term but I can't recall where I heard the phrase)--he has ten envelopes and he does a large batch process, where he first folds all the papers to go into the envelop, and then he stuffs all ten envelopes, and then he seals all ten envelopes, and then he puts stamps on all ten envelopes, or simulates this. Then he does small batch processing, where he folds one paper, stuffs it into one envelope, seals the envelope and puts the stamp on it, or simulates this, and then goes on to the second paper and repeats this process ten times. He times both processes and finds that the small batch process is about a third faster than the large batch processing.
"So I've been trying to do small batch processing in lots of things. I woke up today and did a small batch of laundry and I threw out a small batch of trash and recycling. I tried to keep my 'spaghetti chart' simple and with minimal movements. It's interesting. I don't know if I am more efficient or not. I'm experimenting.
"After I threw some laundry in the wash and made coffee et c. I brought coffee to Fiona in bed and sat down in bed with my lap top. I went to play a video on Facebook of a scene from Portlandia, but when I hit the mute button so I could hear, Guided by Voices' song 'Waving at Airplanes' started playing--I left Spotify on apparently. I played some more GBV and then turned to Pavement, playing most of their album, 'Slanted and Enchanted' while Fiona sat next to me playing 'Tetris Blitz'.
"I took a shower and did a reverse strip tease for Fiona when I got back to the bedroom. I was naked and then I put on my underwear while humming 'The Stripper' by David Rose. Then my socks in an awkward teasing, slow put-on. Then pants. Shirt. Ta-da! Dressed.
"Hm, is that erotic or not?
"Then Fiona took a shower and when she came back into the bedroom I played 'The Stripper' on my laptop and she did a better reverse strip tease.
"The night before, I had fallen asleep and Fiona was up. I was in the middle of a dream where I was around a round-table of people and someone had said something and I exclaimed, 'It's racist'--but I had woken up at this point. Fiona laughed. 'What did you say?' 'It's racist,' I said. 'You said something racist?' I laughed. 'No, literally, "It's racist!".' We laughed. 'What is?' she said. 'I don't remember.' We laughed again. I think I went back to sleep pretty quickly after that. Sleeping the sleep of the just apparently."
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