A good-looking, stocky, hairy man is jogging along the sidewalk toward me. I will melt onto the pavement as he runs past. The other option is that I will gesture excitedly saying, “Heyyyyyyyyy.”
Nowadays, there seems to be no in-between.

I carried a list to the supermarket, one I’d written in the fourth grade, after I’d gotten really really pissed at one of my teachers for humiliating me in front of the class.

He’d slammed his fist on the podium and said I wasn’t listening to him. I remember he was asking us to write down a math problem. For some reason I couldn’t hear him. I guess I was too busy thinking about my list: Rice O’Roni, Pop Tarts, Aunt Jemima’s syrup. Pepsi. Doritoes.

I shouldn’t go into the list. I should go into the anger. The disappointment.

But then there is the other list. Pond’s cold cream. Ex-lax. Luden’s cough drops (cherry)–the one I used for the fifth grade, for another mean teacher.

My sixth grade teacher: Levi’s 501 jeans, Pepsi-free, and Kit-Kats

College professor: AZT, Depends, Preparation H, Zima

Oh dear Lord, I have no idea what she’s going to say when I tell her but just let me take it like a man. Let me just stand there and take it.
In case I can’t: let me cry very stoically and sensitively, maybe a few tears, just small ones that drop off my face quickly and dry quickly.
Please don’t let my nose run. Please don’t let me run.

One cigarette for old time’s sake.

Two cigarettes because the flavor of the second one is different from the first one.

Three cigarettes to reflect on your life.

Four cigarettes to remember how stupid you were to have started.

Five cigarettes because that is all you’ve been given.

Journaling, doodling, yawning, thinking, burping, scratching.
Anything but working.

Someone will ask, “Hey, why do you scratch the back your head so much?”

And the other will answer with their own question,  “Why does saliva always have to froth on the corners of your mouth?”

The other will say, “Dude, you froth too.”

The other will respond, “Now way, dude.”

“Yes you do,” the other insists, and will go so far as to present the evidence: a picture taken with a cell phone while the other one slept. And sure enough the froth is clearly visible in the close up shot.

“Oh well,” the other says, handing back the cell phone to the other. “I was sleeping.That doesn’t count. I don’t froth while I’m awake.”

“Your frothing now,” the other says.

“No I’m not.”

“Yes you are,” the other says and attempts to take another picture.

But now both of them are frothing at the mouth.

In the struggled to prevent or pursue a photograph, one of them dies.

Now the other is sorry to have mentioned the scratching at the back of the head.

The perfect beignet comes with the perfect coffee which comes with the perfect spot in the cafe, which comes with the perfect companion to nestle in that spot with.
Awash in all this perfection, if you can find it, is a sense that any false moves in this perfection is inevitable, because they say perfection cannot last. It is fleeting. Ever notice that you must eat the beignet soon after it is brought to you? For to wait any later than now, and it’s contents begin a new collaboration, one of imperfection. Same with coffee. And the location. The companion however tends to evolve over time; you don’t have to partake of your companion ever so quickly for they “keep,” as they say, never going bad like a day old pastry. The problem comes with the comparison of one’s partner to a pastry. The problem is that you sometimes go bad. Can you keep?

Damn. This is terrible. She is running toward me. I have to run away.

She is fast. I am not. I know she will eventually catch up to me and I’ve yet to formulate any answers to the questions I know she will ask. Finally, out of breath, I stop, hold onto a lamppost for support. As I sway there, heaving, she runs past me. It wasn’t me she is after. I don’t know who’s she’s after. But I know she will catch up to them.

Along the puddles of rain, I saw flashes of light. A whole other life inside those tiny pools. Distorted streetlights, squat buildings. Squat people rushing along, upside down. When the puddles dried, the collected debris was free to blow along the sidewalk, eventually getting sucked into a whirlwind, airborne along the avenue, passing a deli, where a man tried to light a cigarette.

But the wind would not let him. While the flying trash laughed at him.

I got confused. I thought one actress was another woman’s appendicitis.

When I approached the woman, she was doubled over, in what appeared to be some attack to her abdomen. I spoke to her, offering my assistance. She heard my words of “Nistris,de-nookeneueru.” Although, frankly, how she could have misheard me was beyond me. I spoke as clear as a bell to this woman.

This actress I am referring to had just been let go from a show that I’d hardly watched. So when I approached her, during the earlier part of the dinner party, she had already been told of her unemployment by her agent. She struck me as one of those people, that when caught off guard by bad news, is incapable of hearing clearly (Something about the blood rushing to one’s head, creating either a distorted echo or pulling in periphery sounds, causing the wrong sentences to blend with grammatically correct sentences, giving birth to a new array of words–or just gibberish in her case). Which only caused her to look up from her pain and say to me, “I’m sorry. I can’t multi-hear.”

Whatever that means.