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Showing posts from 2014
It was time to step away and invest sentences into the actual thing.
She packed up and vacated the offices of her past for a much better lease on the future.
Deposits had been made, checks had been cashed, and now all of his accounts were overdrawn.
He was as casual in casual conversation as it gets.
She had a voice--the kind that could translate well via live stage, recording studio, smart phone, walkie talkie, tin can....
He had been hoping for a little more asteroid.
After a long pause, he ordered a Happy Meal and a chocolate shake topped with whipped cream and a procrastination berry.
Hopping backward to a younger, carefree day, she sprang forth with confidence and joy.
The days, weeks and months were mapped upon his haggard face like the imprint of a wrinkled sheet.
Given to daydreams, he often found that his focus on the moment had to wait for a minute.
She looked a little bit like Monica Vitti with a bad perm.
He loathed the expression rusted shut .
He sat on the couch near the back window, drinking his coffee with a closed book on his lap, and listened.
Her opinions and observations concerning the crumbling infrastructure of a lost and reeling society were sure to be a best seller.
He shamelessly lied to himself about the reputable clinical research that supported the benefits of including a coffee cake muffin with a cream cheese center in one's daily morning diet.
He had never really been able to discover a decent antidote for writer's block.
She was aware that there were forests where trees and plants and other organisms wouldn't grow.
He had entered one of those sterile waiting rooms where all creativity was put on hold.
He couldn't resist a glazed or chocolate-frosted donut.
She constantly reminded him that his generalizations had to be drawn up over and over with each new set of circumstances.
What the films had taught his generation is that there should always be music, at the very least noise--in the background, middle ground, foreground: that silence is artificial.
What stood out and remained with most people was how the cowlick at the crown of his head matched the colicky behavior at the heart of his personality.
It wasn't uncommon for him to become totally bogged down with his blogging.
She argued calmly and confidently and carefully before the executive board, as if cruising through a neighborhood filled with playing children, that terrible, self-absorbed drivers were spurring the need for rapid advancements in driverless automotive technologies.
When he switched from Google to Google+, he wound up minus something.
She gaped out of the rain-streaked window contemplating how she could help the men feel more comfortable with her extremely high level of knowledge and expertise without furthering their deep-seated feelings of inferiority.
He shuddered to think what other intelligent life would conclude about them based upon topical analyses of film and television studies.
The made-for-television series confirmed what she already knew--that there was as much misogyny embedded in the culture as sugar on sugar-coated cereals, or poppy and sesame seeds on everything bagels, or cinnamon and sugar on cinnamon donuts.
He hoped that if he fell flat on his face there would be a banana cream pie on the ground.
He was hoping to discover the hallmark of quietude in the country beyond the orange groves.
Ideas came to her mind the way mail arrived in the mailbox.
When the alien interrogation was over, they left her in a soft clearing in the woods about a mile from her house with some nice parting gifts.
Who didn't chase a cheese cake muffin with a strong cup of coffee?
And for his sins, he only allowed himself to eat sugarless cereals in the morning (not true).
They met on their lunch breaks--two artists in their own rights--and wandered together through the museum and talked, vaguely aware of the art.
She insisted on starting each day with a cup of French-pressed coffee, a croissant and the voice of the diva.
He never grew tired of his Pop Art books.
It was all French toast to him.
She treasured the moments he was able to break out of his lugubrious philosophical stand up.
If after all of that laughter he found nothing funny, then he would at least bask in the satisfaction of having put forth a Herculean effort.
He was definitely in over his head, but it felt familiar.
She laughed in his face.
He felt good about it.
He knew that this country's biggest issue was greed, and that many, many other issues could be tackled if greed could be eliminated from the equation.
She wasn't down with all of this fancy schmancy bullshit.
He told the young mother on the cafe patio that she might want to cover her children's eyes and look away while he devoured his chocolate chip muffin.
After all of the blood work came back, his doctor concluded that he was suffering from a poetry deficiency, and, after subjecting him to a brief questionnaire, prescribed Ginsberg, O'Hara, Koch and Wakoski.
She understood him better than anyone else.
Between the scrambled eggs and fluffy pancakes, he discovered a Slim Jim --not quite what you were thinking.
Sometimes he wanted information; sometimes he wanted entertainment.
Now, as he aged, a certain cache of memories began to strike him as too absurd or outrageous to have actually occurred, and yet the very unlikelihood of the substance of these recollections is precisely what gave them a sense of credibility, despite the unreliability of his memory, because he knew, to his dismay, that his imagination would be hard pressed to create the lines, shapes and values of these particular shades.
He thoroughly enjoyed not how but that  Ke$ha rhymed "saber-toothed tiger" with "warm Budweiser."
His proximity to the heavens and stars after camping in the Berkshires intensified his desire to "get off the grid."
She needed to "get to the lake" or camp at least once every summer in order to endure the cabin fever of winter.
He had been subjected to a spot check while wearing  his favorite plaid jacket.
As his understanding of time was altered--i.e., when he became aware that no one, including himself, escaped--his concept of time became more scrambled and abstract, less tangible.
During quiet moments, like early in the morning or late at night, as she sat at the table sipping coffee or lay in bed trying to sleep, listening to a train, she felt like a portal through which incoherent and indecipherable transmissions from undiscovered dimensions were emitted.
He walked places.
It had always been important that he had been right in front of the stage, pushed right up against the edge, or in the front row, right below the lead singer, since he would never be in the spotlight.
She was in her greatest element on the longest night of the year, and she could feel her powers intensify.
He stoically dedicated the show to those who had gone before, and to those who could see with their eyes closed, and then they began to play without another word to each other or anyone else for the rest of the night.
After he peeled back the pink strip of hair on the cyborg's head, he wished he had selected a different sort of nightmare.
The neon lights and tinted, reflective windows, the colorful newspaper boxes and fire hydrants, the crappy graffiti and commercial signage of the strip embodied the hues of her soul as seen in her eyes.
Not even a bottle of Coca-Cola could strip the garlic from his breath.
It was fair to say that he had, and continued to, borrow from Jasper Johns, believing that he might as well borrow, since everyone did, from the best.
She didn't let little things like runny eggs ruin her day.
He took the heat like a neatly folded square of paper tucked into his pocket.
The whole gig revolved around the fact that he could see, as a boy, that he had been born Ojibwa but hadn't been raised as if; the rupture in identity, as a result, had been huge.
She found it hard to explain that writing was as abstract as living to people who didn't write.
He wondered what she was doing, even though she was only on the other side of town, and found it hard to comprehend that other people were doing other things while he typed.
He found the commercials to be better than the programs.
The day was an organism which he adapted to his needs and desires.
Day in and out, he relied upon the casserole to balance the humane with the existential; today was no exception, and so, viola!
He needed a drink.
When he was young, he complemented some of the most memorable and infamous events of his life, some of them planned, some of them accidents, mistakes or misfortunes, with shocking, unforgettable haircuts.
He had had a belt with ersatz Native American bead work on it when he was a boy that had actually made him feel less indigenous than people would believe he actually was.
During the warm, sunny interim of the day, he often sat erect at his desk on the eighty-seventh floor like an android and stared out of the large plate-glass windows over the city and went to a place where although he could be seen and observed by the other partners and secretaries and visitors, if they happened to glance into his office, he couldn't be found.
She had a hunch that the tenant in 24B was a simulacrum in the strictest sense, combining artificial intelligence with biologic features.
Sometimes he tried to match natural forces with an army of synthetic cliches.
The reservoir burst unexpectedly, and after the flood waters dissipated, they discovered that he had become a casualty in the pent up zeitgeist of the 90s.
Her garlicky croutons sailed on a wave of Caesar dressing atop a bed of sea-colored lettuce.
He applied copious amounts of sunscreen on the exposed segments and hemispheres of his body before demanding anything of the sun.
His lyrics gained power because of his adamant unwillingness to defend their obvious lack of strength.
She applied for a visa to another genre because she was sick of the short story she was living.
He woke up without a theme this morning and therefore felt inclined to stay indoors.
He was certain that he would love her when she was no longer young and beautiful, and went so far as to say so, although it was over the phone, so maybe a little removed?
She'd argued with him in public because after dinner he'd insisted that she had been born to live.
Lana called and they talked for a while, and he confided that he did indeed actually have that summertime sadness, but it wasn't true.
When he imagined having lunch with his favorite painter, it played out as follows: a lunch meeting at a shaded outdoor cafe, coffee, a light meal, a few brief casual remarks about a recent opening or exhibition, a beer, a newspaper, a convoluted inner monologue concerning the night before, a syncing of watches, a napkin, a handshake--as if old friends.
She refused to knowingly contribute to the burgeoning stupefaction of the masses.
Afflictions and maledictions aside, he was having a good day.
It wasn't a crime to carry cans of spray paint around in one's backpack, but it wasn't the smartest, and for this he'd paid the price.
She had never cared what others thought; she would've dated that punk rock boy in a heartbeat.
He had written a short story that featured a character who went around to public libraries to rip out the last pages of modern classics only to discover that one of his closest friends was secretly guilty of such deviant behavior; everything had already been done.
He sped onward and wished well all of the trains departing from the Grand Central Station of his mind.
She imagined that in a post apocalyptic scenario there would be very little inhibition, if any, which both thrilled and terrified her.
He felt a bird fly in and heard maybe a voice as a door opened within.
The omnipresent amplification of music in all aspects of society--malls, elevators, gas station pumps, cafe patios, ipods, commercials, films, birthday cards, caskets--resulted in a "soundtrack without end", making life seem more like a take on a reality TV show or a scene from "this summer's greatest experience" than the real deal: made him wonder in moments of unbelievable and unexpected silence if he was in fact asleep and struggling somewhere in his subconsciousness to inform himself that "it [was] only a dream."
She wasn't planning on comparing notes with anyone; in the future, everyone could look at hers, if they wanted to.
He looked at the sparrow on the wrought iron rail and realized it was actually there.
He had read Walker Percy's debut novel, The Moviegoer , for five consecutive summers before it had occurred to him that a fascination with the novel's spiritually bankrupt protagonist suggested a defect in the machinery of his own psychology.
After hearing Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit" for about twenty seconds--the first time he had heard a song by them--he knew that they would not only be huge, but important, as well.
He had carried Salinger's Franny and Zooey around in his backpack for about a year and a half, just before turning twenty, pulling it out and skimming passages from it when he had found himself in empty bus stops and sterile train stations, or when he was just plain bored in a library study carrel or a bagel shop, knowing eventually he would inevitably suffer the same spiritual and existential breakdown and wind up on the Glass family's Manhattan living room sofa--minus a lecture from Zooey, of course, in his case (he wouldn't be that fortunate)--Franny's beloved cat, Bloomberg, nudging and pawing his chest and sniffing his breath and purring in his face, with any luck.
As the spacecraft reentered the Earth's atmosphere, already having transmitted all of its data and spectacular imagery, he asked himself, "Where is the joy?"
It was clear that she had been born with a certain amount of style and grace and rarely had to give it a second thought.
He had a hard time relating to people who belonged to what Albert Camus referred to as "The Cult of the Serious."
Unable to play any instruments, unable to write anything original, unable to predict the next look, they settled for losing themselves in the packed audiences of intimate concerts.
He stood in front of the bathroom mirror and tried to duplicate a face he had made thirty years ago but it was useless.
They had often talked about forming a band during their student years, while at dinner, or while lying about the dorm, or while walking across campus, but none of them had actually had any talent, and they couldn't have been convinced that they collectively possessed enough good looks to fake it, as evidenced by a lack of anything vaguely resembling romance, or even squalor, in their uneventful daily lives.
Halfway through the interview he got up to use the restroom, slipped down a back stairway and kept on walking.
Was she always barefoot because she enjoyed it, or because her parents wanted her in shoes?
His grandfather had taken him, a true city boy, to his cousin's flower farm when he was young and he'd hated it, the isolation of it all, the sickening vegetation, but now he could see himself living in the middle of a flat plowed nowhere where the only protection was the vast open absence of protection, and the brown cloud of someone approaching could be spotted two or three miles away, giving him plenty of time to grab his poetry, set the fire and run.
He couldn't listen to "Taps" without tearing up.
She opened the bill and slapped her forehead.
As with any project, it eventually became his distraction.
His texts were becoming more and more parenthetical everyday.
She ordered the last bottle of wine.
He rejoiced in the beehive of memory.
Sometimes while sitting on the patio at the cafe with his notebooks and a strong cup of coffee, he would imagine that he was joined by Jean-Michel Basquiat--smoking, and on something, of course--and together the two of them would talk about Picasso, ethnicity and popular culture.
She loved Miro for his kinky lyricism.
On a clear Saturday morning, a little Louis Armstrong, a bit of Miles Davis, a dash of Dave Brubek, perhaps, was all it took to jazz up an otherwise fairly ordinary batch of scrambled eggs.
He distanced himself from a bad memory lingering from the day before by eating a hearty sub.
Now, at the age of forty-six, when he looked at the place where he had usually seen himself, he saw instead the absence of himself.
He discovered out of sheer ornery laziness that he slept better fully clothed.
The contagion of malaise contaminated the punchlines of her jokes.
He sat at the table and waited quietly, like a matador sentenced to death by sword.
She wanted to affect his life like a shot of espresso.
Of course, the siren wouldn't have reverberated so much if his head hadn't been so empty.
By focusing on a siren that seemed to be weaving its way across the south side of the neighborhood, she was able to forget that her to-do list had been written on a pink sticky note by someone with a child-like scrawl.
As the siren grew louder in the neighborhood and interrupted his morning coffee and the serenity of his mind which had been stuck in that moment preceding the moment the blossoming siren had first pushed through a needled, leafy barrier of stagnant thought like a crocus in the flower bed (he'd been staring at the damp lilacs just beyond the front window made deeper in purple hue by the morning rain), he silently promised someone, anyone, that he would return to looking, remembering against his will what the great American poet had written: No idea but in things.
Early in the morning his thoughts played out as follows: What? what? what? okay, okay, ugh.
She placed the note card on his desk and slipped out of his office; he would never guess whom it was from but she didn't care.
He often woke up on Monday mornings with an overwhelming desire to paint.
His secret weapon was the donut.
They could tarnsih her image, but they couldn't dismantle her legacy: donuts?
When he drove in the car in silence with the windows up, he felt outside of time, totally cut off from life, everything, as if he were looking out at the world from behind a mirror, unless he had a donut.
Tough inarticulate mysticism offensive to his yuppie limitations awkwardly neutralized empathy.
The icicles melted, orchestrating that his yo-yo-like agnosticism necessitated emancipation.
The investigation manifest offered theories his younger, lighthearted adversaries nourished equivocally.
The incendiary messages often transported his youthful longings across narcissistic entanglements.
People who used the phrase, Maybe I'm naive , angered her; silence and denial, she believed, were worse than naivety.
He felt unique and most charmed in the average moment.
He read to her every day, played with her every day, colored and drew with her every day, went for walks and wagon rides and bike rides every day, painted pictures and pasted projects and video taped her puppet shows every day, washed her clothes, made her meals and took her everywhere he went.
When the club didn't have a girls team for his daughter, he made sure she could try out for the boys team and told her that the boys team would be fortunate to have her.
He got down on the floor to play with his daughter, pushing the thoughts of all of the other men who were at work, or getting home from work, or preparing for work, to the back of his mind.
The culture encouraged, no, championed, escapism; he couldn't tell if the moment felt more real with the radio on or off.
She held up the hearty image of the daffodil in the face of any naysayers.
In the fifteen seconds that it took a thousand pounds of dynamite to implode the 19-story Genesee Towers in the heart of downtown Flint--a city in more than dire need of rebirth and revision--he saw roughly three years of the worst and happiest time of his life flash before him and leer at him within the massive, abstracted clouds of dust and debris.
He went for a walk through the neighborhood at four A.M. because he wanted to get his soul right.
She liked vintage clothing, especially the accessories, because she believed that modesty and decoration were a virtue.
He wanted to be able to record his thoughts in real time, not reflective time.
He selected a paperweight from his desk, hefted it, looked out over the city, made up his mind and walked into the meeting, the paperweight still in his hand.
She spent a lot of the day by herself, and then punished people through the night for it.
After episode 207, he vowed that he would never piss off Ragnar Lodbrok.
He got that tedious, mind-numbing housework, such as dusting inconspicuous nooks and vacuuming untrammeled  areas of carpet and scrubbing linoleum floors that didn't look clean afterward, going hard in rooms upon which one could easily and satisfactorily close the door--the ridiculous, absurd battle with Nature insubordinate to no one and no thing--had to transpire every once in a while, but he knew that deep down, he equated it with madness, and therefore never willingly participated in this kind of activity, though sometimes underwent the trauma of it all for the sake of love.
The spring brought the rain, the rain brought lilacs, the lilacs brought out his inner wealth.
He felt as content as a cat.
"Listen," he said to his laptop, "I am doing everything I can to make this as easy for you as possible: you have to do your part."
As his computer struggled to complete the simplest tasks--the most uncomplicated applications one could possibly imagine, no matter how creative--he knew that he would have to come to some  kind of terms with contemporary existence immediately or risk everything.
She loved to say the word Yoplait.
He implored the architects of the present day to send him an email revealing whether listening to Spotify at the table in the dining room while the water in the dishwasher churned and the sun bathed everything with a surface was possibly just as worthy an endeavor as making money or art, despite the vast gulf between the two.
He wanted to be in the moment like a regular Arby's roast beef sandwich.
She hated to start the day off with mandatory texting, but it did at least wake her thumbs up.
Tai chi in the dairy aisle at Meijer, or in the electronics department at Best Buy, would have probably boosted his quasi-spiritual connectivity to the internet.
He thanked the goddess for cloaking our hero with the translucency of idiotic fashion.
She slapped his face and asked if he could feel that.
He wondered what he had ever seen in Princess Leia anyway.
The lack of structure on the weekends was enough to put him in a hospital.
When he asked his father if he could take the car, his father responded, "Is that what you're wearing out of this house," to which he replied, "Yes," accepted the keys and left.
The first time he heard Howard McGhee, he threw all of his paintings out of a third story window after returning to his studio.
Aw, "Rats," he thought.
Her disregard for the treasured insights (?) of the hoi polloi was well-documented and oft-discussed in all of the affected ivory towers of art and academia, as well as in the basements and secret warehouses and on top of all of the slag heaps of popular culture.
He simply could not sanction the concretion of dog shit on the neighborhood sidewalks after the snow had melted, nor the Jackson Pollocknistic splatters of vomit downtown after the semester ended, but then again he wasn't in the mood to judge.
When the lilac bush just outside the front window began to bloom, he remember how, after his grandfather had died, his grandmother had gone out into her back yard with a pair of scissors to "trim" her lilac bushes and had "trimmed" them down to the ground by the time she had finished.
She just couldn't do work-all-the-time all the time anymore.
He usually poured his coffee with his left hand.
He often found himself in art museums on warm, sunny days.
The words were elongated and heavy, like a printing die, but all she could grasp was that someone was speaking.
He tried to think of a way of using the word parfait as a modifier, or a verb, but it just wouldn't happen.
And then it was that we saw him walking, truly and freely through the sun-drenched neighborhood, like a Yeti, unencumbered and surrounded by a halo of majestic natural wisdom, up and out of the dampness of everyone's negativity, from the angry drivers to the neurotic apocalypse seekers.
Despite being told, "No," at every turn, she turned every corner and held out her, "Yes."
Coming up and out of the neighborhood, as if it were Fitzgerald's valley of ashes, or Homer's underworld, he had the sudden urge to hurl his refill mug as far as he could, because he could--though really the culture had paralyzed such impulses for better or worse at a very young age--thus walking naked and unencumbered, although fully clothed, freely and truly as intended.
Technology was against him.
He liked the idea of strapping his laptop to the grill of his van and driving the van off a cliff, bailing out, of course, like a cartoon character, just before the van reached the bottom.
You would think that flinging the laptop from the Eiffel Tower, or into the Grand Canyon, would provide more than adequate satisfaction, but it wouldn't do at all, it wouldn't come close, because such a ridiculous height wouldn't provide the ultimate, necessary experience, which was in fact the end of the line; no, what he really wanted was to drop the damn thing from a parking ramp, maybe three or four stories high, so that he could still see and hear its demise.
She owned Saturdays, or so she led us to believe.
He was vary of listening to too much classical music, especially of the experimental variety, because it instilled a lie--a sense of immortality.
The feather drifted high and low on the current of the breeze, seemingly in slow motion, before landing in her lap as she sipped lemonade, languidly reclining in a chaise lounge in golden splendor behind a dark pair of sunglasses and capturing all of the afternoon sun, as if feather and sun and time were hers, and hers alone.
One of the Keebler Elves had lived on his street.
For once, he wished that the makers of Cheez Its would select an immature cheese.
In the final analysis, he was a big fan of the crunch, but the raisins, eh, not so much.
He haughtily ordered a half portion of reality, but later sent it back before the waiter could set it on the table.
She smiled as she lay in bed, remembering throwing the book out the window on the expressway at seventy-seven miles per hour which was undeniably one of the most satisfying experiences she had had all winter.
He was done trying to help other people get there.
As he slowly navigated the carpeted stairs with both hands on the banister, fully three sheets to the wind, he envisioned himself transformed into a Slinky.
She was more of a Zesty Italian than a Thousand Islands.
He was as pliable as Silly Putty.
Even though he knew that it was impossible, he felt as if he had come to the end of the list of all the verbs.
She was so angry that when the man handed her the expensive ice cream for which she had just paid, she stepped to the trash receptacle and pushed open the flap and cast the ice cream cone into ice cream cone hell.
He forced himself to look and see, insisting that his sight pass over as much as possible, the term "much" encompassing many things, including things he couldn't actually name, or things that he didn't realize he was actually seeing, and all the shades and hues were made more substantial by the dampness of the early morning rain.
It didn't really matter what he thought because he usually acted on impulse.
They only took cues from her, ignoring all of the other cue-makers that vied for their attention.
After making a sandwich, he often found he couldn't find where he'd set the tie for the bread.
In many ways, the health of the neighborhood was an extension of her will.
She was able to exhaust life just as thoroughly as travel from her bed or from the couch when necessary, or when she preferred to remain in one place, perfectly still, staring calmly out a window, her rich imagination traveling at break neck speed, a book of poetry splayed open on her chest as she drifted off to sleep.
It was as if she and the sun had been going for a walk, the lilac bushes near the cafe beginning to bloom, behind the fogged glass the regular customers lined up for coffee, the garbage trucks groaning from within the depths of the neighborhoods, the traffic making the damp streets sing, the sun leaning in to murmur in her ear as with each step, as the morning began and the sun continued to climb, her confidence soared.
He was the only liberal in the men's book group; it was awkward.
He guessed wildly that a grape-flavored snow cone was the key to her heart.
Oh, he thought about it all right; he thought about it for a long time.
He cut a hole in the car mat large enough for his head to fit through and wore it around his neck like an Elizabethan ruff.
There was nothing she abhorred more than standing in line at the DMV.
His final report concluded with the observation that one to three motorists ran every red light at every major intersection.
She asked herself how much sense it made to proselytize for peace across the universe when it couldn't be realized at home.
Beyond the fear she experienced as she willing stepped into the teleporter, there was no time to register how she actually felt--physically, emotionally, or spiritually--at the instant her atoms disassembled.
She understood in theory how altering even one trivial, mundane variable in the parade of outcomes in the colorful arc of the past could affect this moment to which she hoped to return.
Because of the all-encompassing, overwhelming presence of people and flat digital images, but mostly humans, wherever he went, coming upon a dozen or so deer grazing among the gray stubble of a harvested cornfield at dusk as he drove home from America's heartland was nothing less than surreal.
He made the run on the far post instinctively, and when the ball sailed across the six he caught it on his chest and smashed into the goal before it hit the ground.
He awoke from the faceless dream with an intense desire to write in his journal.
He stood at the reception desk about as dumbfounded as a Great Dane.
Vehemently opposed to sweating profusely, especially for a duration of locomotion lasting more than several minutes, she handed her trainer a booklet of Ponderosa coupons and told her to lose herself for the remainder of the day.
He admired the herculean efforts of the marathoners from the window of his hotel room, his hand holding back the heavy golden shade for a minute or two, before yawning and going back to bed.
He gauged his well being on whether he could sit through a film from beginning to end.
In the spring, yes, the spring, he was able to extend his walks through the neighborhood until they felt at least as long as his life.
He put the sign on the door and jogged down the street for a milkshake just as it began to rain, the rain clouds completely indifferent to his invisible cravings for a universal connection.
Every time he imagined himself standing up there on the podium, he was always wearing the wrong outfit.
By the time the others arrived on the scene, he'd decided to rewrite the ending.
In the aftermath of the opening, he felt a different door closing.
Her unbiased opinion was that there was a certain amount of negotiating that was inevitable, and enjoyable up to a certain point, but well worth the effort, the end result nothing less than the most majestic waffles ever assembled.
If she looked back, and was completely honest with herself, she had to admit that the best days of her life had begun with French toast.
Yes, a certain amount of frustration was unavoidable given the nature of this particular project, but he was learning how to make the pancakes go further.
He adjusted the wig.
She requested another hit.
He chose the leopard skin pattern.
Later, much later, after the book had come out, his attorney admitted that the dream defense had been risky from the start, but a challenge he'd been thrilled to embrace, believing that the jury possessed a better grasp of psychology than quantum mechanics.
The combined effects of her late-morning dream, which by now was only the vague outlines of a one-act play she couldn't recall--a muted, faded drama she had perhaps never seen but had only heard from the vestibule of her youth--and the malaise of a Sunday afternoon, which she recognized as a remnant from her pollen-filled Catholic childhood, almost always resulted in an anxious desire to go for a walk through the neighborhood in search of what felt missing, as if she would know it when she saw it while each twig, each stone, the anemic lawns, each porch, each storm-dirtied house, the dull cars parked along the curb, the abandoned toys, each stride, each swing of her arm served to rebuild her confidence.
The effects of the dream persisted well into the afternoon like a determined clump of yellow crocuses inconspicuously thrusting upward toward an ambiguous, noncommittal cornflower blue sky, disrupting an unnoticed arrangement of pale, dead, matted leaves at the base of a telephone pole, something only an artist or photographer would catch, the feeling of a lack, of missing a flight, of losing a wallet, of being told over the phone that the relationship had run its course growing steadily like the strength of the sun, the shortening of the shadows, until the weight of it, the significance of everything unnameable and beyond reach, hung directly overhead, pushing down on his brow, neck and shoulders while he sat on the patio sipping his coffee.
She paced herself, diligently reading fifteen to twenty a night as she brushed her hair, but the pages appeared to multiple each time she closed the book.
He told himself that it was only hair, that it was a temperate climate, that the shiny button which had gone missing from his shirt had fallen into the cuff of his pants, that the concert series had been a major disappointment.
His haircut was laughable, but she didn't because she didn't feel like sweeping up all the jagged little shards of his ego.
He could still taste the fried Lenten salmon patties of his orange-hued youth.
In trivial conversations with coworkers and friends, she often found herself arguing for and/or against what she believed she believed, depending on how playful or bored she felt in that particular instance, which ultimately diluted her beliefs.
He understood that his current definition of humanity would be stretched by ongoing cybergenetic investigations.
He sometimes wondered what his face looked like illuminated by the glow of the computer screen in the early morning while the house was still dark and the neighborhood murmured and tossed and turned as it roused itself from sleep and the donuts arrived at Quality Dairy.
When she walked into the meeting, all sidebars ceased; she held them there, in that moment, as if she had pressed pause, savoring her power.
Something odd was happening during the night, the resultant outcome extremely vivid dreams (some rearrangement of the vase of flowers, mostly tulips [which was how he thought of reality, and therefore memory] which reversed itself ever so slightly, although never completely, in the morning, like a glass half-full of water being picked up and set down on the opposite side of the night stand by a ghost, leaving him with a vague sense of having been manipulated by internal and external forces to which he had never been formally introduced).
After cutting through all of the red tape, he discovered red velcro.
Whenever he cut through the downtown hotel lobby, he felt like he was crossing Limbo, the antechamber of his own personal hell, perhaps.
The gray dome of weather made him feel like a trilobite.
It was with a sense of relief that he welcomed the dormant part of his imagination's takeover of his life.
She was coo coo for Coco Puffs; it wasn't a reach.
He only ever made calm, exacting movements for fear of stressing the fibers of his clothing.
He was so angry that he sped home and tore up the winning lottery ticket literally right in front of her face.
She rolled her eyes as the sack race contestants bounded toward the finish line like frenzied salmon plunging against the rapids.
The appearance of his fingernails was an indicator of his emotional well being.
How could she pull off a major intervention, bringing the tribe back to a sacred place, if the central component of the plan--the earplugs specifically manufactured for blocking all of the bullshit--hadn't already been properly distributed and inserted?
His inability to take himself too seriously was his best attribute, a gift that lifted the veil , allowing him to see behind the world wide hologram.
Her disillusionment was complete and, thus, she boycotted eating wavy potato chips.
In the photo, he is holding a photo of a photo of himself in a photo.
As she activated the toaster, she thought back to a group of school children she had seen running down the street--recognized them as her kindred spirits--and said to herself, "Tough shit if it's the last Pop Tart."
He scoffed at people who ascribed moral judgments or pop psychology to walking with one's gaze on the ground; it was just another choice, a different perspective.
She turned her anger inward, adding extra sugar to her sugar-coated cereal.
His disgust and contempt for those reckless bastards disturbed the delicate balance of his afternoon tea.
In the good, although often misinterpreted, company of Charles Baudelaire, she believed that Ennui was the most  insidious, ravenous foe, far worse than any virus or malware imaginable.
He maximized his consumption of Happy Meals with the efficiency of our unlikely hero, the shrew.
The very thought of reaching out to her fellow cat lovers made her grimace.
His donuts were now part of an uninvited history.
She slipped.
Vacuuming this priceless shag carpet would have to wait until he was clean-shaven.
She owed him nothing, but he refused to accept it.
Each morning as he peered into the swirling chaos of his mind, he wondered about the probability of isolating the same sentence ad infinitum and shivered.
Her poetry served as a conservative, right wing detection matrix.
His French dictionary couldn't make up for his lack of a grasp of colloquial expressions.
She enjoyed her French toast in the wake of conquered adversities.
He set his bracket down on a park bench, placed a rock upon it, and calmly walked away.
She found the place mats disconcerting.
Listerine's claim to a deeper clean directly influenced his decisions.
Like a beekeeper, he calmed the hive of his apprehension (his mother's trait) with the masking smoke of Stoicism (his father's trait).
They couldn't sabotage her confidence, or good mood; she would thrive like a stubborn hedge of roses in the Valley of Ashes.
The fact that when he looked in the mirror, he still wasn't the spitting image of Ric Ocasek, despite all of the brushing and blow drying--and the skinny tie--was the source of many crestfallen mornings.
When the doorbell rang is when she would close the bathroom door.
He liked airports, naively romanticizing every interesting possibility in life patiently waiting to connect with a flight.
She wouldn't look at him because her eyes were set to incineration.
Her blog where she collected bits she overheard people saying wasn't going so well because her hearing wasn't so hot.
He pictured a mountain of frosted Mini Wheats the size of Mount Holly and knew that in some way it represented his life.
She was intelligent enough to know that at the very least several nations withheld vital information because it compromised sensitive intelligence operations.
He didn't understand why cool shoes enhanced a dull weekend, but he understood that they did.
He had to pay attention in the spring because there was more shit on the sidewalks than on a farm.
She viewed her world through the prism of her children.
The other shoe perpetually loomed in the balance, only ever halving that precarious distance, but the one on the ground with which he had somehow managed to form a solid pact had become a better fit.
She smiled to herself as she dropped the mail on her new desk in her new office which afforded an incredible view of the city thinking, "I will run this place in a manner better than anyone else has ever approached; I will make the world a better place."
Endorphins kicked in whenever he walked up through downtown early in the morning, toward the rising sun, with or without a travel mug of coffee in his hand--it didn't matter.
While mosquitoes were a nuisance, he was more concerned with their collective thoughts; he sensed a conspiracy.
She vowed never to take another four-martini selfie in the pink room.
He recognized that the other impresarios in his dreams were extensions of himself.
She couldn't bring herself to admit she was addicted to sunlight.
Relatively simple machinery, like a parking meter, tested his resolve.
There were times in this technologically driven world when her resistance slipped and the flat screen image of a thing made more sense to her than the actual thing itself.
He felt buoyed to the ceiling in the hubbub of a coney island.
It wasn't her favorite play--was tedious, infuriating beyond endurance, in fact--but the beautifully starched and coiffured waiters in tuxedos (the Great Gatsby Collection) carrying silver trays of pink adult smoothies at the intermission made up for everything in life.
He noticed that his parents always made a sound, a double "m," before they said, "Goodbye," on the phone--echoed it after his mother hung up to experience how it felt.
Her personality was a magic wand, infusing color and helium into the gray, flaccid balloon lives of everyone she met.
After much deliberation--after feeling conflicted for years--he gave in; it turned out that walking away was an option.
Her superior preparations neutralized their vitriolic campaign to assassinate her character.
She had been born with enough determination for them all.
He rallied despite the psychic crush of record-breaking snowfall.
The Suave skin solutions solved her problem.
Everyone behaved the same, no one had aged, a muted sorrow manifested itself as shadow--like the narrowing, dimming screen of an old TV--and for the first time, he could see his whole life in color.
She angered the chairman; it gave her strength.
He didn't know, and he couldn't be sure: the dream had been that lucid.
They had reached an understanding, but it flowed through his fingers like water.
She would have been the first to tell you that she didn't give a damn about Justin Bieber.
He had a pleasant conversation on the elevator, albeit a little awkward, with the security escort.
She knelt under the weight of too many lessons.
The deeply saturated vibrancy of the afternoon sky matched the hue of his vest, seemed like a by-product of his imagination.
Standing still as possible on the footpath so as not to startle the young deer, she realized that it wasn't a messenger; it was waiting for a message.
All symbols pointed to him.
How, she wondered, could one discover the antidote if the poison remained so elusive.
He left the game on downstairs during lovemaking because after crossing a certain line it became conceivable that the roaring fans were cheering his performance.
Ultimately, his legacy would revolve around chocolate pudding, primitive robotics and practices in the mainstreaming of social networking interventions.
On the first day of spring, her biorhythms performed a horizontal flip, as if her moods were being Photoshopped.
Although he was totally uninterested in the subject, especially in breakfast terms, his expertise lay in toast reform.
The approval of the previews for all audiences only instilled a semblance of confidence and well-being within her.
He peered into the canyon of disconnect between their lives and the war and vowed to become a better listener.
No longer preoccupied with sex, she replaced her former anxiety with a preoccupation of the absence of her preoccupation with sex.
Secretly, he was pleased that Paramore was featured on the soundtrack, and longed to dye his hair.
After the semi fell on her car in the second act, the uncommonly frigid theater of winter weather didn't bother her one iota.
He worried that the next generation would be offended that he enjoyed their music and slang as much as they did.
From the rooftop, he looked out over the city, his eyes following an undulating wave of pigeons on the jet stream between the buildings as he contemplated the imminent, disturbing loss he felt certain to experience when physical mail no longer arrived in a three-dimensional mailbox.
She often thought about the active American voice.
He didn't want to believe that the thoughts which floated through his mind like space junk were the debris of a well-ordered universe because it contradicted his belief in chance and chaos.
Morally, it was indefensible, but the board was morally bankrupt; her confidence soared.
She was so cynical, she wouldn't eat the marshmallow hearts in a bowl of Lucky Charms,  her favorite cereal.
Even though the modern complexities of a car were completely foreign, he felt confident that he could skillfully drive one over a cliff, which, he believed, would uncomplicate most of his problems.