Tuesday, August 31, 2010

The problems from the North are showing up the South

"The problems from the North are showing up," she tells me, this freckled preceptor, "but they are manifesting in the South." Despite the obvious clues, shape-shifting, chairs with a grainy texture like gumdrops, I think I am awake and already look for geographical interpretation. Anything external in fact will do, because I am still fearful of the other possibility.
This message is how she interrupts her own song- which she sings through her smile- right into my face. We're sitting only one foot apart, this is a known and stated fact of this world, it is one foot exactly, as measurable from tire to curb by the driving tester. Somehow her banjo still fits between us, and the observer by my side still holds my hand without having to crank his arm in a shoulder-popping position to do this. Dreamspace is slightly more defiant that way, refusing to give up on what is rightly possible just because of simple matters of matter and mass.
By the way, I am pleased to see her even if she scares me, but the message is muddled by the medium or the fact that I want more song, more lulling, want both hands impossibly held. I can sing along to her silly song, it repeats "You can't cut the grass in the wintertime."
I guess I need to sleep faster, because someone needs the pillows. Waking this time feels like a pop.

Monday, August 02, 2010

Love the Flava'



"Is the chai sweetened?" I ask the girl behind the counter.

She is puzzled for a second, not like now, as she adjusts her spiky pink ponytail and betrays her roommate's reality TV addiction while the guy with red dreadlocks and an officer's cap outdoes hers with an even more shameful tale of someone else's affection for "Flava' of Love" repeats.

I think she wants to give me the right answer, which brews inside her for a bit until she comes out with this:

"No, it's not sweetened. I mean, we don't add any sweetener to it, but it has a natural sweetness. It's not very sweet." So I order it.

It tastes like ice cream.