One day I kicked back and smoked some fictitious
grass and wondered if Australian fruit bats are really bats at all. I stared out the
window, eating dusty grapes, listening in on the conversation of the
couple next door:
“Hey, I’m gonna be sad and then I want you to make me laugh” Mumble, mumble, sniffle and guffaw.
Later, at the coffeehouse, I studied the performance-art -woman against the wall. She stood very still while someone played Gone With the Wind across her half-dressed body. Would she be able to keep this up for three and a half hours?
A patron with a goatee drank non-alcoholic mixed drinks and popped candy placebo drugs. The woman beside him was weeping and slipping off the barstool. He said to her, “I never lie to you, I just allow you to misunderstand me.”
The slipping woman wore a T-shirt with the word “Maudlin” plastered boldly, in neon, across the front. She was recovering from an accidental acid trip, which she blamed on a furious battle with pica.
A small child approached me and asked to shine my shoes. When I looked down I found the shoes had been replaced with someone else’s.