chase scenes serial #14
a sprite, one soy latte‡, for which I coyly asked if Coffee Break had soy milk. Although in Bismarck, Rapid City’s ‘simple’ cousin, and we had not even seen a grocery store from which one might buy soy milk, the man behind the counter, probably in his early to mid forties (40s), was pierced beyond the capacity one might have to recognize his human form. One would think that such a man would carry this elixir, or at the very least, some soy milk syrup. When I ordered the drink at last he asked me in mild shock if I did not want some flavour. I said no. But immediately a textual theme was cemented for this description. I was ably prepared to remark, perhaps in passing, about the hundreds of syrups bedecking the shop. Perhaps I would have even tied it into the man’s obsessive, no, apparent obsessive behaviours foregrounded on his half-metal visage. But now I am free to discuss the intrusion of syrup into this man’s world view. It was in fact the lynchpin of fine coffee beverage drinking. Every person that then came in proceeded to order bizarre concoctions which have been more eruditely satirized in other avenues by intellectuals such as Steve Martin and probably someone on the
‡ It is hard to write the way I like to write with a cat on my lap. I prefer to have the page in my lap, which is easier if I am writing in a hard book, but these proofs I have been writing on now seem rigid enough, just so, to sustain my light miniature script. There are twenty-three (23) sheets of paper here, one third (1/3) of the final number of sheets that were left in the notebook, if I had written one less it would have been more difficult to write here. As it is I am having to place the papers on a table and reach over the cat with my right hand to write. I am continuously petting her with my left hand so that she won’t leave, or so that she won’t attempt to get onto the table to eat the beets which are growing there. I found that my ideal setup for composition was at a coffeeshop in Athens, GA where they had small, relatively low circular tables. I would pull my chair so far up to the table that its central support pole was immediately between my thighs. The table was so small that it almost disappeared beneath my open book. It, no, the level of it was somewhat higher than my lap but actually this was a more effective level for the curvature of my arm and the angle of my wrist, and I could write smaller because it was slightly closer to my eyes. The table was so small however that I did not have room for my soy latte, served in a clear glass stein, which I had to rest on a neighbouring table when one was available.
