≥- FUnny how things come full oval. Not circle, of course, cuz nothing ever comes around to the exact same point. But things do come around, if you’re as patient as Neptune. For example, I scheduled my fifteen minutes for 10:20 today, but it didn’t occur to me that that would kind of overlap with my Classic Breakfast (turns out it’s just scrambled eggs and toast, for seven dollars—good! but not cheap!) at BRewed Cafe. What’s elliptical about that? Well because I used to come here in the nineties, when it was called Brewed Awakenings and you could smoke in cafes, and you might have a muffin or possibly a bagel, but not an actual seven dollar breakfast for chrissake. And you wrote in a red spiral notebook about loneliness and how it glows on you like warm massage oil. And then the intervening years, ravaged by your marriage, when you tried to recapture that glow by going to the same places, but the same places weren’t the same. And then all but giving up, until a series of small disasters (who are growing into quite lovely young ladies, thank you very much) and one big disaster led to a lot of long walks and a book by a girl named Dorothea that’s even older than your anodyne memories, and that led to seeing textures just maybe slightly differently, and being simultaneously more annoyed with and more compassionate towards younger people, including your own ghost, and suddenly you found a new rhythm, a new routine, and part of it involves coming to quote unquote Brewed Cafe and getting eggs because while you can’t EXACTLY afford it, you kind of can, which is astonishing enough in itself, but also there’s the fact that your tallest most elegant daughter who is nonetheless hesitant and still trying (maybe not even consciously yet) to find her own voice, and meanwhile she breaks off mid-internet-meme-based-sentence, breaks off with an air laugh because she can’t quite commit to her own utterances yet because they’re not fully her own utterances yet, is practicing Capoeira with some people who are also more expensive than mine used to be, but seem pretty much OK as people go. You are finding new places to go, even and possibly especially when they’re in the same cartographic location as the old places, and you’re not trying so hard to squint and scrunch up your face and make them the old places anymore, and so they can actually exist and be the places that they are--see? it’s ovoid--, and you can be in them, and that’s by god a privilege. Thank you, whoever you are or aren’t, for giving me breath and legs for enough more days in a row that this could happen to me. I’ll try to do something cool with it. But I swear to god if this plastic-glasses-faced khaki-pants-wearing I’m just going to go ahead and say it HIPSTER in the next room on the couch (of course) doesn’t stop giggling at his imaginary friend while he holds his fucking retarded rectangle in front of his face while he pretends he has a real friend to go to a cafe with, I swear to god I’m going to fucking explode. Just kidding. I’m not going to explode. I’m just going to scowl a lot, and hope that my negative energy wafts over by him like cigarette smoke used to do in these places, conveying messages no one would ever dare to say to another human being face to face. But that was before we had phones to keep from having to say stuff to each other face to face. Now we don’t need smoke OR negative energy--we can just turn on a screen and pretend everything’s copacetic. Right? What is this, some kind of failing old man comedy routine? What’s the deal with these CELL PHONES??? Notice how I spelled it with two ells, showing how out of touch I am. THe old man is like the dog. Hovering just beneath the threshold of human comprehension. He knows to say the words “cell phone” but he doesn’t know how to spell it wrong correctly, and he absolutely can’t say it casually enough, because he’s trying to say it casually. His self-analysis even misses the mark--debating about the words “cell phone”? What is this, nineteen ninety fuck? Two ladies almost as old as I feel just walked in. I haven’t slept in two nights, one says. But this is perfect, she says, selecting the table by the window. Perfect. I love them. They’re ugly (like me) and I love them. Everything that you’ve been complaining about that we helped you fix, you’re now complaining about. The other one says. The perfect one speaks in response, and starts crying. You need to stop. You need to pull your shit together and at least stop crying while you’re sitting with me. I can’t listen to this right now. Says the other one. They’re going to try to work it out. THe crying one is scared. I’m a little girl (she’s clearly nothing of the sort), I’ve never been--on my own. Well at least they’re talking to each other, instead of talking to stupid dumb retarded fucking rectangles.