so naturally we find ourselves at rao’s coffee, drinking dirty chais we cannot afford, thinking about going into the bathroom to roll ourselves a mugwort cigarette and take a piss, leaving our laptop unattended, ripe for the stealing, so we can enjoy this simple pleasure, this tastier tobacco alternative which is neither addictive nor additional, chemically, it’s just mugwort, all it does is smell like cannabis and make you feel like you smoked cannabis yesterday and the high wore off really quickly but left your brain with its higher functions. so that’s nice.

we commence with a series of facts from last year which we do not at all want to forget, because they reminded us, briefly, of our ability to know them while we knew them, and we don’t really know them anymore, but will again, because we are reminding ourselves, and will remind ourselves constantly. things like the death of gary coleman, and how it made us feel a thing which no word or phrase in english is adequate in describing. not all respectful sorrow, not all irreverence, not all fear-of-being-either. just weirdness. like we were supposed to open a door to get to the other side of understanding it but we were in fucking outer space.

or the dread of knowing we didn’t follow the deepwater horizon story closely enough in its early days, dismissing it as another bit of miserable wartime correspondence on the frontlines of this modern hell, only to find out how right we were. how sickly, sickeningly right. this is identical to the dread of remembering the volcanic ash cloud from days before that, which in hindsight looks like a warning. was it really that foreboding? maybe it was so foreboding we didn’t even know. even though that makes no fucking sense whatsoever. it’s not like we could’ve known, or could know now what’s coming. maybe the time’s soon coming when we’ll know what’s coming for us. one of these days.

we enter, rao’s, bathroom, realizing mid-piss that throwing our coat over our laptop is not a crime deterrent, because the people who steal laptops are the type that not only look under jackets, they are also the type that notice, out of the corner of their eyes, when their marks, sitting in the most secluded corner of the coffee shop on such a slow day, get up to take a piss, furthermore they’re the type that are delighted with a jacket to put back over the scene of the crime, because when we come out of the bathroom and look underneath it and find nothing, we have wasted a small but maybe crucial amount of time with which we could’ve caught an asshole running away with our laptop, jacket or no jacket.

we begin line for coffee, asking for a warm up hours later, which is bad manners, but ours is delightful lacking, the type which makes it easier to do things that are free because they are free, waiting for the only free bus in town because it is free and we don’t care where we go because we won’t buy anything anyways, the type of lacking which reminds us of our complete equilibrium, which makes us love the recession for extremely shallow reasons, like its timely murder of the passive voice in spoken american english.

we start on our air mattress, for which our souls have settled until they get back on their feet again. one of these days.