Run-On Occurences

Well, mostly I have been going grudgingly up my six flights of stairs ten times a day and swimming back and forth through water that makes my cheeks drier than bark.  Anne and I had an Art Party and painted skinny birds and fat monsters on twiggy branches and hung them from the wall on string and clothespins.  I turned the TV off and said to it: "I wish you didn't exist." But then we got talking about Top Chef, and I wanted so badly to turn it on, I had to pour another glass of Sarah's Sangria and think about real things.  Then Anne slept on the couch and smelled steeped fruit all night while I dreamt I was swimming through red apples and dark water.

My dad told me they are switching to satellite cable in February and then no one will have to pay someone else for their hundreds of channels, and I wonder what this means for the good people at Comcast and Cox.  I saw Vicki Christina Barcelona and I wanted to be a painter and make frenzied pieces and be misunderstood, until I realized I actually just want to be understood and maybe misunderstood people are simpler than they seem because of that same desire.

I wonder if words and paint and our sordid attempts at understanding difficult things make ourselves more difficult to be understood.  What if everyone was quiet?  What if there was a place in which you had to be totally silent, and you could look at people, but that was the only thing to do?  Would everyone think everyone else was artists or boring?

A teenage mom in Daz Bog ate an entire pint of ice cream in one sitting and caught me looking at her, and then I had to pretend like I was admiring her baby, when really I was in awe of her thin blue limbs and their creamy intake.  I had to go to the bathroom.  First, I had to grovel for the key to the toilet kingdom, which was an 8-inch round 10-inch long PVC pipe, and then there was nowhere to put it but on the floor, and the whole experience was gross and I made the Sour Grapes Face at myself in the mirror.

I walked past the ice cream queen and tried to smile again at her, but when I sat down, Sarah said,

"What's wrong?"

And I angled my neck towards the PVC key laying yonder and said:

"Bathroom Key."

Sarah saw its huge roost on the counter and her eyes got more white and saucer-wide and she said:

"That's huge."

Then she wrote her legal papers and I thought about reading instead of reading and we looked out onto 9th Avenue at two women holding hands and the late sun crisping the roof of King Sooper's and we thought of places and people we might rather and might rather not be.