Suddenly, I heard Kevin gasp. We stumbled blindly toward his voice until echolocation led us to a vine-covered mausoleum. The script was crumbling, but the names were unmistakable.
I took a train every morning in Budapest to a little café called Budapest Bagel: a bar and a bagel shop where I somehow received college credit to write short stories and read novels following a longstanding expatriate tradition.
D.A.R.E. to explore the unexplored. Here be monsters and suddenly we’re the first ones, wading through myth and legend and finding freedom, happiness, and warmth. We don’t see dragons or lose our grades. We don’t get pregnant. We aren’t shoving suppositories up our asses à la Trainspotting or whoring à la Requiem for a Dream. It’s just nice. Warm and cozy and soft. One of us uses the word “underwhelming.”
6. Bribes are more than okay. I’ve trained my kids to think that tic-tacs are the holiest of grails in terms of possible rewards for good behavior.
So I scoop the Cherry Pineapple Parfait, listen to Katy Perry, and wonder if any of my effort will ever make any difference or if I’ll always be as powerless and obsolete as a plastic bag drifting through the wind.
“This is not Burger King. You don’t have it your way. You take it Bud’s way.” This was true. There were two items on the menu, a “hamburg” and a “cheeseburg.”
No one believes it. I didn’t believe it, until I grabbed the bumper, tried to lift, and realized I didn’t even know how to grip the thing. I’m writing about an experience I still don’t fully understand, and the sharing of it is even more incomprehensible.
It is that stillness I search for in the transcendental north. The quiet amidst the buzz of living that I haven’t discovered in the nooks and crannies of my own hum of days.
Then the boxes are labeled and slid into the corner, waiting ominously to be lugged onto a trailer. They speak a steady word: change is coming; change is here.
The water of Lake Superior is bone-chillingly lovely in a way that could only be considered refreshing to someone whose brutalized bones could use a good, algid chill.
