Thoughts on consumption

I wish I had some popcorn. Maybe I will eat some pretzels in lieu of it. But that would practically be like eating rice cakes instead of what you really fancy.

I like eating popcorn because you can eat a lot of it with little consequence. (Except when you bite down on a kernel). And the repetitiveness of it — popping one fluffy piece after the other — takes your mind off things.

I wonder how much popcorn you would have to eat to actually get full. A pound or two? At any rate, I don’t have any.

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A customer is casting a spell at the Starbucks counter. Listen to her conjure. The barista is spellbound! The pastries, they glaze over…

Sunday morning at Charlie Frias

Up ahead I see a man lounging on the pavement in shorts — no shoes, no socks, no shirt. Leaning up against a utility box, he is a white man tanned browner than a band aid. His feet nearly reach the curb, so I step off my bike and wheel it gingerly past him. We exchange good mornings, and I hop back on and head toward Tropicana Avenue to hang a left.

It’s warm out for my first trip to Charlie Frias Park in Las Vegas. Riding on sidewalks is legal here, so I take advantage of it sometimes when the streets have no bicycle lanes.
Continue reading “Sunday morning at Charlie Frias”

An uptick in butterflies

The butterfly was not a butterfly but two fallen leaves.

I had been seeing butterflies a lot lately, and so I thought this was yet another encounter.

Recently my local Cooperative Extension made an announcement on Facebook that there was an uptick in the insects’ numbers in the Las Vegas area. Now I wish I had read it.

I wondered if it had something to do with climate change, although the Extension had an optimistic tone in sharing the news. Continue reading “An uptick in butterflies”

My bicycle is my primary ride

I had a sort of outdoorsy conversion experience a couple of months ago after a drunk driver plowed into my beloved Nissan Versa and splattered it like a pinata all over the road near my house, leaving it totaled.

My awakening, so to speak, didn’t stem from the fact that I had a near-death experience or anything of that sort. In fact, the collision occurred at around 3 a.m. when I was in my bed sleeping. No, my shift was driven by my subsequently becoming a pedestrian / bus commuter, and then, soon after, a bicyclist — by choice, meaning I opted against getting another car. Continue reading “My bicycle is my primary ride”

Two Eggs

First of all, the eggs in my dream were not in their carton. They stood upright, transfixed inside my fridge, side by side as if a married couple on their porch.

Who knows what they were looking at? Perhaps each other.

Observing them, they struck me as enigmatic, and so of course I thought of that painting American Gothic. Continue reading “Two Eggs”

Disturbances

I like when I deliberately make a weird noise, and my cat in turn studies me quizzically.

Before too long she goes back into repose, and then I go and make another strange sound.

By the third or fourth time, my cat’s patience has worn thin, and her curiosity gets the better of her. She decides to leap onto the couch to investigate.

But there is nothing there to discover. In fact, neither of us can glean anything further about these unusual disturbances.

So it just goes to show that I am not the smarter of the two species.

It wasn’t really meat

The woman behind the counter said “pork” when citing the “pork,” “chicken” when mentioning the chicken stand-in and shrimp in reference to the shrimp replacement, without flinching.

This was an Asian vegan eatery, and she acted as if she believed herself. O, there was “beef” in the rice dish I ordered, as well. Anyway, the woman reminded me of Mrs. Baylock from the original Omen. I wondered if she delighted in her ruse. She also reminded me of Klimt’s women, or a Picasso sketch — I’m talking about those 1940s lithograph studies.

Overall, she was friendly but had Mrs. Baylock teeth and an omnivorous grin.