and then they kiss.

(the following was originally intended as a letter to someone. as a result, some of it might not makes sense to some of you. not as a result, some of this might not make sense to some of you.)

remember all those sunflower seeds i ate on (superbowl) sunday? well i think that was largely the cause of my mouth/throat/head soreness yesterday. and today, an even stranger result: my tongue is peeling! it's as if i had sunburnt it. imagine me lying on the roof with one of those aluminum sunflectors on my chest, my tongue hanging out of my mouth. or, even stranger: imagine me eating so many fucking sunflower seeds!

yesterday i searched for "salt poisoning" on the internet. obviously eating salty stuff until your mouth hurts doesn't qualify, but i did find some strange things. people who want babies dead can poison them to death quite simply and without traces of poison; all it takes is about two teaspoons of salt. for an adult, it would take forty teaspoons, which (i used an online converter) is a little more than four fifths of a cup. four shots of salt. mmmm.

(unrelated note: i recommend that if we ever write a song about new york, we title it "the big rock candy apple." on another unrelated note, we need to build a much better bar-trivia team. i'm afraid you're getting the cut, darling; you and i know all the same stuff. time to diversify.)

remember in the first scene of that severence film when those girls were speaking romanian or magyar and we had to keep playing it over and over because we thought it might just be english with a really thick irish accent? well, i need not comment on our mental shortcomings, but the "severence effect" is alive and in full effect here in the city that never sleeps. on the train this morning i was sitting by two chicks (butter pecan rican, perhaps) who seemed to be babbling absolute nonsense. after about eight straight minutes of listening intently to their conversation, the world seemed to pull itself instantaneously back together (image: exploding head, slow motion, reverse) to uncover the horrifying truth: they were speaking english!

upon rereading, that was a stupid story. but i'm going to leave it in so that this paragraph makes sense. this is the last sentence of this paragraph.

anyone who knows how to do the shing-a-ling, the skate, the boogaloo, or the philly please get in touch with me. also if you have night terrors and want to tell me what that's like. i think i've been dancing in my sleep. this is at least what my hair, sheets, tent, bedside lamp, and reliable eyewitnesses seem to be implying. for those of you in birmingham: that town needs a volcano. i just found an article i wrote at some point in my rememberless life that says exactly why. provided upon request.

it's been in the teens every morrning this week, and that's before accounting for the wind. i like how the bitter cold makes normal humans moody and unpredictable. (i'm immune since i don't have feelings.) watching coworkers, roommates, and people on the streets see-saw between angry sensitivity and hopeless malaise has become my great pleasure. another is watching sleeping people wake up at a stop on the train and frantically try to figure out, in their sleepish daze, whether or not they have missed their stop. here's an example from this morning that combines the two:

a man is sleeping on the train. he wakes up at the chambers stop and it takes him a full minute of looking in all the wrong directions to realize that he has missed his stop. he looks at the man sitting beside him, whom he apparently doesn't know, and says "why didn't you wake me up?"

"what? i'm not your daddy," the guy beside him says.

"well you sure look like my daddy. that horrific tweed getup. and you're both dead, too."

"that doesn't even make sense," says unsuspecting man as he gets up to move away.

"oh, yeah," says angry guy, standing to meet him, "neither does this."

and then they kiss.