Minimum Fuss

A bench by the fountains and the sun for breakfast. A sweating egg in a black leather jacket landed on my right and pointed a camera at the crow on my left. He asked permission for its picture and wondered about its habits. I ate a cheese and chicken sandwich and believed I mustn't move. The egg told the crow it had great feathers. It nearly moonwalked. He compared it to a jackdaw but needed it to know he didn't mean jackdaws were better. It bobbed its head and blurted yeah and flew away. He leaned in and showed me his pictures. I nodded and said decent. He looked at me. I chewed through the silence. He compared the rear of a passing woman to the rear of his girlfriend in the mid-seventies. I got the feeling they were no longer together. I didn't want him to ask me who's removing my trousers these days and he didn't. I chewed.

If You Don't Count The Duplicates

We saw the oldest thing we will ever see. It was some white powder at one end of a clear plastic tube. White powder from space and the past, back when the past was an enormous now and space was wall-to-wall everywhere. The tube was on a stand in a perspex hutch. Other perspex hutches stood to its left and right, housing their own big and small things from the universe. We were in a fucking museum, is what I should be saying. Until that moment, the oldest thing I'd ever seen was a group of kind and intelligent South American blobs using telepathy to tell me all about the mushrooms I'd just eaten. I could tell they were South American by their hats. So this powder being there all warningless and tiny was a nice surprise. A lot of very young people added fizz to the experience through inexplicable roaring. I don't have the official figures but I think there were four million of them, and it was my birthday and I forgot to get a vasectomy again. There ought to be booths for this kind of thing. Maybe I'll do it myself with a craft knife and a couple of bulldog clips. It's important to think about the future. I've been practising, which is why I haven't updated in a while. I've reached no conclusions. I still have a job.
The Pulitzer Smackdown is going fairly well and people are being nice about my efforts. For which I thank them. A lot of the stuff there is good. And are you well?