i ordered a coffee at wayne's coffee because my hands were freezing and then sat down at the table right next to the counter which turned out to be an ideal spot to plot to steal a pastry from the counter. there was no one at my back and a column that halved the counter, on the other side of which the employees lingered; there was one 30 something schlub and 4 or 5 blonde girls scattered about. and i was sitting there reading on the road by jack kerouac, really ready to hate it half out of insecurity and half because i'm inclined to disrespect narratives and all that active living because i'm really a homebody. and his prose is so wild and fresh, even today, the best kind of comic book punctuation, and i'm feeling very stale and absurd and overwrought plotting for this macaron. i'd settled on the vanilla macaron that was sticking up on the left side of the little glass bowl.

but i had so many problems. it's amazing how a little plot like this is foiled by the meanderings of fate. people kept coming in, though it was nearly empty. and there was a door to the kitchen on the far side that'd have a clear view of me and my arm. and there was a woman sitting 10 feet to my right who looked sour but eager and extremely willing to have a conversation and not that interested in her paper and whose wandering eyes would sink the whole enterprise. and so i felt very baroque emotions for the complexity of the set up, and found meaning in how my cellphone had forgotten the date and time, so it was 1:22AM on January 4th, 2006, and which i kept thinking was vibrating but was actually just a quiver in my thigh. the whole situation was so bombastic, an exquisite scaffolding of meaninglessness, compared to the absurdly active world i was reading about, all external, hardly a moment for reflection when nothing was not totally new, when the whole world wasn't right there in the horizon, ever moving, and blinding you or freezing you in the night -- you know what i mean, just that he's exposed to the raw immensity of it all.

and it's all the more embarrassing because i feel like i'm imitating that falling-forward writing of his.