In real time

Because this blog has some, er, autobiographical elements, people I know sometimes find out something notable going on in my life via a blog post. But there often are so many delaying factors to their attaining that information and to their bringing it up to me that, when they do bring it up to me, it often feels curiously like they are discussing a past version of my self. It's a little like having a very old friend, who was perhaps closer to you when you were very young, who says things like "Remember how you used to catch lizards all the time? Do you still do that?"

"No, that sort of faded out when I turned eight."

"Well you don't have to be all sarcastic about it!"

"I wasn't being sarcastic. Hey, wait, come back." But maybe I don't say "Come back." with very much vigor.

And why, you wonder, am I so sensitive about a childhood catching lizards?

I'm not!

Acquaintances, co-workers, friends might come up to me and say "I can't believe you're going to Walt Disney World!" And because I am very caught up on my blog at that point, and have written great sheafs of blog posts all lined up to drop each morning for weeks to come, and because those people maybe only occasionally get caught up on my blog and so are reading through a bunch of old posts, their information is incredibly dated. So I find myself saying things like "Well, yes, I went to Disney World, but it was just over a year ago now."

"Well you don't have to be all sarcastic about it!"

Did I sound sarcastic there to you?

But the curious thing about my catastrophic back injury of the past two weeks (I am tentatively doing much better thank you) is that every last shred of my being prepared or ahead of time on my blog is gone. Right now there is nothing between me and you. What you read here now is entirely contemporaneous. This is not ideal to me. I like to fuss over and digest everything I write. I prefer my blog to be a kind of thoughtful recent history. It is difficult to have every word I write instantly appear.

Nevertheless there is some small advantage and pleasure to the absolute simultaneity of my writing this exactly in the time it appears before your eyes.

Like what? You ask.

Well, look over to the left. Do you see that?

Normally I'd have to describe that to you! 

We are the tools of the Internet

Traditionally on Sunday, we at clerkmanifesto reflect, or, at least, we pretend to. But holed up as I have been, with a half broke back, in the sensory deprivation tank that is my house, I have done an awful lot of reflecting this week. I lay on ice, popping anti inflammatories like skittles, and told you things the Internet does not like to hear.

What does the Internet not like to hear?

Ah, if I told you that you'd click away from this page before you could even read my answer.

Or, more likely, you'd never have arrived here at all.

Why you are so sad

As a person who has worked a long time in a large (yet almost cozy!) library, one thing I have learned is how when people leave the library, the water closes right over them. The ocean of time obliterates in a quick and tiny splash! Old timers like to occasionally gather in twos and threes to recite the names of former employees partly because they know just how gone they are. When we do this recitation, what we are really saying is, the past did happen. It did!

Yeah, maybe it did, you creatures of the dream world!

All this is a bit on my mind as I come to the end of two weeks off with a bad back. Of course I hope that everything is going terribly at the library; carts and shelving backed up, the machine in chaos every morning, patrons complaining bitterly of poor service, and everyone in a surly mood, but even if everything at the library has completely fallen apart, unlikely as that is, no one is going to be standing around connecting it to my absence. No one is walking around with a scowl saying "Work sucks without him here!" Yeah, I know how it goes. This is why I am so glad I will be back probably in a few days; they'll need me to tell them.

Deprivation

Many years ago I'm pretty sure there was a minor fad for sensory deprivation tanks. The idea was you got into a soundproof and lightproof tank, floated in viscous liquid the temperature of your own body and, deprived of sensory input, you had spiritual visions, or something cool happened, you know, like dreaming. I think there was a movie about it called Altered States. Then later the concept sort of developed into The Matrix, starring Keanu Reeves. The Matrix took a darker view of floating around, sensory deprived in viscous liquid, but it also presented some more exciting possibilities.

Why am I telling you about real and imagined sensory deprivation tanks? Ah, well, with a serious back injury, lying about day after day doing very little for myself but trying to be somewhat comfortable, it's all a little like a big sensory deprivation tank. I float and float and float. Am I having hallucinations, lucid dreams, visions?

No, it's more like The Matrix, I reach out to the Internet with my mind!

Spoiler Alert

All too often here I am afraid I let the cat out of the bag (Hello! If there is a cat in a bag somewhere of course I'm going to let it out!) without giving the due and proper warning. I am talking about spoiler alerts, as in "The cat, in the end, gets out of the bag." It's just that in the heat of the moment I'm all like "So when Charlie finds the golden ticket..." and you're like "Whaaat?! But that is so statistically unlikely!" and I'm like "Ooops!" and it's not like I mean to ruin Where Did You Go Bernadette by telling you Bernadette is alive in an Antarctic research station working on some architecture, it's not like I mean to ruin the surprise party we are all, oh, er, well, so, you see, I just get carried away.

So as a preventative I thought it might be a good idea to gather as many spoilers as I could think of, here, under the careful banner of spoiler alert as a way to sort of safely clear the air. That is why this post is titled "Spoiler Alert", though I suppose I should have explained all this before I ruined Where Did You Go Bernadette, your surprise party, and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

But I still have a couple more spoilers to go so it's not too late for you to close your eyes before I mention that "Rosebud" was his sled.

So, are your eyes all closed? Good. As an aside did you know that more than 99% of my 200 million daily readers read this blog with their eyes closed?

Living is easier that way.

And today's spoiler is:

No, not everyone dies, only those who die before you.

On ice

I lay flat on a slab of ice, anti inflammatories stewing feebly through my body. All movement is a gift. Did you know movement was a gift? Yeah, I would have said something like that too, pretending I know. I will pretend again soon, but now I do know movement is a gift, at least until my ever-taking-it-for-granted-brain rises again. I don't begrudge it. I hear that's how brains are supposed to be. If they didn't take as much as they could for granted we'd all burst at a young age, leaving behind only the blaze marks of desperate poetry. Maybe that's what happens as it is, we just don't recognize it as such while our brains feverishly try to hammer the wild jagged world into something smooth and roundish.

Yeah, good luck with that brain.

And my blog lays flat on its back too, on ice, as I tease it along from a small gaming device that sort of lets me type by thumbs. My blog itself is bedridden, here again today on a kind of drip feed.

Of all things I miss double spacing and bending the most.

So this then is my twitter post, my faithfully sworn 20 foot jog with a broken ankle, my writing without a net. Let us stare at the ceiling and wait to dream again.

One third of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

I just reread the classic children's book Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and was eager to tell you all about it. So I wrote one introductory sentence and then, instead of continuing, I drew a hundred tiny dots on my thumbnail with my pen. Those little blue dots are pretty interesting on my thumbnail and they say to me "I don't like writing book reviews!"

Now that that's out of the way I can say what I came here to say. I love the first third of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. I love it to pieces, which makes it particularly appropriate that my copy is a first edition with all the pages falling out of it. I love that first third so much that even after probably a dozen read throughs I still cry every time Charlie finds a golden ticket.

My god! All that making a small chocolate bar last for a month because it's that precious and rare, and his heartbreaking birthday present of a mere chocolate bar where he doesn't find a ticket just as one would expect and his grandpa's hoarded dime that buys a chocolate bar without a ticket as one would expect, but a little less so, and then finding the ticket only when in an astonishment of good luck, desperately hungry, Charlie finds a bit of money and buys chocolate that he wolfs down without even considering the ticket because he is starving to death. 

To talk about the grab bag of dazzling, imaginative genius, amusing nonsense, and petty, mean-spirited moralism of the last two thirds of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is beyond the purview of this essay and merely makes me want to see if I can draw a nice chocolate bar on the back of my hand.

So how about I leave you here and get to that...

Back options

My back hurts so badly I had to consider several options to keep, or to not keep, my Dimaggiesque daily blog post streak running (I think I am on the verge of passing Wee Willie Keeler's consecutive post streak of 44, or something like that).

Here were my options:

1. Let the blog go mysteriously dark. Listen carefully for the sound of the Internet's heart breaking. Remember that the Internet has no heart. There is just a ball of mirrors where the Internet's heart's supposed to be.

2. Run a repeat.

3. Find something clever I wrote and kept from my youth. Insert "my blog" into the text of it at random intervals.

4. Write a 4-point list of fresh material, but keep the quality down low so as to keep my options wide open for tomorrow.

5. Get all inscrutable.

My fervent belief in Finnegans Wake

I have discussed James Joyce's great masterwork Finnegans Wake here before (Ulysses? Feh!). Sure, at first it was the bizarre novelty of it. And to this date I have only, cumulatively, read eleven pages of it. But once one passes through the I-can't-believe-this-is-a-book phase, the this-is-sort-of-good-in-an-unreadable-but-fascinating-way phase, the look-at-me-I'm-reading-Finnegans-Wake phase, and the why,-he's-very-talented-phase, one comes to the ultimate utility of the great Finnegan's Wake: ballast.

Does what you read define you? Well, that's an easy question, because everything defines you. Emerson said “I cannot remember the books I've read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me.”  which isn't exactly "Our cubehouse still rocks as earwitness to the thunder of his arafatas but we hear also through successive ages that shebby choruysh of unkalified muzzlenimiissilehims that would blackguardise the whitestone ever hurtleturtled out of heaven.", but it makes my point better. And that point is that you are what you read. So if you are a bit over fond of rereading old Dick Francis novels, and the first third of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and random YA Fiction featuring talking dinosaurs, and stories where nice people fall in love or fix the universe or whatever, Finnegans Wake will act like condensed mass, it will hold you ship to the water, it will bleed gravity into every sentence you touch.

Here, check out this random reading list:

Ten favorite novels:

1. The Fulfillment by LaVyrle Spencer

2. Bygones by LaVyrle Spencer

3. Savor the Moment by Nora Roberts

4. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

5. Vision in White by Nora Roberts 

6. Perfect Match by Jodi Picoult

7. Finnegans Wake by James Joyce

8. Twilight by Stephenie Meyer

9. November of the Heart by LaVyrle Spencer

10. Manhunt by Janet Evanovich 


You cannot judge this list. It is impenetrable unless you have read and fully understood Finnegans Wake, which you haven't. So get off your high horse!

Not that you were on one. 

I mean them. You know, they.

Here's another reading list for you:

1. Clerk Manifesto the blog by Feldenstein Calypso

2. Finnegans Wake by James Joyce


I'm just saying, when it comes to your reading, keep everyone confused.

Your wisdom blog

Some people are under the impression that this is a library blog, or maybe it's a moose blog, or perhaps a Dylan blog, or a cooking blog (couldn't you go for some potato taquitos just about now?), or a graffiti blog a Disney blog a grape blog a cat blog a coffee blog a fake blog (ooh, consider that one!) a blog about blogs a writing blog a marketing blog a book blog, or the blog to end all blogs.

But nope, fooled you. It's a wisdom blog! 

Wisdom blogs are where all the big money is these days. 

Yes, you can tweet that if you want.

Yesterday, right here, at this time, the subject of infinite wisdom came up. I had one more little thing to add today before we left it sitting there, on its lonesome mountain peak, quietly radiating peace, at least for awhile, until we decide to visit it again and pepper it with questions it will refuse to answer but that we suspect makes it ever so slightly nervous.

I am willing to accept a glimmer of possibility for all sorts religious constructions from waving chickens over your head to get rid of your sins through prophets flying on miniature horses with the face of a woman and the tail of a peacock to virgin births and enlightenment. 

But I draw the line at infinite wisdom. 

That stuff needs a good fence around it or it gets in everything!

All the answer you will ever need

Let's see, what fascinating library story can I regale you with today?

None, because I am home with a hurt back.

How did I hurt my back?

It was just sort of visited upon me by the gods.

Why would the gods do this?

I don't know. Let us ask the gods.

Hey, gods, why did you visit upon me the hurting of my back?

(please don't say infinite wisdom please don't say infinite wisdom please don't say in...)

Infinite Wisdom.

Oh man. Never ask the gods anything!

Nazi in library!

At my best I love the patrons of my library in the way Jesus was supposed to love everyone. 

No, really, I do. 

I am no particular fan of Jesus, nor do I hold unconditional love for humanity to be the ideal of my passage through life, but that's how it happens sometimes. My heart is wide open. Everyone who walks through the door fills me with an absolute sympathy. I find the most miserable, crustiest of them to be utterly dear. But that doesn't mean these are all good people. No, it doesn't mean that at all.

Tens of thousands of people come through my library. What all darkness is on them, what bloodstains and vast litanies of crimes petty and unforgivable is on them, I do not know. Most of the time I don't want to know. The library is its own ivory tower. We don't offer redemption. We only offer, when we can, all distance and remove, the dream of the mind. I suppose there is hope in that, if you want it.

But occasionally, whether I want to or not, I do know or suspect things about our patrons. Notorious murderers have been regulars at my library. I have seen dark tattoos inscribed into patron's flesh. The ugly misdeeds of others occasionally rise to common currency. And some are quite open about what nastiness circles their heart. For instance, an avid Nazi spends his days at our library. He disappears for a few months at a time for what I assume to be periods of institutionalization, then he takes up his spot at a computer once again. 

Let us call him Clive.

Clive loves our computers and our printer and our copier and our various office supplies. He loves our help. He likes us to see what he's working on. He likes to leave his twisted up documents lying around the computer area for others to find. He likes to mutter darkly about us, I think because we're government employees or Jews, or both. He likes to wander up to that thin line where he might get banned from the library, and then retreat just in time. He is difficult to deal with. He can be very difficult to deal with.

So when I was chatting, during a few quiet moments at the front desk, with my colleague and desk partner of the day, and she saw Clive heading towards us, she went a little ashen. "Oh no!" She muttered with dread. "Here comes Clive." The Nazi was headed our way!

I looked him in the eye, warmly, as he approached, to bring him to my side of the desk. "Hi." I said. "What's up?"

He held out a library card to me. "Someone left this over by the computers." He said.

"Oh. Thanks."

Yes, every once in awhile I love everyone who comes to the library. It is not doctrinal. I don't even really recommend it. It just happens. It's just, what the hell...

Cries

If no one has been up shelving in fiction for awhile you will sometimes find a lot of books scattered on the shelves. It looks pretty much like someone has been roaming through fiction, pulling an occasional book out of its place and setting it face up on a nearby shelf. Or it could be that they're browsing, pulling out interesting books, briefly looking them over, and then, instead of putting them back in the gapped space they created, they make little scatterings of books, like animal marks of their passing, or droppings, or tributes to the god of disorder.

These unshelved books, when I find them, always feel like acts of hostility to me, like finding little notes on the shelves that say "Fuck you".

But I think that really they are cries for help. Horrible cries for help, left anonymously. Mysterious cries for help that, at the same time they cry out, also insulate the crier from the very possibility of being helped.

That explanation is not supposed to cheer you up, in case you wondered.


I was in the teen room and some heavy traffic was going on there back and forth into our meeting room. Each time the door closed it made a terrible screech, like a miserably lonely bird of prey. Among we small group of staff nearby comments were made: "Someone should do something about this door." Was said. It occurred to me that I am someone! So I went and found some WD-40.

It turned out that this particular door had an amazing number of hinges and moving parts. It was full of a nearly impossible amount of possible joins that could create the horrible squeak. So we started applying WD-40 and listening. When we got to the 35th hinge and doused it, all of the sudden the wrenching squeaking cry was gone! Fantastic!

I immediately took the WD-40 to the fiction section and applied it to all the patrons.

Potato taquitos!

Real Recipes for Real People!

Potato Taquitos.

Time:

11 minutes

(for God, chef ruler of the Universe)

or

5 intensely difficult hours 

(for you!)

Ingredients:

Potatoes

Cheese

Oil

Corn tortillas

Pallet of paper towels

Salve

Pantry items

Step 1:

Boil potatoes. 

What variety?

The variety you bought at the store!


Step 2:

Blend cooked potatoes in a food processor or just mash them up with grated cheddar or Parmesan, garlic, salt, olive oil, maybe some lemon or lime juice if you have it.

How much of each for all these?

Look, I could make up amounts, but whatever you do at random will probably turn out better than what I used.


Step 3:

At this point, you should have a modestly gluey mash of potatoes and an already distressing number of dishes to clean. These potatoes, as is, taste pretty good. You might want to cut your losses now and just eat these. No? Okay, but consider yourself warned.


Step 4:

Heat two fingers width of peanut oil in a large frying pan. This will turn out to be a terrible mistake, but it's in this recipe so you're supposed to do it.


Step 5:

Plop a large scoop of potato filling onto a corn tortilla. Then, with the back of the spoon, spread the filling evenly on the whole tortilla to the very specific depth of 11/57 inches thick. For the rest of the world 49 mm thick will work, but not as well. If this recipe does not work out exactly as I say it will come down to depth variations of potato on tortilla and so is not my fault.


Step 6:

Gently roll the tortilla into a tube, like a taquito! Watch in horror as the tortilla rebels against being curved and breaks apart into useless, messy slabs.


Step 7:

Turn down the oil! It is so hot that it's singeing overflying aircraft!


Step 8:

Okay, new plan. We'll make these more like quesadillas!


Step 9:

Make a new layer of potato on tortilla. Press another tortilla on top of it. Perfect!


Step 10:

Put your "taquito" in the oil. Because the searing oil didn't exactly cool down in the two minutes since Step 7, bits of blinding hot exploding particulates will now fly painfully into your face. Swear freely.


Step 11:

If blind seek medical care, if not blind, carry on.


Step 12:

Prepare your second "taquito", then note with alarm the following two things:

The insides of your taquito/quesadilla are somehow sort of oozing out into the oil, and

The top tortilla is no longer flat! It has sort of curled up on itself like a dead spider.


Step 13: 

Flip the taquito thing. How do you do this without burning yourself and losing most of the filling and having the top tortilla all bunched in on itself? Now is not the time for a bunch of affected niceties!


Step 14:

With a metal spatula scrape all the stuff off the bottom of your frying pan. This will be the first of so many times that you have to do this that I will no longer mention it in the steps. Rather I'll just advise you now to do this every minute or two for the next several hours.


Step 15:

Remember that broken mess of an original taquito? You might as well throw that in the oil since the chaos in your frying pan can't get any worse.


Step 16:

Remove your first taquito or whatever it is now (the one you flipped). Set it on a pillow of 20 sheets of paper towels. Oil will still soak through this amount of paper towels, but concern for the environment has prevented me from fully exploring how many paper towels it would really take to prevent this.


Step 17:

Repeat with the oozing, scraping, splattering, blinding yourself process. Don't be gentle with these quesataquitos. You want to cook them into crunchy submission!


Step 18:

At some point, with all the oil and potato filling you will wonder if you can make a potato pancake. Scoop a couple large dollops of batter into the oil and lightly press down.


Step 19: 

When it becomes clear that you can't make potato pancakes because they dissolve in the oil you will need to up the frequency of your pan scraping. Set aside fried bits scraped out onto more forest killing layers of paper towels.


Step 20:

Keep cooking until all tortillas and batter has been used up. Turn off stove.


Step 21:

While waiting for quesataquitos to cool, eat your collected crunchy bits. Extremely delicious, no? Yes they are! You have now consumed the equivalent of two 12 ounce glasses of peanut oil.


Step 22:

Eat what you can of your quesataquitos as they will be no good to anyone in about 45 minutes. If you have anyone in the house or nearby in your neighborhood feed them quesataquitos until there's nothing left in your kitchen that a full container of dish soap and two hours of washing won't take care of.


Step 23:

Figure the nausea will pass in about ten hours, at which point you will crave:

Potato Quesataquitos!

Yum!

Walking dead fines

An occasionally recurring motif at the library, involving certain patrons who feel beset by constant library fines, occurs in the form of a peculiar belief. They decide that they keep paying the same fine over and over. They become convinced that they have paid their late charge, seen it disappear, only to have that same late charge reappear at a later time, sometimes over and over. A zombie late charge, so to speak, laid to rest only to reemerge from its resting place to roam the earth once again, or, at least, to roam our computer system once again.

Everything's possible, and, on the whole, this belief is probably a bit more likely to be true than the one involving real zombies, stumbling through our library, muttering about brains.

Nevertheless it is still not very likely. I can easily think of many vastly more likely explanations for these people's seemingly reanimated fines. And I do think of them. Then I carefully examine the evidence and invariably find a lot of support for one of those explanations.

Such as: 

A similar fine was paid for different books, or 

the book in question was renewed late and paid for and then returned late after that, 

or they only paid half of the fines last time around.

And so on.

And usually when I hit them with a barrage of theories, reassurances, historical accounts, explanations, and evidence, they reluctantly relent. They unbend. They become sort of convinced.

But sometimes they don't.

And who am I to say they are wrong. People believe all sorts of things that seem palpably impossible to me: God had a baby, Republicans aren't evil, non dairy creamer works in a pinch, and, well, I could go on forever, but I don't want to offend anyone. And as I said, who am I to say? What about my own passionate beliefs that defy all logic, run counter to all experience and to all evidence?

Like?

Well, surely the world's all time greatest blogger has at least one!

Dreaming

Oh, here.


I am in a parking lot sitting in the passenger seat, waiting. I turn on the radio and a lovely song is playing:


 Little did we know, that the world was dying.
That the birds outside, they never sing for us.


And I think:
 
I wish that I loved everything.
 
Well, almost everything.

Wind rips face

I have experienced a great variety of worse weather. Colder, windier, snowier, more cruel. But today, as I took my long walk through the city, when the wind gusted to 40 mph and ripped the fine snow off of rooftops and tried to peel the flesh off of my face with it, those fine distinctions of worseness became curiously unintelligible to me. I leaned into the particle blast and plowed on in a confused haze of exhaustion. The city was all around me, going about its normal business, almost oblivious. The sky went from clear blue to dark grey in less than 15 minutes. The weather seemed unreal.

And I had a thought. If I were walking in some remote Minnesota woods, down some trail, a suddenly distant mile or two from some cozy cabin of the great north, and this were the weather, I would be probably be fearing for my life a little bit. I would be picturing myself freezing to death as the snow grew deeper and deeper. I would be wondering at how hard a wind can blow. Can it blow harder than this? Than this? The wind, I would find, can always blow harder. I would worry about the numbness in my cheeks, the stinging in my ears that I was unable to relieve. I would think "I can only stay warm enough now by moving, and it is getting harder and harder to move. The wind would howl in the trees and sound like wolves. Night would fall in the middle of the day. Trees would explode. I would crawl.

"I need shelter" I would mumble to myself, coming to an understanding of just how serious the situation had become. I  would pull myself through the trees and the drifts, cowering as the wind tried to beat me down. And then I would find my way inside. It is light and warm in there. People are chatting at tables. I unwrap my scarf, and I buy myself a sandwich.

A new winter

The sun didn't set at four o'clock in the afternoon. Flowers bloomed and the trees were luxuriant. Dazzling birds populated the world. A few simple items of clothes, taking mere seconds to put on, were sufficient dress for all the needs of the day, public and private. The air was rich, the sky was blue, and the city belonged to everyone.

And then the first snow came with its shoulder lowered, and it slammed into the city with deep layers of hard ice and heavy snow. Warmth sank deep under the bitter winds blowing. It was quiet, and it was night almost all the time.

I drove terrified and floundering over the terrible ice of the world and reeled from the shock of it, but after a week I remembered that the cold doesn't bother me at all, and the ice is only terrible at first. So I stepped into the world again and resumed my long walking commute.

And I found the city empty. Few bikes if any, and the rare people around were all far away and obscured by silence and clothes and steam. It is our own little annual Armageddon. The birds are scattered and scrappy and rough, the trees jagged and asleep. Smell is gone, light is clear, air is fierce. The cars are like creatures stalking. The sky is endlessly tall and empty and indistinct from all of space and time. The wide river path runs out in front of me, empty for as far as I can see.

The city is mine again.

You can only ever get halfway there

The phone rings at my library.

"Do you have a lost and found?"

"Yes." I reply.

"My daughter lost her wallet yesterday. Do you possibly have it?"

"I can check. What does it look like?"

"It's sort of thinner, and greenish. It mostly has cards in it, and some cash."

"Hold on. I'll go see."

I go see.

"I have four greenish wallets." I report back. "Pattern or no?" I ask.

"No pattern." 

We're down to three wallets.

"I'm pretty sure it had her library card in it."

"Two of the wallets have library cards." I say after a brief look through. "What's your daughter's name?"

"Lynette."

"Ah!" I exclaim. "I have Lynette Watson's wallet right here."

"Oh, no. It's Lynette Sloan. Do you have Lynette Sloan's wallet?"

"Green, cards, no pattern, Lynette... Sloan?"

"Yes?"

"No. We don't have her wallet."

"Okay, well, thanks for looking."


I suspect it was an elaborate prank call.



 

Big chair

Writing, as I do, on the Internet, a very social medium these days, I get a lot of messages from readers.

"Hey," one of these messages says "Write more about your trip to Disney World. Write about that time you went to Gaston's Tavern, near the Beast's castle. Write about how Gaston's Tavern was actually of a uniquely (for Disney World) suitable size to echo what it was supposed to be: a small deep forest rural village hunting tavern. Write about how you bought there that weird toasted marshmallow flavored apple slushie that came topped with mango passion fruit foam. And then how you wandered the baking sun trying to figure somewhere just to be for awhile, but there wasn't anywhere, because the Magic Kingdom doesn't really do places to just be, so you gave up and went back into the charming, but full, seating area of the tavern. Then, suddenly, dreamily, IT was there! Write about that, about how all of a sudden there was a beautiful, magical, gigantic throne-like chair, covered in bear hides or something ruggedly rustic like that, to the right of the roaring fake fireplace, all perfect for you and your wife to sit together in. But just as you made your way to this gargantuan chair a very small child from a nearby table spotted the chair too. You were there first though, and you sat down and it was absolutely heavenly. But as you sat in delight, sipping your bizarre, but very appealing, drink, and admiring the excellent room with all its Beauty and the Beast references, it was impossible to ignore the three year old child in a state of exquisite agony as he longed for your chair with every fiber of his being, all while his parents desperately tried to soothe him. Write about how you got up and let him have the chair and found a table facing the roaring fake fire as the parents mouthed 'thank you' at you. Write about how that was a pretty good seat too, but not quite as nice as the bear throne."


"Okay." I write back. "I will."