mlle. h. bean

So I'm on the bus the other night, after a movie date with some friends, and I'm looking at the mud caked on the outside of the bus window. It's always there and usually has some pretty neat textures. This night I was curled up on the back seats of the bus, the ones where you can stretch out as you like. I had the four movie stubs in my pocket, from earlier when I took them from the movie guy as a reflex and then none of the other girls wanted thiers. I also have a reflex of keeping things, at least for a little while, and so later on, on the bus, I reached in and found them there. I also had a pen with me, so I wrote these on three of them:

Ticket 1: The mud on the window: a cross section X-Ray of carrots growing in ultraviolet soil
Ticket 2: Bamboo forest, or the bayou with fog--below murky swampwater--where?
Ticket 3: Papyrus roll, carried miles from army camp to Cairo, finally stretched out, dusty and cracked to reveal--nothing, no message

***

I have this theory about teeth-brushing and bed.

You're tired, you want to fall asleep and you're drifting off when guilt rears its ugly head: "Brush your teeth! They'll rot off!" So you do, and maybe you even floss, but the point is that the energy you gear up for this rapid minty motion in your mouth then has nowhere to go but your bed, and so you go to bed, now all frictioned-up and not in a sleepy mood. Maybe as a culture we should all start brushing our teeth right after supper and not eat anything after that. But then that would go against the grain of our purported desire to have 'whatever we want, whenever we want it', and we just couldn't have that...

***

There is no meal that pink lemonade is a wholesome complement to, except maybe hot dogs with mustard, ketchup, relish and onions.