'My dad once took me to a move when I was ten,' Josh said. 'It was Passover and we weren't allowed to eat popcorn. That popcorn smelled like God to me. God was right there and he was begging us to eat him.'


'Gimme a french-fried potato,' the old man said.

The deal with old people was that they never said 'please'. They spent the whole day at the Burger Zoo, eating their yogurt from home and stealing grocery bags full of napkins.

'Tell me,' asked the old man, 'why don't you make hard-boiled eggs for breakfast? They should drop dead with their sunny side up.'

'I'm with you on that one,' Josh said.

Old men looked awful with yolk dripping down their chin.

'Can you say something to them for me?' he asked.

'I could, but I doubt they'd care.'

'Maybe you should boil a couple up for me once in a while?'

'We don't have any pots,' he said.

'I could bring one of my own,' the old man said.

Josh imagined holding the man's head in his lap and yelling at Bob the manager.

'Can't you see this man needs a goddamn hard-boiled egg?'


One day he would say, 'I don't want to write about anything. I want to create consciousness itself; I want raw emotion.' He would be wearing sunglasses and he'd be wondering if he'd just said the right thing.

-Lenny Bruce Is Dead by Jonathan Goldstein. Henry Miller reminds me of Goldstein. Not the other way around.

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