day 4

i am riding down king street in tory's mini cooper. through the window i see cainnon on the sidewalk. in the second where he would have seen me too he begins to almost convulse and then sneezes, violently. i like that i see him in the moment of a sneeze and then right after i don't see him anymore and i only see the gesture and don't hear the sucking in sound or the sneezing out sound. i think of mimes and how a few years ago that famous mime died and i never knew before that there were famous mimes. they are having a christmas parade today and there is a vendor on the corner of king street selling balloons in the shape of spiderman and dora the explorer. there are also reindeer balloons but i think there are more dora the explorers. at the grocery store i steal a packet of vegan cheese. sometimes i think it makes me sick and maybe that is why i steal it. sometimes i think i could love roland because his father committed suicide by overdosing on heroin. i don't know why that is. my father never died but he fell asleep at the dinner table on thanksgiving. he was drunk and i guess it is easy to get drunker than you thought you were getting but i also thought he would know better by now since he's had such a long career. when i was hiding in the living room on thanksgiving i heard brandon in the kitchen say one of my most favorite things. he said get these bowls away, i don't need bowls. they keep slipping and breaking my ship apart. sometimes i think i would like to have kids just so i could write down things that they said and then maybe i wouldn't have to think anymore. maybe if they were my kids i would want to play with them. i don't want to play with children when other people are watching, there's too much expectation. i like to talk to them though and teach them tricks. onetime mike asked me to fill-in for his mad science partner and i said okay because we'd get 20 dollars each. the mad science gig was at a catholic school which he never told me and i said i wouldn't have come if he had told me but i probably would have. i wasn't a very good mad science assistant. my mad science name was jessie the jokester and none of the kids thought it was funny. and then i started seeing all the kids as little adults. everything they said to eachother changed the course of each of their lives and meant too much about their parents. and the women who corral those kids at church things are always snarky, almost always. the one woman had pale blond hair and was narrow and looked like a mean librarian. librarians, at least in highschools, are almost always mean. one boy kept clucking, all he did was cluck. not incessantly or loudlky just normal clucking. the boy had to sit by himself on a bench because hye was clucking and couldn't go into the other room when the other kids did. he had a single mother and i don't know how it happened that i found that out but i remember it was true. my job as a mad science assistant was mostly cleaning up confetti. i sat with the boy on the bench and i drew a mustache on a popsicle stick and held it up to my face. then i handed it to him and i told him the next time someone asked him his age he should pull out the popsicle stick under his nose and say 35. i was hoping to change the course of his life, i guess, or hold his hand without touching him. at first he held the mustache up the wrong way but it didn't really matter.