In these days of coronavirus isolation, I already miss my Thursday morning writing routine at Dunkin Donuts.
I stood writing at Dunkin Donuts, and in the corner they had one of those morning shows with bubbly hosts and banter and talk about celebrities.
Then the male host announced, “I took my cat’s litter to work instead of my lunch.”
I don’t know if it was a joke or if they were talking about embarrassing moments.
But a guy sitting at a nearby table was nodding along like, “Yeah, I do that all the time. PREACH.”
I’ve come to the point at which it doesn’t make sense for me NOT to learn the stealth and hacking skills I would need to fix the music at the Dunkin Donuts where I spend too much of my writing time.
When I was in college, I had a PDA with infrared capabilities that allowed me to use it as a TV remote once I installed the right app, although we didn’t call programs apps back in 2004.
Remembering this prompted me to use Dunkin Donuts’ wi-fi to search for “use smartphone to change music at Dunkin Donuts,” though not with any success.
I have now tried both bulletproof coffee and the bullet journal. I have not tried putting these things together, though if I did I imagine the result would be an artful-yet-greasy coffee ring. Here’s my …
What I like about blackout poetry is that it’s sort of an inverted version of pinhole cipher, where a hidden message is concealed in printed matter by pinholes under the words of the real message. I used to make pinhole ciphers on discarded newspapers in cafeterias and coffee shops, just in case someone noticed.
If I had nine lives, I’d use one of them to be a spy who retires and opens a coffee shop. Preferably, the spy part would be in the early half of the twentieth century, before analogue cryptography was completely outmoded.
With blackout poetry, I can just sort of pretend that someone sent me a secret message and pick out whatever words or syllables interest me.
I didn’t have any particular plan when I did this one, but it’s clear to me that this poem explains how I deal with a lot of social niceties, particularly being asked how I’m doing when I’m not doing well, but I don’t want to say so. Smile, smile, find some sort of lie, and try not to sigh depressively.
Not that I would put on such a charade at my spy coffee shop. I like to think I foster an atmosphere of erudite grumpiness.
