You know?

There is a lack of donuts. Inter freakin' alia, right, but donuts would be a good start.

Garble

It is a strange, unfriendly enterprise, this one, stack words in piles that make them say how things are, like stuffing cold butter into a keyhole. Casting around among the lego pieces to get a two-er for the edge of your 1:100 X-wing, nothing like the real thing, not at all, but my god so cool just like it when you're done, flying it around the room with ILM effects in your throat and miniature light sabres caught between the floorboards. Me and my big box of morphemes, winsome as the guess-how-many fairground jar of jellybeans.

Everything cocks its vast effortless eyebrow of already being how it is, apples and birds and the smell of pipes on the morning tapwater, loneliness and soap, the strangled underwater music of the upstairs Kinder leaving for school. Make coffee. Shake the box, to hear that there are things inside.

West

I went for Kaffee off Kurfürstendamm with my friend Once Was Architect today, shaking out my lungs in the frozen air, stamping my feet and my Einzelfahrschein AB against the solid comfort of German trains, zurückbleiben bitte, pink-and-purple cubist seat covers and a red button, please shut the doors on cold days.

Literaturhaus café, wonderland of dark wood and padded-leather corners, majestically average coffee for €3.20 and an arresting waitress with her pad holstered thigh-level on an antiqued belt and a rope of peppered dark hair sheafed at her collar. She thanked me in French.

Gluten

I baked bread yesterday, primal yeasty solution to everything. It smelled precise like gecko feet on glass, and was crusty and percussed crumply-cellophane as it cooled.

A loaf, my loaf, round and whole as salvation and just as prone to go stale.