sweet things

i hope i am permitted a list of sweet things without it sounding too of music

• every giant m&m cookie i ever ate almost every day of middle school even though i got sick of them after the first few months but kept getting them anyway because the fat lunchline checkout lady i always went to would say "i bet you want your cookie today!" and i didn't want to disappoint her.
  
  
• margaret warner's brooches
  
  
  margaret warner on how it is done
  
  
• boring words that have awesome meanings. like awesome - the sum of awe; or essentially - of the essence. think of the shit we could tell each other with better words. upright words above the squalor of quotidian synonymity. impossibly meaningful nouns, verbs, and hand gestures. the things i would tell you with those words. the things we would say...

how much blood constitutes a "wake-up call?"

nice weather for ducks

Much keening for J.D. smacks of rusty adolescence, awkwardly horny for existential perspective. Narcissistic fallacies bloom like acne on the opinion pages.

The "kids today" pop-psychological steriotypifying taughtoillogical bullshit is the same lazy substitute for Actual Thinking it always was, but somehow this sudden context has over-30s in a fogy tizzy: What would Holden think of The Twitter?! The Facebook? The Sexting? The Kids Today might, if they can finish a book, detect trace-element profundities, but real-McCoy Catchers went the way of every op-ed contributor's youth. Gag me with three phony cocks.

When the brilliant bite their own magic dust, the rest of us can ponder God's mercy in modest gifts. But when geniuses — this one in particular — leave the herd, we might just look around and wonder, "was it us?"

The goddamn truth is, we can't stay in Neurotic Neverland forever. Not even if we hide in New Hampshire for 50 years. But Holden Caulfield can. The rest of us will grow up. Grow old at least. But Holden is still waiting for school to start, wondering where ducks go in winter.

think