A Call

There's nothing to read any more in my tiny corner of the coffee shop: just technical manuals, how-to books on cooking up brains in vats, pamphlets on astral travel and philosophically impenetrable semantic circle-jerks. I need to go back to the kind of reading that I enjoyed on some level that still escapes me. You know the kind: reading which imposes narratives on this world and, while making you cry, is always implicitly saing "it's OK; don't worry". So which poems/novels/novellas/plays/streams-of-consciousness have made you feel that way?

In the meantime: a man walks into his house after 11 hours at the office with some Chinese take-out. As he walks in he hears sounds of flesh slapping flesh and moans of pleasure: his wife is making passionate love to his best friend. He waits until they both climax violently and volubly. He then takes off his overcoat and sits down to dinner, scooping three platefuls of noodles and mixed vegetables in special sauce (#163) out of the cardboard containers. His wife and the Other Man join him at the table.

"Try the snow peas. You guys might be a little desensitized to the pleasure, but they are phenomenal," he says.

"But we've worked up quite an apetite," says his wife.

"I hadn't thought of that."

They eat.

Consider: "Philosophy is like the mother who gave birth to and endowed all the other sciences. Therefore, one should not scorn her in her nakedness and poverty, but should hope, rather, that part of her Don Quixote ideal will live on in her children so that they do not sink into philistinism."