waiting for madeleine

One goes to the coffee shop to write, purposefully to the coffee shop with the dodgy Wi-Fi so that one will not be tempted to surf about getting up to date on the day’s slang in the Icelandic blogosphere, savoring the confusion in Norway stemming from the Bush family’s choosing to flash the easily mis-parsed longhorn salute at the inauguration, discovering well-illustrated sites dedicated to the erotics of typography and otherwise not addressing the task at hand.

One orders a medium coffee, stubbornly insisting on medium and refusing to use the absurd and oh so faux patois the coffee shop in question imposes on its customers. In reality, one hates this coffee shop, but its Wi-Fi is so terrible that it becomes a selling point in itself for the easily distracted.

One orders the medium coffee and even gives up a first name, knowing that it will be mangled by the fellow behind the counter, wishing that it were enough to promise to respond to the name of the beverage (medium coffee) or even the name of the beverage in the ludicrous local Java-Volapük (which will not be recorded here) instead of indulging in this perverse pseudo-familiarity with the pimply caffeine-dealers behind the counter. One considers taking up a pseudonym for the sole purpose of ordering coffee at such places. One toys with the idea of taking up a specifically Javanese pseudonym for this very purpose. One discards this as a stupid joke no one will get.

Thus lost in thought, one permits oneself to be sold up inasmuch as one purchases also prepackaged baked goods in the form of three reasonably wholesome-looking madeleines. One decides to forgo egregious pretension by making the obvious reference. (And one has not in fact read Proust anyway.)

One collects the coffee, takes a seat, boots the computer, dunks a madeleine in one’s coffee, bites into the madeleine, and, slave to procrastination, hapless weightless feather on the swirling floodwaters of recollection, falls to reading the older contents of one’s harddrive. One relaxes into the inevitable and decides to enjoy it. Never otherwise will one's juvenalia be this fascinating.