Today's post comes from the other side of Atlantic, and in particular from my friend Phil.
Phil is a Californian expert on Ancient Roman Concrete (?), an embassador of the benefits of eating broccoli, and a scholar of the 'hook-shot'-Art.
The following is Literature at its finest! Enjoy.
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This was a couple of years ago, but on a New Year's eve party. At the beach, definitively. Before or after New Year's? I can't be sure - I'm not used to paying attention to the time once it gets dark. It seems not to matter. I usually just check the time whenever the night comes lurching to a halt - though sometimes it just disappears - and then sometimes send a message to somebody to say "look at me, I stayed up until THIS LATE", along with whatever else the message has to say for itself. I started when I met the girl by the fire. It did not begin promisingly. She kept coughing. As soon as I would start to say something, often times something quite witty and crucial to that particular moment, a cough charged forth. It was as though she was allergic to my observations, which I must again emphasize were witty and crucial in their particular moments, although instead of sneezing or abruptly ceasing to be able to breathe, she coughed. Nothing tuberculin or whooping about it, but still extremely problematic to the task(s) at hand. She swore up and down that she wasn't sick. So I issued an ultimatum: either she stop coughing or I would requisition a pipe from one of my friends who had stopped smoking them but still had some tobacco and light it and smoke it and blow smokerings in her face it would give her a reason to cough, I said. It is good to watch people's faces when you give them ultimatums, and so I can tell you that her face grew more and more displeased with each stipulation, so that when I got to the part about her face, it was aghast, as though the smokerings would make her age disproportionately, like a boom-and-bust-rain-and-dust tree or something (the coughs made me think of her as an environmentalist). And she stopped coughing. And she said you had better get that pipe, just to be sure. And she tackled me as I was walking with schemes in my head to steal the pipe. And that is why, whenever I think of her now, I check behind my ears to see if the sand is still there.
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