Oatmeal just tastes like oatmeal until it doesn’t. Until one day I wake up and it tastes like Fuck it, I wake up one day and I feel like finding all the research labs in Pennsylvania that do experiments on monkeys and chain myself to their doors as a protest, or set their doors on fire and Fuck it, I only have one body. Then I realize. I realize that I am not tired of being a man, not tired of my teeth or my hair or my hands or my shadow. I cannot be tired of being a man because I often feel like a monkey that’s trapped in a circus of painfully unfunny men. Not only have I learned to speak and to dress, but I have learned to like it. And with that I’ve learned as well to dream of front porches with rocking chairs and a wife who reads in a hammock a book I’ll never read but that I love for her while little monkeys run around the garden and maybe then I feel like a man and I stand up and go to the hammock and she turns her head because she knows I am approaching and we both say together at the exact same time Fuck it, the world is big and elusive and you look at the night and you can’t even see the stars, or maybe just one or maybe a planet, and you can talk all you want about how nice it would be to be in the wild with a hammock looking upwards to the silent sky while you do the same in the hammock next to me and the silence is so deep and so elegant it almost hurts and we only hear the beat of our own pumping hearts bubum bubum bubum Fuck it, the fantasy does not materialize, the world is big and elusive and I never see you again, and I stroll through the night and I keep making the wrong turn and missing my street. Maybe the reason I miss it is so I can take a bigger sniff of the smell of the river of olive oil that is flooding the street. I remember the words of the wise master: when safe, let it hurt. It’s funny, the world is so big and elusive and full of politics and insanely complex technologies, but my pain is simple like a grape or a circle. It’s funny because it is so simple that it simply goes away. It vanishes with a tiny little weesh-sound, and I’m left only with the peel of the grape. With something that wishes to be a pain but it’s more like arugula or dark chocolate. It's funny, because then I stroll through the night and at the apex of my self-deprecation soliloquy, at the climax of my declaration of eternal loneliness and perennial sexual frustration, I see a squirrel. I see a squirrel and I see a rabbit. And right there right then I can only say Fuck it, the world is big and elusive but populated by furs and plants that are small and connected and that you can hug through the night instead of strolling through a river of olive oil that gets to your knees. I hate to admit it, but the world is so fucking full of things that are accidentally magnificent that I almost want to throw up because I’m not even justified in being sad. I remember that I have the right to be sad, because the world is big and elusive, but fuck it I also have the right to see a squirrel. To see a squirrel and a rabbit. You, you wait, in the bed we just shared, I imagine, until I let you know I’ve gotten home. Maybe you were not waiting, I don’t know. Our paths then deviate, just like lines tend to do because it’s fucking rare for two lines to hug and walk together through the infinite space. I then wonder what will happen to you, how much of that night will you remember in 10 years. What will happen to you, would you be doing laundry while in the front porch your husband reads a book that you’ll never read in the rocking chair? If so, what song will you be listening to and what movie did you watch the night before? What’s the name of that restaurant you really want to go on Friday lunch? perhaps after picking up a little monkey from preschool after your last patient of the day. These little fantasies are absurd, but they give me joy like a pair of fun socks. When you asked me to define what fun socks are, I should have said perhaps that a definition of fun socks is that fun socks are socks that tell a story. Our paths won’t cross again but it hardly matters, because fuck it, the world is big and elusive and there might even be ghosts out there, but fuck it, there are also squirrels and rabbits, and fun socks you can wear on a Tuesday. Griefs and joys of all things being just fragments.