Proposing A (Slice Of) Toast
Saturday, February 26, 2011
The strangest things can be found in the most unexpected places. Although toast isn’t randomly encountered all that often. Buttered toast even less so...
There are exceptions to everything, especially at unseemly early hours in inner city parks.
Finding Lucy in the sky without the help of any diamonds can be accomplished with a simple (but not easy) recipe of working excessive hours (preferably in an occupation you despise), studying, traipsing about to far-flung and uninteresting corners of the city (in the name of said despised, and now thankfully former, occupation) and... having to write poetry.
The poetry was part of the studying, and related to a rather random subject on “Isms”. Surrealism, existentialism, postmodernism... and, in particular, workaholism. And it related, specifically, to the surrealist portion of this whistlestop tour of the misunderstood and at risk of being pretentious.
Surrealism comes easily to a person who spends 30 out of every 24 hours at her desk, on an assortment of buses and taxis, and occasionally under her desk. Attempts at capturing surrealism don’t require anything as complicated as standing under a melting clock with a jam jar, waiting for consternation to walk your ferret. It’s right there, just waiting to be unleashed into a raging torrent of whoomph! Fortunately*, I have no intention whatsoever of poking around in search of said raging torrent and inflicting it on the unsuspecting and innocent** interwebs.
Just one small bit of blank verse meets psychedelia meets exhaustion is remembered. It surfaces at times when efforts feel especially futile and the world seems a little odder than it ought to...
Stumbling towards. Walls. Of. Toast.
Whether to eat the toast or bang your head against it, I still haven’t quite figured out. But finding buttered toast lurking in the hedges in Surry Hills seemed sufficiently incongruous to have brought the idea to quite unexpected life.
You can find other unexpected things in inner city parks in the early morning, too...
*But not quite so fortunately as the eventual change in occupation and abandonment of the practice of napping beneath my desk
** Well, if not quite innocent, at least, in this case, blameless
