We usually start the day with some kind of cookie. It is most likely a lemon sandwich cookie; the kind you can get for two dollars in a package slightly too large length-wise that only a family of six should be able to ingest fully by expiration. The cookies are housed in a plastic tray and wrapping created in the school of user-indifferent to user-i'm-going-to-ruin-your-day technology depending on how far you are in the package and how sensitive your ears are to the acoustic terrorism of the anti-sensuous giving of the wrapping.
Eyes open, a few slight adjustments of the body and a sentence or fragment from a dream or waking thought slips past the aural demarcation line that separates the mind from the commons to become the first entry of the day in the dialogue of two; no intention but duty. It is the brave or ignorant front line in the celebrated battle of conversation with another, the kind you never want to end, some nights foregoing sleep for it to be seamless into the next day (much to the suspicion of others). This initial utterance is at risk of dying in vain a flimsy sentiment; the remainder of whatever can be siphoned from the drug run-off drop box of your subconscious and a dangler from the previous day's to-do list. But as cut-up style equations lay and lie, the math for this morning's initial utterance was simple.
“I wonder what will be the cookie of the year.”
This statement is the result of thinking about and reading top lists for the year and having a theoretical interest in eating something peppermint, made manifest by last night/this morning's peppermint sugar cookie as the featured daily vitamin. But cookies on the brain are an anomaly.
To be empirically sound, my top-ten list of cookies could only feature three types before I would have license to either lie off my ass about cookies or get real dumb with metaphor about it. Don't worry, I have no intention to start listing my “cookie moments” of 2011, but I will have to sit here and think about how absurd it would be to pen a top-ten cookie list in the former fashion.
Here is what I came up with...
-Top ten cookie list as homework assignment. Here the child either gets busted from copying another child's list instead of thinking of their own. Another option would be that the child randomly wrote down ten cookie types and the pedantic teacher deduced either from inconsistency of taste preferences or some kind of magic that the list was false.
-Jilted dessert critic has a melt-down and lists the worst cookies she can think of as a murder/suicide-style vengeance to the world. Beyond victimless to completely pointless, this hypothetical is actually making me kinda sad.
That was in real-time. Yes, part of this will be a dumping ground for kiss-offs and full-blown make-outs with homeless ideas and constructs,. Part of this will be serious, part of this will be silly but it will always be very serious about being silly. And this is the difference. I would like to take this opportunity to state some claims:
The brief cookie list detour above stands. I am writing in pen. We will exhaust all options. We will make the entire space available for these options. We will think twice, three times, four times about something before forming an opinion and we still reserve the right to change our mind. We will beg for others to change our minds. We will press the re-start button to remove any pity-party that tries to sneak into our brain rager. Like strict parents who actually love their children, we will call bullshit on the artless and sexless, not for any reason other than the fact that we care about the crafts at hand.
There are way too many “cool parents” buying their children cheap beer and trying to look hot way past their prime and they are calling the shots and buying in. Just because you did it does not mean it is good. It is not enough to do-it-yourself... DO IT RIGHT. And this is calling myself to arms as much, if not more than, anybody else.
The first thing you say in the morning may fall flat on its face. The observance you keep repeating, longing to get at its center, may cause eyes in dull heads to roll. The result of your opus of brilliance may receive diminishing returns. But while others are window shopping for meaning, I am making a fake cookie list, or whatever...
THIS IS WHY WE ARE HERE.
