Some Notes In My Notebook (and what I think they meant)

"Two golden candy wrappers (Reese's perhaps) rolled into perfect balls and placed in the center of two adjacent subway seats." I like to imagine that these were actually underdeveloped Golden Goose eggs, and that two really negligent Golden Geese were randomly sitting next to one another on the R train when they simultaneously and totally unpredictably each laid a golden egg weeks before their due dates. The really negligent Golden Geese, embarrassed by the incident but touched by their mutually shared experience, ran off together, encouraging one another to throw caution to the wind and waddle away from the responsibilities imposed on them by society.

"Asian newspaper front page photo." I'm not sure which Asian language this newspaper was in (apologies), but the guy next to me on the train one morning was reading a cover story with two accompanying pictures. The larger photo was of a man standing between a bed and a wheelchair, leaning on neither. A smaller photo was superimposed in the lower right hand corner; this photo was of a man's hand reaching for one of a myriad of pill bottles arranged on a mahogany shelf. The arrangement of these two photos seemed to imply, to one who could comprehend the text in no reasonable fashion, a cause/effect relationship, with the stupendous recovery of the man from paralysis being attributed to his consumption of an inordinate amount of medications. If this was actually a huge medical breakthrough, the photo caption seemed like a letdown to me: Man takes plethora of pills... celebrates medical miracle by standing near two things he usually sits on.

"Mr. Pellequin looked like a pelican and also like a penguin." I'm pretty sure a person I saw on my commute one morning inspired this note. I think I was going to use that statement as the introduction to a very uninteresting short story. I'm tempted to write that short story anyway, just to prove to my early morning uncaffeinated commuter self that I wasn't completely wrong.

"Instinct... that freak out at the theatre with the shoe, the purse string snake on the subway and the dolphin-shark." I think this was a late-night commute note. A couple weeks ago, the glint of light hitting the shoe of a improviser doing a side-kick onstage freaked me out because I thought something was flying at my face. This was unfortunate for the people around me as I spazzed out. A couple days later on the way home from work, the tassles on my new purse had wrapped around my thigh and for a split second I thought I saw a snake crawling up my leg. Again spazzed out, again unfortunate for innocent by-sitters. I have no idea what the "dolphin-shark" bit is about.

"NordicTrack open on iPod." Got me?