stir-fried frog legs. three things.

Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas is written in the second person. People will tell you (second person) that sometimes when they read a book, it's like the author is describing their own lives. Not what happens, but how the main character perceives and reacts to the things that are happening. Exact situations are unimportant compared to interpretation and sensation. Neither interpretation nor sensation are subject to what country you live in or what's your financial status. “It's like, I watched this move, and like, everything that was happening was just like what's going on in my life. And I told that to whatsername, and she was like, 'me too.'” I don't buy this on the grounds that I know there weren't trapeze monkeys and Parisian urchins lining the walls of your work place every evening, but sure, you probably wanted to say 'fuck it all' (even the good stuff) more than you wanted people to know. Books and movies don't speak to me like that anymore. But in my book, I'd be the third person. And I'd be hobbling around on a fucking peg with a headful of rum. I'd be nailing a gold doubloon and striking a bargain with my crew. Instead, I'm bitching about rent.

Henry is seventy-six years old and has led what he calls a beautiful life. He has a wife and a couple kids who have over the years given him a grippe of grandkids to whom he (apparently) runs home to every night when he leaves the bar. He was in the national guard as a young man and everything in his life ties back to those days of driving tanks or trucks or keeping a straight face in front of a screaming sergeant. After two beers (PBR's, on which he doesn't tip even the fifty cents change off two dollars) he'll go on about how as an old man your body doesn't work and how all your quiet time is taken up in revelry. “All these memories,” he says, and he squints real hard at me like he's sharpening up the point with his eyes, trying to penetrate my young, thick skull. “All these memories, and it's been a beautiful life! Make no mistake............I was a handsome man, good hair, always small, but................” Sometimes I wonder if he knows he's hanging out in St. Louis' only non-gay gay-bar. I wonder if his family chuckles and wonders the same thing as they pick him up nightly 'round nine.

It's only after you've given up on a certain amount of your piddly ambitions (what lots of people call 'dreams') that security becomes important. These days, what I think about when I hear a line in a song (written, by the way, by a 19 year old) “what you reap is what you sow,” it occurs to me that I may have been forgetting this whole time to sow anything. Except for marginal effort sunk into a job that requires constant attention I'd rather not pay. Reap and sow on a weekly basis. Sow at five, reap ten hours later. It's not entirely my fault. And I'm not entirely alone. “Sow to reap” is a concept that might be kind of dated. Even farmers probably don't throw those words around anymore. And they might douse the 1 to 1, sow to reap theory with a cold bucket of logic if questioned. All it takes is an early freeze or swarms of monarch butterflies to prematurely reap what you've sown, and to leave you with the mess to clean up.