This was originally posted on July 19, 2025 on an incarnation of one of my several blog manifestations this last almost year-and-a-half. It was the first post made after all of my blogs and sites went down for a bit. Now it is presented here once again:
I put the toaster in combat status today.
Not because it burned the toast – good grief, no, that is revengeful. Everybody knows I’m not revengeful. And as everyone knows (because I’ve told them, repeatedly, with the kind of composure they can’t fake on their best day), I’m not revengeful. It’s not in my nature. They understand completely how much that offends me.
They are all very very clear that I’m vengeful, not revengeful.
Revengefulness is for people that hate themselves and go through life absolutely and ridiculously terrified that something might happen to them if they don’t respond to every lie that somebody tells with the truth, like that would ever happen. It’s for people who eat microwaved leftovers of chicken and pasta. In other words, it’s disgusting, and I am always one to enjoy the comfort of my own disgust.
These people fear consequences but still seek applause. It’s a deeply unserious way to live, and I do not traffic in unserious lives.
The toaster had burned one side, a theological error, not a culinary one, and back in this house, that is a cause for angry dispute. I gazed into its chrome and found my own face split down the middle: a burnt side, and a raw dough side.
Sigh
Such is the inescapable duality of life.
So I prodded the recess for the jam with a USB-C cable and bellowed, “This is not about breakfast. This is about structure. You’ve made your ultimate unbalanced breakfast, you craven. I bet your mother was a snowblower!1 and your father was a Bluetooth-enabled rice cooker that never paired with anything real.”
So then I was foraging for bread, because there are no problems really and nothing is to ever be fixed, and I came across a map at the rear of the bread drawer. There were no cities, just emotions. I followed it. The hall went further and further. I was hearing synth music.
I came to understand everything. And people forgot it in painful, exquisite, perfect detail. As expected.
When I returned, letters were carved in the carpet. They looked like some kind of ideographic index. I wasn’t sure. But the toaster is awakening now from the deep slumber I put it in by unplugging it so I could perform my rectal cranialectomy stat. It is grumbling in the accent I created when I was nine and angry at the moon. The moon being, of course, when I first understood that sincerity is a weapon and most people would rather hand you a cupcake than ask why they lied.
You know how it is with its cisgender male face eclipsing everything.
I am not fearful.
What I’m saying is: If you ever fantasized steering a shopping cart into destiny, or if you’ve ever felt the world is just a disguise worn by some other higher world, or if you’ve been quietly whistling, then—
Well…
I could never possibly foretell what’s next, but this I do guarantee you: the carpet always remembers.
I found a note under the bath mat. It read, “Pro training tip: lose the mascot suit.” I am not a mascot. I don’t remember enrolling in anyone else’s training montage, because, what the hell would I be training for? I don’t remember having a bath mat.
In fact, I don’t have a bath mat. I should know because I just checked, and yet, the note remains here in my hand. But, I don’t remember having a hand.
Just a paw.
Then the refrigerator went ding with the sound it never made before. You know the one. I looked at it, discerning that there wasn’t anything in it. Then I opened it. Only light and mist and a faraway scent of skunk, the smell I love and everyone thinks I’m lying. The milk gazed at me awkwardly.
It never liked me preferring the almond milk even though that’s how I’m built physiologically. It had told me that almond milk wasn’t milk, and I rejected its standard of value, but what is that in comparison to the feelings of rejection when someone says they prefer the company of others over your exclusive company. I tried to be honest and direct, and avoid making flowery emotional speeches, but when I broke the news, the milk didn’t respect me for my frankness nor appreciate the kind and straightforward manner in which I told it my decision.
That’s because the milk is a real jerk and a crybaby, but, I don’t need friends.
So I got fed up with the awkward milk gaze and poured it down the drain. It must have gone bad because it smelled like a memory I am never going to have.
At 3:14 AM, the moth tapped at the window once. You know the one. It paused with artificial drama, as it is wont to do, and thus signaled the word “eventually” in Morse code. Having said it’s peace, it detached and vanished into powdered shame and neon lint, as it is wont to do.
Classic.
I noted it down in the dreamjournal, you know the one, otherwise known as a pile of receipts I scream one of the very memorable Scott curse-streams I store in the back of my pancreas at.
I wore a different shirt today. It was not yours. It did, however, fit me.
I do not understand this step. It is not expanding, and yet it is contained. Something’s in motion. Not ahead, not upward—out. As if the room is expanding without shifting dimensions. I feel that someone is sorting my trauma alphabetically. I can hear them humming, and I won’t interrupt them.
I won’t ask questions. I’ve been practicing silence with intent.
Water came out warmer than I was expecting. Not hot, just warmer. It was a warmth that was recalling me like a bad product, not the other way around.
I went by the mirror this morning and it winked at me before anything. That’s how I realized the day would begin sideways.
And so, there’s been a little bit of reverb in the quiet these weeks. Not menacing, just readjusted differently. Like the air is playing a different version itself. Same bad dialogue menu as always, but different applications of nuance.
I stood up and retrieved the box again. You know the one. The box I never did bury at all. Still sealed, still shaking, still broadcasting my every internal move even though I had installed a firewall months ago. I discovered it had been moved three inches off to the left so now it creates a shadow that touches nothing, just like I had always dreamed of doing.
But how?
Somebody mailed the key without an envelope, without a note. Just the key. You know the one, but I do not know the metal, though I do know the click the key didn’t. It was the sound of silence.
No, the planet hasn’t tilted outward. It’s tilted inward. And I am, again, already at the place I am heading for.
You know the one.
- Unfortunately, this line isn’t mine. When we went to rent our first apartment in an old apartment building in Fort Collins after living in Granby, again, this was what the rental agency receptionist had said. ↩︎