The Thaw (Reclaim Your Miniature Public Sphere Young Writer)

When he awoke this morning he knew something had to give. To be honest, he felt really good, really composed. He had slept better than he cared to remember. No disorienting spill out of the bed, teetering on the hardwood floor as he tried to find the right footing, barely balancing forward in a stumble of lingering sleep wishes. No this morning he did it just right. He couldn't even grasp a single dream from that night's sinking. This was an oddity, a sign even. Usually his dreams would wrap around him like flickering corridors, pressing him into a narrow box. Think the mouse boxing the cats in Windows 95, Rodents Revenge, hankering for cheese that just gets replenished, holes that fill the room, a stomach that always ends up empty again. That's one way he may have summarized his dream remembrances. Tight corridors with black walls, chipped paint all over them, flaking off on him as they anaconda'd all the way around him. Elusive, but gripping, he would remember a dream like a tastebud trying to conjure what it was like when a single bite of something marched over it, and then plunged down the throat slide. His dreams were faint, and that disturbed him. He could related a few frayed odds and ends, but he would eventually have to just let it go. Let go of something that was always there, taunting him to remember it right, organize it correctly, as if there was some sort of sortable movement to a dream in the first place, as though it were some scrambled up letter with scraps of words surrounding the wastebasket. No, not this morning, this morning there was no dream to worry about. He tossed around in bed, treading through the sheets and mattress with a leisurely backstroke. The galfriend paced around with a quiet easing of floorboards, the dressing ritual, the readiness for work dance. He's unbelievably lucky to get to avoid this once a week, and still wind up with food on his plate. He smacked his lips with satisfaction of those nodreams, the no thing to worry about smack. He considered falling back to sleep, a trivial consideration, really just an affront to the fortunate lack of uncontrolled image. But the possibility of sleep soon vanished due to the insistence of a shit. It feels tremendous to have to shit this morning, he thought to himself. Instead of dreaming, his night turns had compounded a massive dump inside of him. It rolled up all of the temporal, edible possessions of the last x hours and offered itself up as a massive, memorable, perhaps more memorable than most eating, sort of shit. It felt like a tube, like he was pregnant with a tube, that connected his pelvic-anal region with his stomach, his intestines, his lungs. He quietly remarked to himself that it wasn't very often that one had the opportunity to admire how full of shit you are, and to understand it, to relish that it really was true, that you were utterly full of shit, and furthermore, that it was one concentrated entity. One novel tootsie roll that a kid would carry around a Sam's Club or Costco, like a piece of lumber, like a battering ram. He was still in bed, slowly rotating around, sizing up the internal dimensions, preparing to cork screw through this Thing (hey, it earned that T). He decided to dwell on yesterday's diet: three bowls of rice (white, sticky, grainy, the mortar) smothered in potatoes, thick fragrantly sweet onions, wide mushrooms that kept their distinct mushroom figure, and peas just for a sickening, swelled beads that pop in your mouth kind of twist. Imagine those popped peas streaking this titan of turd, like the psychedelic ground of a mud filled music fest where everyone must resort to more acid, more shrooms, more detachment. Good old peas. That was dinner, lunch happened too. Three pound fish burrito, go on and scale it. He dared himself to enjoy the sunshine of a lovely lunch breaks vis a vie a taco truck. No not a, he thought to himself with every steady bite of its luscious grilled white fish (oh ambiguity you haunt us, scorpion fish where are your pricks now??), cabbage, beans, a disturbing patchwork quilt of cheese, and more rice-mortar, no no not a truck, el camion is the, the end all. He imagines dragging wary relatives and innocents to this earthquake eruption of burrito, this fissure of the refried, he chuckles to himself on a park bench near the sun, mouth honking on that impossible tube of fish bliss, imagining him dragging people into an irresistible gouge in the culinary earth, where a mexican truck runs over your stomach's soul over and over again. This burrito defined the solidness, the singleness of his shit to be. Before that there was cereal, there was banana and orange. The murkiness of cow cream tempered by the erotic helplessness of banana and orange flesh, how can you not feel like you are fucking, like you are taking whatever comes your way, when you are peeling wide a fruit, when you are lapping up its juices, he remarks to himself. HOW? HOWWWW?

Enough, the poop made sense, sort of. He could run through its inspirations, its foundation, erection, and mystical completion. But only one sacred step could make it a reality here on this wet and wild earth. He rose from the bed, galfriend no longer in sight, no longer in smell for the horrors he was prepared to unleash upon the world of apartment 2. He did not need to stumble out of a dream and into a routine, he needed to brace himself for something that would shatter the mind of the birther. He needed to push, see, know, flush (smile).

This thaw for the public has now begun.