I was like “What?”

I’m stopped at a red light.  I’m listening to NPR.  The coffee was grown in a country I know nothing about.  It was roasted in Oregon, but I can’t drink it until some of the energy is transferred in the form of heat to the air here in Brooklyn.  Some jerkoff is honking.  The Yanks won.  Corruption charges, autumn breeze.  Some jerkoff is honking.  I’m breathing in I’m breathing out.  Images of a pile of envelopes, tossed one by one into a bucket of flames.  Some jerkoff is honking.  How did I get here?  I’m blocking the jerkoff and he just wants to turn and he is four feet away from me and his window is also open but instead of using his voice he’s honking and I laugh hard and scooch up a few feet so he can turn and laugh more and I’m alone and I was like “What?”

No one posted for like a million years and I was like “What?”

I woke up and immediately tried to figure out what day it was but that wasn’t working, so I tried to remember what I had done the previous evening, and I couldn’t suss that out either and it was around that time that I realized it definitely felt kinda like a Saturday, and the more I thought about it the more my confidence grew in the Saturdayness of the early afternoon I was experiencing so I popped open my phone and it said “Weds, Mar 25″ and I was like “What?”

I was eating lunch on Broome St. one day and a couple of sweaters around the shoulders type of euro-dudes walked up to me hesitantly and offered me a sandwich from their bag right as i finished my lentil soup and i was like “What?”

The man driving the car told me that patience was the virtue of King David and I was like “What?”

julian, cat, daryl and i went to the bodega by his house and of course we brought julians puppy with us. i waited outside with her and a british man asked if i was homeless and if i wanted a dollar i was like what?

today i thought i was safe from invisible robbers, because my door was shut. i then realized my door is cardboard i was like what?

i was sitting on the stoop in my pajamas, with last nights makeup on in front of the place that i live, when a boy who i do not know came up to me and asked “do you want a bacon egg and cheese” i was like what?

“Scratch a man and you get a monkey real quick” is specifically what the old man with the chalky blue eyes said, and it didn’t much matter if we were standing on the edge of a pitch and putt in Los Feliz or if he was talking about The Big One or whether he thought you would have to eat raw food because the smell of cooking might get you killed and really nothing much mattered as I shook his hand and took three steps toward the car before he turned back and said, “Maybe you’ll end up here too” and though the words that came out of my mouth were We’ll see, I was like “What?”

Before leaving the house today my roommate sat down with some toast and cereal and even though we had OJ in the fridge he proceeded to pour a nice portion of generic brand ginger beer from a plastic 2 liter bottle into a delicate long stemmed white wine glass and I was like “what?”

After a long tiring day of counseling insolvencies and foreclosures I just wanted to teleport myself home but I promised to meet a friend at the Graham stop off of the L train and to exit the platform, a seemingly endless huge set of stairs presented itself to me and my tired lazy azz wondered where the fiznuk the escalator was, just as the Exit sign above also read “Escalator Upstairs” and I was like “What?”

My boss just put his jacket on the floor and flipped it over his head like a little kid and I was like “What?”

i saw a fart bomb on the subway yesterday and i was like, “what?”

I walked easily a half mile across unsalted sidewalks covered with ice the other day on the way to practice but since I slipped and fell on the very first step I took off of the ice and onto the salted ice-free sidewalk I was like “What?”

One of my cats, the one that sometimes flushes the toilet in the middle of the night, figured out how to open a cabinet the other day, and I was like “What?”

It must have been around 1994, my family was driving down a highway headed for Myrtle Beach and we saw something sparkling on the left side of the road, not just on fire but exploding fire, we’re getting closer and it’s a shop hardly bigger than a shack, now we’re coming up alongside the spectacle and there isn’t a person or vehicle in sight and there are actual projectiles shooting up into the sky 20 or 30 feet above the roof, and the sign says Fireworks for Sale and I was like “What?”

i stepped outside of work to get some coffee and there was an enormous fucking urban assault hummer behemoth vehicle outside the post office with about ten different “never forget / 9-11-01 / support our troops / freedom isn’t free” decals on the back of it and i was like “what?”

i ate parsnip apple cheddar soup and I was like “What?”

I just finished reading The Road, and it’s pretty late and there were definitely things about it that were challenging or even off-putting, but when I read those last 10.5 pages and it became necessary to block the next few paragraphs with my hand and everything in my apartment started getting brighter,  I was like “What?”

i started the directed research class for my graduate thesis this week and my professor said we had five days to do all the research AND writing for it and i was like “what?”