My favorite breakfast is a slice of very sour and dark rye bread with Swiss cheese and orange marmalade. And bucketfuls of strong coffee.
It's about the marmalade I wish to write. I love orange marmalade, almost as much as I love chocolate, but orange marmalade does not love me.
Or perhaps it does? You decide. For some weird reason it doesn't matter how careful I am in spreading it on the bread or how carefully I place a very thin sliver of cheese over it, to cover it completely, or how carefully I put the knife I used away. Whatever I do, there will be orange marmalade all over my fingers up my arms, behind my ear, and, once, even in the back of my head, stuck to the hair.
If I take my breakfast back to bed I have to launder the marmalade-covered pillow-cases and often the sheets, too.
What causes this to happen? I suspect a revenge from Zeus, because no other sticky food makes me lose all the nimbleness of my fingers, no other edible item ends up all around the outside of my coffee mug, and no other condiment ends up all over my body. Or I might be hexed.
I once spent a night at a hotel in southern Illinois where the skies are enormous and the earth flat and where hotels seem to never have heard about orange marmalade. Realizing that it isn't available everywhere, like oxygen, made me feel deflated and weird, as if some major physical law of the world had been disproved. Coming home to my pot of marmalade meant relief and a return to normalcy.
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This post will be archived under "stupid rubbish to get my writing going."