Run! It's--YOGA GUY!

I was at one of my favorite breakfast haunts this morning, but things are no longer the same. Mindy, oh! Mindy! She left for a much better job at a museum, and her omnicompetence is sorely missed! (I feel like Jack Nicholson in As Good As It Gets.) For instance, my fiesta wrap arrives and it is slathered in salsa. Salsa? For breakfast? Not this little warrior-scholar. Every time I have gone there for the last 2 years, I have had the same thing and Mindy, oh! Mindy! didn't even have to ask. But as in a lot of food service jobs, there is a lot of turnover (I suspect, however, that the commerce with museums is rather higher at this place than elsewhere). This is the first time that I ate there since she left, and they fucked up my order.

Because the only thing I like less than salsa in the morning is confrontation, I choked down the assigned prison food. Eventually, a big guy with a graying red beard sat down at the next table. And started laughing at his laptop and apologizing loudly, when all I really wanted was to read about the unbridled slaughter of slaveholding families for a while. Certainly everyone has been in the same situation. He went on and on to the otherwise busy wait-creature about how magnificent his breakfast was even though (surprise!) they prepared the wrong thing.

Apparently, he noticed what I was reading (Nat Turner's Confessions) because when I put the book down for a minute to digest what I had just read (0 calories!), he said: "Do you think that the Wal-Mart workers are going to rise up and kill their masters?"

"Heheh," I replied, when I meant "Oh, sweet fucking tofu Christ." "Oh, I'm reading for a class I'm teaching. It's about [Racoon Uteruses]."

"Sounds really interesting."

"Yeah, it's fun."

"It came out of a course about extraordinary claims I taught last year. We'll be talking about conspiracies next week..."

"You know the eye above the pyramid on the dollar bill? Do you know what that is?"

"The all-seeing eye of God, which a lot of people mistake for the Illuminati?"

"Well, it's Illuminati, but it's your third eye. Did you know that if you meditate, within a few hours, you can discern your third eye." He pointed to the spot on his forehead where I wished he would shoot me. "Its color depends on what your personality is like. And it's not crazy, like, anyone can see it after a few hours. Yeah, I spent years taking care of my mind and just started taking care of my body doing this yoga."

"Heheh."

It was one of those conversations that does not end but lingers awkwardly and finally dies of emaciation. Mindy, oh! Mindy! would have swatted him down like the large intellectual horsefly he was.

I'm going to have to start eating breakfast at the museum.

HJ