We cry for the dead lobster whose penumbra eases over the mantlepiece. And likewise we cry for our lost luggage with which we paint the walls in an unwritten agreement. Sometimes even I wonder what happened to the days our pockets were stuffed with cheese and transistor radios and neutron stars and toxic waste and dead rats, and I ask myself "why not fry the equilibrium?" Because in the end it's the equilibrium which clouds our apogee and makes our tongues burn with incest. I am an angry sugar bowl.

I met a cynical toad inspector who told me he would fly if I paid him with living stones. As I descend into the depths of joy I find it is these very stones which scuttle to obstruct my path. "Charlemagne!" they yell at me, "Stand down. Give us your headphones and diner's club card before it's too late." But my name is no longer Charlemagne and I die slowly and silently.

I turn off the telephone and baste Cleopatra's nose with flying fish and clam chowder before I am arrested and thrown, kicking, onto the interstate. It is cold, this road, this ribbon of pavement in a sea of orange starburst microphone-strangling cow salesmen whose mothers fry violently without opening their windows. And I don my anti-freeze necktie with a pyrotechnic flourish which leaves the audience stunned. "Encore! Encore!" they shout at me, but I refuse to come back on the stage. This turns out to be a good idea; it is laced with cyanide.

This has serious implications. For instance, it means that the cantelope I swallowed yesterday could well have been a communist spy and my internal organs may be carefully monitered by Russian officials even as we speak. It also means that I may already be an air traffic controller.

But in spite of all this sentimental jello, I have real, concrete needs with legs and arms and bank accounts and they have beaten me senslessly and heedlessly into senslessnes. I shifted slightly into fifth gear and waited for the mercury to eclipse my vague desire and wandering philanthropy. It did.

"Quiet." Darth Vader rasped at me from the driver's seat. "You'll wake up the idiots." The idiots were already stirring in the backseat, so I hit a random button and stepped out of the rapidly disintegrating car, which gave me a nasty enveloping look and popped out of the toaster with a sunburned grin.

"Service with a smile." I whispered, lifting myself up from the hot, dusty road and crying.