🍎🍎 The Photo Not Taken: 🍎 Two leafy-topped full-sized carrots, sprawled on the slimy sidewalk near the loading area of Fairway in a sludgy pool of vegetative goop, chalk-outline-ready, awaiting my caption of "Car-rot". 🍎 A clear plastic carton of brown eggs, upturned several yards away on the street near the same area of Fairway, around which several pigeons of various colors, including brown, searched and pecked, awaiting a caption that didn't come to me spontaneously but would have had something to do with the fact that birds lay eggs and maybe, if I thought a bit more, cannibalism. 🍎 You were, thankfully, spared.

A post shared by Jodi (@jodiverse) on Aug 22, 2018 at 4:23am PDT

The coffee’s held hostage in its pot until I get something done. I must complete the task in order to earn the reward, so the coffees languishes, my silent incentive, just wanting to be poured into a mug already and quaffed. It’s getting impatient.

I would complete the task with more expedience/happiness if only I’d had the coffee, but I can’t until I’m done the task. It’s, yes, a Catch-22, or a Caff-22, or just plain old ridiculous since I’m the one imposing this rule. Still, I must abide or I’ll have let myself down.

My task? Writing these words.

The “Jesus Shaves” mug was sent to me as a gift from a friend who makes me laugh hard enough to make me almost pee my pants, a charming event that would be hastened by coffee quaffing (coffing?).

In the mug’s “ready” state, anticipating coffee, it depicts Jesus, looking like a long-lost BeeGee on the brink of harmonizing with his brothers. When hot liquid is added, he loses the sexy beard and several years and looks like a poetic-souled boy who’d pair bellbottoms with his tunic in my seventh grade class circa 1975 and earn several pages in my diary.

My phone likes when I ask it how old celebrities are.

“Okay, Google. How old is Ted Danson?”

“Ted Danson is 68 years old.”

“Okay, Google. How old is Mary Steenburgen?”

“Mary Steenburgen is 63 years old.”

“Okay, Google. How old is Jason Schwartzman?”

“Jason Schwartzman is 36 years old.”

But after that, Google gets impatient and only supplies the number without the name, like a parent who, on the way to IKEA, thought it would be fun to do that “I spy with my little eye” thing, and realized quickly it wasn’t going to end with the car trip.