Point A: A lecture on the Oulipo at Duke’s Perkins Library. Point B: Toast, in downtown Durham, participant in Wednesday’s Dine Out for Kids benefit and a guaranteed good meal. Dream A: Stop working and spend all day thinking up algorithms to perform on archaic texts. Dream B: Have minestrone soup for dinner.*
Route: Down Chapel Drive in the bumpy bike lane (labeled, charmingly, “only bikes”), around the roundabout, currently planted with pansies intruded upon by red-orange tulips, up Campus Drive, which I had imagined would be more uphill than it was, and which has a bike lane so bumpy one cannot be distracted for a moment, under 147 past paint dripped on the sidewalk by fraternity and sorority graffiti-ers, up and around to Main Street. Well.
I have mentioned that a small section of Main Street is the worst road in Durham. I must now extend that assessment to include Main Street up to Campus Drive. Good grief. Uneven, narrow lanes with cars going super-fast through erratically routed intersections. How can one dream of minestrone, or of procedural poetics for that matter, when one is busting tail over the potholes in fear for one’s safety? I submit that one cannot.
One can, however, make it through to discover (a true coincidence, I tell you!) that Soup of the Day #2 is minestrone. With sweet potato, no less. Some dreams get to come true.
Some other ones—well, let’s just say I’ve got to learn 1) to wake up earlier and 2) how to make those pencil-and-paper Turing machines.
*Did I mention that it was cold, and that I forgot my mittens this morning? The real world intrudes upon the dream world; it’s not always bad.
