I was working out on the old bicycle, the old stationary bike. Please enter profile. One. Please enter maximum work load. Seven. Please enter time of workout. Fifteen. Press start. As I was walking into the workout room and the good old happy old happy black hard seat flashing red numbers stationary hard butt seat hurts your thighs please do not spray the display with cleaning fluid bicycle, I saw her, she was standing. At the snack machine. I normally hate the word snack, I do not like it, I despise the word snack, I don't like the way it sounds- I like what it means, I like to snack, I'd like to snack on her ankles- but I don't like the way it sounds, it sounds like snack too much. But there she was, at the snack machine, and have you ever seen her stand in indecision? She stands on one foot and the other foot snakes around- I hate the word snakes, it doesn't snake, she has a lovely foot, a beautiful foot, a demure, white, fine, porcelain, sculpted, to be worshiped foot, I've never see her foot but I know she has the perfect foot, I love feet, not in general only pretty ones, and that's not a duh sentence, for example, I don't like pretty snakes. Have you ever seen her standing in indecision? She stands on one foot, her other foot, the instep, caresses her ankle on the standing foot, it is the most beautiful thing in the world, it is more beautiful than roses, than childbirth, than chocolate sundaes, than chocolate shakes- this is how beautiful it is:

It is seven o'clock on a warm Hawaiian night and the sky has reluctantly allowed the playful sun to leave so that the wonderful twilight can practice it's speeches before full on night turns couples into lovers and lovers into friends. The sand recalls warmth to your toes and you notice that her toes are painted redder than they've ever been red and even though you flew through hellish conditions and a crowded plane with crying babies and drunk business men you'd do it all, naked and covered with salt filled wounds if it meant you could be on the beach for the rest of your life looking at her toes, and your heart is beating not faster but harder than it ever has in the whole world of ever, for every bit of redderness her toenails are your heart is beating faster, the stars are singing a serenade to the rhythmic insistence of the sexual ocean and you know, you know, you are truth, truth is right there in the color of her hair and the roundness of her face and the earthy sweet inebriating smell of her skin, and you know, you know what love is- it is the most beautiful thing in the entire universe, past, present, future, and conditional tense combined.

That is how she stands at the snack machine, and now I love the word snack, I worship it, I write it down on little slips of blue paper torn from the back of programs that fall from the rubbish bin outside the theater where fat rich old people with wrinkles and Bentlies go to watch starving actors starve on the stage while they drool, the old people, on the programs that they leave behind that the starving ushers throw away that I find that I rip to write the word snack on because I love the word: it is the most beautiful word in the whole world. I saw her and gazed with a powerful gaze at her as she stood there in indecision, was it to be the crackers or the cookies, cookies or crackers, the pasty white crackers or the lovely brown cookies, round or square, or cookies, or crackers, or white, or which, which one? I hoped that her brain would fail at that moment, that God Himself would rip from her her right to be human and have willpower so that she could never never be decided and forever forever stand there in infinite indecision and me there too, staring watching looking gazing eying ogling her indecision and her standing on one foot in her black pants and her black shirt. Her hair is a red trying to be brown and her eyes are the deep summer blue of winter which pines for fall and dances with spring. Her eyes moved from rack to rack to row to row in constant indecision and I asked God Himself to strike her dead where she stood in indecision and me too so that forever and ever our ghosts would haunt this silly spot in the gym next to the snack machines and for all of eternity and after that too and so on and backwards in time, back to the big bang, the big bang a fine machine built by God Herself so that I could stand for ever and watch her looking between crackers and cookies. Then I went in to workout.

I road that bike like a battle cruiser, piloting it around the gymnasium and killing with deathray blasters every woman who dared to have legs or eyes. You, at the rowing machine- pow, dead for having legs, blasted out of the sky to die in a fiery furnace of hell-borne fury pain and suffering- oh, I sweated to think that there I was on that bike for fifteen minutes at power level seven on profile numero uno while she decided to be undecided no more and went back to work. I sucked the energy right out of a black hole to power up my super jam power laser jet ram death blow shooter and kaboom, there you are, on the treadmill, dead for having two eyes that sit on your face the way hers do- above her nose. I became depressed and sad and lonely and guilty and ashamed because I loved her and love her with more energy than there is in seventeen black holes and a million billion suns, but for all my love and my ability to map every square micrometer of her legs and her eyes, I did not recall what her nose looked like. I pedaled faster and faster and provided electric juice for a million homes in Russia but still I could not punish myself enough until my reward was that when she smiles it is like the angels and the heavens and God and Jesus and Moses and Adam and John and Mary and Joseph and all the innocent children and the beautiful animals of the earth and the fishes of the sea and the birds of the air and the fury of the fire were there in my pocket telling me that I and she were the reason that the universe was spun out of the yarn of God's brain to begin with.

The smile I saw after I got done exercising my legs, white, etc. For I left the gymnasium which is connected to the box office which is where she works and like the man that I am with my legs and my hands I walked from the gym over to the cocacola man before going my merry way home, where there is no she and there is no legs and there is no cookies and crackers and Hawaii and stars and God and birds, only a small wet tank where I lie in stasis breathing once per hundred years, heart beating once per thousand years before I rise like a leviathan Pinocchio from my bed and go back the next day to the gym to see if she is there again. Having exercised so much that actual sweat came out of my skin, I approached the cocacola man and saw that she was there. She was with the cocacola man, she was trying to make yet another decision, and as the cocacola man who will forever be a God and an angel and an avatar and a saint to the heavens and the earth for all eternity because she spoke with him and by doing so ripped his soul from his body and set it free to roam where space and time are the fictions of an overactive imagination, and as she told him her dilemma he made a suggestion which she did not understand and she smiled. Her lips on her face stretched.

Her teeth which are the teeth of beautiful white teeth and her red lips and we were on the very edge of space itself, like a beach except for sand we had reality broken down into one second bits and for an ocean we had the impossible chaos of our future together as man and wife, husband and lover, brother and sister and aunt and uncle and niece and nephew and boyfriend and girlfriend and she smiled while bent slightly at the waist to peer with her blue eyes at her various choices, her waist which is her middle which is where her top meets her bottom and if God is good and grants to those who worship him their best and most secret wishes he will let me dwell there in her middle for all of eternity, yea and verily I will put my hands on her hips and gaze into her eyes and she will stroke my ankle with her instep and I will be every single atom in the universe simultaneously and for all time, I swear it, I swear it to holy God Himself. She smiled.

And I walked to the cocacola man and made damn sure I had exact change like the cool boy I am in my hand and made damn sure as I approached I new exactly which cool boy choice I was going to make, spied the Pepsi can in the ice on top of the heap of choices there and knew damn well for certain and no question about it that I would give that man exact change for his can and take the can and shake off the ice in the coolest way known to God or the devil herself and then pop it and drink in such an alluring and sexy way that she would have to tackle me and beat me on my chest and say damn you damn you damn you for fulfilling my destiny and being the very thing which I have always wanted in this mad crazy world full of crying babies and drunken business men and bored flight attendants. I got my can as she glanced at me and if I had paper enough and if I had time enough and if I had energy enough I would wrestle God for his writing hand and tell you what it means to be glanced at by she. Then I got my can and I got it and I paid for and then I gave him the money and after that I made sure he had due change for his can and then I got my can and I opened it and then I made sure it was open and I opened it and then I shook off the ice and I paid the man and I opened it and then I drank some and I paid them man after I opened it before I drank it after I paid the cocacola man and as she watched I drank it and then opened it and then paid the man exact change and she glanced at me.

And as I walked toward the windows of the door of the building which was next to where we had just made love under the fool moon and the brilliant stars and the blanket of approving angels, I saw in the reflection my pasty white skinny legs under my gut, and I knew that she had glanced at somebody else. The rest of the words on this page express exactly how I felt: