Now, you'll notice that I did not use the word when just now, but the word while. I did it for a very specific reason. Very often lately I find myself writing things that would seem to be mistakes or typos but are actually meant for a very specific reason. And yet I do not know if it is my intention to dupe people or if it is merely coincidence, or if, indeed, I am inspired by little discoveries that an apparent mistake is actually something wholly different. For example, I have had it in my mind lately to write a story where a woman says to her husband:

"What would you like to eat, dear?"

And the man replies:

"How about a pyknic?"

Which, as I have suggested, at first glance would seem to be either a mistake in typing or at the very least some odd Teutonic South-African spelling for that meal taken on a blanket in a meadow and consisting of sandwiches and/or potato chips. And maybe if I wrote it that way I would play upon this apparent misspelling, to lure one into the belief that the husband wants to enjoy a meal with his wife outside someplace in the crisp air, maybe gazing at the ocean, or maybe to make furtive love on their coats as it seems to so often occur when couples in books or movies have picnics- nature being, after all, a metaphor for sex.

And once the story ends one would go on one's merry little way and think that she or he had read a nice little piece about love and caring and couplehood and the wonderful life of companionship. That is, until one day much later while perusing a dictionary, for I would want to cater in my writing only to those sorts of people who would, periodically, peruse a dictionary: an idle moment at a desk while awaiting a phone call, or perhaps in a fit of re-braining during the commercials for some inoccuous television show, or maybe, in fact, because my readers are simply the sort who would schedule a time specifically in their week to wander through the dictionary for a few hours, or dare I say a looksie while using the commode, but at any rate, she or he would come across pyknic and recall my story and decide to merely check the odd spelling and see if it is indeed used in South Africa by German immigrants, and then find that in fact it means having a short, stocky physique. Then he or she would recall the use of the definite article a and realize that I was using the English idiomatic for referring to a person by an attribute which that person possesses, such as a Black for a Person With Black Skin, or a Jew for a Jewish Person.

So there she is. I have decided to forego the he or she and just use a she. She is sitting on a commode, and has been doing so for a while because she had a refried bean supper with her father a few hours before and she was a little bit eager with the hot sauce, in an effort to keep up with her old man. She is fourteen, and since she is an only child and her father was on the football team in high school before becoming injured in the big game against their rivals, Hope High, on an option play, when the QB decided to pitch the ball to him after all, and if he had realized it he would have been steeled for the hit from Hope High's Gus Albertson, an unfortunate misanthrope who took out the frustrations his mother took out on him on a daily basis on a daily basis on the football practice and at this time game fields, she was raised to be a bit of a tomboy and therefore she is going through an awkward stage in her adolescence where she not only wants to kill her mother and marry her father, she also wants to kill her father and marry her mother, and this paradoxical schism results in her beating on herself with tobasco at the same time as trying to increase her brain size by perusing a dictionary whenever she is engaged in the voiding of solid wastes, and liquid wastes too if she was drinking gallons of diet Pepsi while watching taped X-Files shows and refusing to go when she had to because David D is such a hunk, so that it builds up and she has to go all at once right before bed, and therefore has time to look up words such as synecdoche and metonymy.

And while flipping through The American Heritage College and wishing for the hundredth time that she could ignore her daddy's challenging glances as he glops yet another glop of Devil Sauce on his chili rellenos and chicken Colorado she comes across the word pyknic and the definition and realizes that what she had read was not a story about a couple who plans a small meal in a forest surrounded by trees and consisting of wine, cheese, and a tiny smidgen of Humboldt Mary Jane just so he can ignore her breast reduction scars better and she can overlook his, shall we say, inadequacies in the girth department, I mean, come on, did they coin pencil dick after this guy's wang, or what? What it had been about, after all, was a pair of people who were contemplating the consumption of a human being, a dwarf, they were not lovers, they were cannibals, midget cannibals, they were eaters of little-people flesh, fat little-people flesh.

And it's a good thing she's already on the toilet, if you know what I mean.

And, like all people who are faced with sudden calamity and find themselves noticing inconsequential things, like the earthquake victim, trapped beneath a thousand tons of concrete who realizes that the dust that has settled on the bones of his compound fracture is shaped not unlike the silhouette of Alexander Pope, or the freshman linebacker from Hope High who is much too scrawny to be playing linebacker, much less as a starter, and who right before the first snap of his first game and probably his last, the killer hit his older brother gets against their rivals star tailback and his older brother's decision to dedicate the hit as it is televised on all the local stations to his little brother who is in the hospital from that first play notwithstanding, notices that the grass under his knuckles is a beautiful shade of green in the arc-sodium lights of this, his school's first night game, right before the snap and the crunch which is his fifth and eight vertebrae receiving comminuted fractures, Daniella, that's her name, it was going to be Daniel after the lion's den and all that, but dad was shooting x chromosomes that cold and blustery night in the back seat of his Ford Mustang with it's brand new tires and an empty gas tank, although, oddly, they had been married for a few years already and the empty gas tank which had never worked when they were in high school was genuine this time, and it wasn't an actual nostalgia for their awful randiness in high school that had turned opportunity into being knocked up, but the inevitable consequence of waiting for a snowplow and trying to keep warm and one thing leads to another and oddly, she had been orgasmic this time and he premature, notices that the origins of pyknic is not South African or German at all but Greek.

Of course, when I say midget cannibals, I mean people who eat midgets, not midgets who eat people, or even midgets who eat midgets. That is not a case of my little foible, but a case of honestly being held to to the confines of the English language, such that even the use of a hyphen in midget-cannibles does not adequately suggest that the couple are two average heighted persons who enjoy eating fat little men and women. However, just now when I repeatedly say short and fat and I am not being redundant on purpose, but actually practicing my little tendency, because I do want to suggest that for these people munching on anorexic dwarves would be out of the question, and I would mention as much in the story, and woe betide Daniella if she didn't fully comprehend as much, for while the thought of chewing on leg of midget is a gruesome thought indeed, chewing on reduced-fat leg of midget is somehow gruesomer, so much so that perhaps it will be deadly that she had eaten a second helping of frijoles rancheros.

If you find that disgusting I beg your pardon. I don't mean the thought of Daniella thinking about skinny dwarves in the oven after having consumed mass quantities of Spanish rice and chimichangas, I mean the idea of purposefully using what would appear to be oversights in writing when what was originally intended was what was exactly put on the page. Normally I would not apologize for something, Daniella and her bathroom fun with the dictionary being a perfect example because I am in no way regretful that I had to juxtapose Mexican Cooking, a Bathroom, a Dictionary, and an Epiphany, for there was a definite reason to do so. But I will apologize for this thing I do because I do not know why I do it and if I did know why I did it I might not do it any more, such as maybe I do it owing to a trauma I suffered as a small pyknic boy while playing football for Hope High after a gargantuan sancho and burrito meal that I had won from a local radio station for correctly guessing what the word of the day was on their morning sex show, the word being onanism, the station being KTIT, and those of you who play First Person Perspective video games will know where I'm coming from. :) And since I am wise enough to know that it is not healthy to perpetuate that which is borne of trauma, I would halt at once my using apparent mistakes as actual intentions, which is why I now freely apologize and beg your pardon if you don't like it.

So, like I say, people do the oddest things while they think no one is looking, and I say while and not when because I am not trying to suggest that people take every opportunity to do something at all at the exact moment that they think no one is looking, both the exact moment of the realization even if it comes only hours or minutes after the fact that no one is not looking and of course the exact moment that no one is looking any longer, instead I mean that people will just do odd things while there is a span when for whatever reason no one is looking or at least they believe no one is looking, for verily we could not say that people do odd things while no one is looking because we could not prove it because no one would be looking to do the verification, although one could always say it about oneself and if more than one person admitted it a sort of consensus could be reached, but who would admit it? No, it's while people think they are unobserved that they do the oddest things, the joke being, of course, that they are not actually unobserved, whether it is a one-way glass or a hidden camera or just well-placed shadow.

And that's all I have to say. No specific example comes to mind. And I will apologize for being so dull, merely stating a thought and not elucidating it with an example. It's just that I've never been one for excessive explanations, believing instead that good ideas stand on their own. People do the oddest things while they think no one is looking. Say it at a party and people will call you wise.