quality not quantity

While waiting for the slow connections to seek completion and finality like we all do, I see a pile of staples, amidst the periphery of my myopic assaults on a damp newspaper, I see a pile of staples and I think that they are a bunch of insects, folded and doubled (at times, tripled) over.  They move hastily towards me now, forcing me to retract my desk-laden elbow, first, then re-examine my entire catalog of perception, secondly. 

While waiting for her to come home, I hear the metallic cogs of my my pet lion's robotic brain shift into a higher level of thinking.  He must be stalking something (it is not me) again.  The gears crank louder (whenever I can hear them from here it is serious churning) and longer from his vast pen in the next "room."  I quotate that word, room, because why, because it is the opposite of course.  It is not really a room, at all, in which he lives.  It is more like an open-air pit adorned with glistening steel trees and iron vines.  Quality construction, it is.  But that is a story for another time.

While waiting for the water to boil, I smell--

"I am not a real magazine writer," Xyz blurts out, his squat body compressing further beneath the admission, "I just got lucky."

Xyz scratches at his black stubble and cuts a jig with his jaw, jutting the bottom out like a cash register drawer.  No sale.  Someone, an old neighbor we'll say, once said that if Xyz sneezed (not sneered, don't misread, even though Xyz has that as a major hobby, sneering) he'd grow a beard.  Funny.  I also like to imagine a PlayDoh Fun Factory, where you put the neon wad in that plastic garlic-press/torture-device looking clamp and squeeze through the thick stalks of soft clay.  Beard hairs the diameter of Bic ballpoints and the color of sunsets.  

"Well, I am not a quality friend," Abc responds, wrinkling his brow in that manner that he is able to make look so genuine, " so we are on the same page in many respects."

"Hopefully some long lost millionaire relative passes on tomorrow and my then my ship will really come in, boy howdy," Xyz feigns the ignorance of a local, "seriously, though, my rents are due tomorrow.  My rents!"

Abc's overbite snags his words out of the air: "I would take your job any day.  You poke your pen for Penthouse, man!"

Xyz shrugs, squints, sighs: "Yeah..."

While waiting for the water to boil, I smell.  Period.  I smell, I exist, I thrive.  That's quality.