Budgie and I were driving around the sorrowfully familiar roads. He and my ex were planning their wedding and had just checked out a venue.

“They have a dish. It’s what do call it. Shredded wheat. Shredded wheat with meat.”

“Whaddaya mean with meat? With meat?”

“There’s like, stringy meat on top. No. A crumble. A stewy meat.”

“A crumbly, stewy meat? A beef? Beef stew. Beef brisket?”

“Brisket! Brisket. Beef brisket. A brisket of beef. Served on shredded wheat.”

“Shredded wheat like the cereal shredded wheat,” I declared. “Brisket.”

“There was a barbecue sauce. A savor.”

We rode past the tractor dealer. Green John Deeres all in a row. We 

The dish sounded revolting and it sounded delicious. Just like everything else in America. The dish we’d all consume on the occasion of his wedding to my ex Janie. I imagined the crunch. Vaguely salty shredded wheat and shredded beef on top, a little too sweet from barbecue. It was grotesque and my mouth began to water.

The Software Update

Sometimes I check the settings of my computer or my phone in the hopes of finding the little red badge telling me there’s something for me to do, that I am called upon, that something’s there to be renewed: the software update. If I see it I feel the slightest endorphin hit, or is it adrenaline, microscopic, barely perceptible and yet compelling. What am I anticipating? It is hope in its meagerest form. It’s beyond foolish and beyond pointless, it’s been proven again and again. But I am hoping for the update to end all updates, the one to solve the world. That fixes all its own bugs and the others. The one that points us to the light. This could be the one. But after the screen goes black and the device comes back to life, and its progress is complete, and it says welcome back or maybe nothing at all, the world within it, just like the world outside, is a little worse than it was before.

Once I had a vision, or was it a dream. A street sign in an unremarkable part of Manhattan, let’s say 28th Street, in the limpid atmosphere of autumn night. Set against gray and brown buildings and perhaps a tree. In this image were all my failures and all my grief and hopelessness. Like I’d arrived at my bleak destiny. I saw this in my head many years ago, before I’d even moved to the city, and I did not know why. I didn’t feel hopeless and I still don’t. But I remembered it from time to time.