Nine Steps

Fire Escape & Delectable Salad.

Step One: Construct salad, using only the finest obtainable spinach leaves, lettuce leaves, avocadoes, strawberries, hydroponic tomatoes, cucumbers, cilantro, pine nuts, and Havarti.

Step Two: Let chill.

Step Three: Emerge onto fire escape with one or more of the following:

(a) hand-rolled cigarettes

(b) book of translations

(c) Hagakure (samurai’s guide to life)

(d) empty mind, free of frustrations

(e) feelings of futuristic nostalgia, wherein the present moment is perceived through a metanoiac cognitive/emotional lens of the imagined future self, thus imbuing the present moment with a feeling of fleeting, dreamlike specialness. (These are the good ol’ days. Them fire escape and salad days. Remember way back when?)

Step Four: Watch sunset disappear into smoky blue skies, exploding into liquid fire that disperses itself into erupting cumulus clouds on horizon.

Step Five: Return to apartment, procuring salad.

Step Six: Consume with family and/or friends

Step Seven: Listen to Charles Mingus live at UCLA.

Step Eight: Aimless bike ride!

Step Nine: Fall asleep putting Eleanor to bed.