They said oatmeal.  Eat locally-sourced oatmeal to lengthen and enrich my life.  Then it was fish or blueberries, then that South American grain with the maggoty texture.  Let’s not forget dark chocolate and red wine, or that one green.  You know.  With ropy-stems?  You have to prepare it with a bomb tech’s level of focus just to make it edible. 

A mob of angry mimes gathered.  They seemed to be sharpening swords or loading pistols, I couldn’t tell.  Also, they weren’t really good mimes.  But there they were amassed outside the city, so we called an emergency meeting with the police and city manager and a retired guy who loitered at all these events. 

A tin-plated nonsense came up over the hill on spindly legs and entered our village at a stately pace.  Our village, having never seen such a thing, crowded the visitor, eager for a chance to benefit from its peculiar form of smarts.  Presently, the crowd around the figure thickened so that its stilts now acted as posts sunk into the earth.  Its immobility was all the better for the onlookers to worship it, and although skeptics existed, they were shouted down by the others.  The nonsense itself, now robbed of the ability to execute its gawky walk, it preferred, I thought, not to make itself a target of ridicule.  It stayed in our village thereafter.

The elephant in the room wants more attention than we are willing to give, and frankly, if five guys out of a proverb want to come over and fondle him in the dark while hypothesizing as to the beast’s identity, they are welcome. I’m sick of our pachyderm. Have been for over a year, if truth be told.

Grains of salt. Wadded napkins. A scent of slivered fried potatoes in the air. This former site of dining, this leatherette monument to food-based fellowship remains desolate. But clearly someone dined here.