Mister, I’m on my way to silence. Can you
let me have a sip of words?
—Kim Hyun
wasn’t what i was
looking for in there.
pretty much anything sweet
would’ve been fine by me.
love is a biscuit and now
we are go-kart racing with
billie eilish. etc. how do i
find the sweet that is in me?
artificial sweetener. which i
began using to make coffee
more palatable around the
time i moved to san francisco.
saccharine: excessively sweet
or sentimental. i’m from the
south, so of course. but let’s
do it without the actual sugar,
i thought, remembering dad
holding a spoon of his first,
second, third, etc., glazed
ceramic cup (this was before
the overkill of bulky mugs),
almost dainty, but holding
a spoon as a sort of upside-
down umbrella over the mouth
of the coffee/teacup in one hand
while the other held the bottom
of the sugar dispenser, butt up,
with a sheer white pour that lasted
what seems like a minute. the
spoon never moved, really, just
overfilled with the white granules
until an oval shaped wall of sugar
began to cascade down into the
cup from the rim of the spoon.
this goes on for some time. then,
finally, the sugar is rightside-up,
back on the table in front of his
saucer, maybe one swivel with
thumb and forefinger to tip the
rest of the sweet stuff out of
the spoon and into the cup,
which would now be seemingly
half-filled with sugar. then the
coffee would be poured over the
granules topped off generously
with whole milk, and the spoon
during this phase of the ritual or
performance would be stirring the
goop back into a syrupy liquid.
and in no time flat the cup would
be slurped all but dry (with a few
dregs of the toast he’d sop into
the slurry for good measure),
so that he’d be back again at
‘measuring’ out the teaspoons
of cascading sugar, starting the
process over again. whether
by genetics of by virtue of
growing up in the south,
my tongue wants things
just as sweet, but dad was
diagnosed with diabetes a
few years before his early
passing, and mom was
diagnosed well before that
and sits for dialysis three
times a week, so i suppose
when i started using the
artificial sweetener some
twenty years ago i was
doing so with a glimpse of
that—of this—potential future,
even though by then i
had yet to even be told
that i was pre-diabetic.
hence the splenda, which
still does the trick for me
and my saccharine-seeking
tongue. where was i going
with this? well, the music
of billie eilish got me here,
i suppose. and as reminiscent
and as rooted as her music is
in the melancholy of goth or
emo or whatever pop calls its
minor keys these days, she is
about as sweet as they come,
it seems to me, especially as
interviewed by david letterman,
whose snide curmudgeon has
worked its way into his entire
demeanor and yet, the longer
that gray beard grows, the
tamer and sweeter the man
gets, so that nowadays, as the
interview streams through the
airwaves to my laptop, which
then gets to me, comes at me
as more sugar poured for the
duration into my head through
my eyes and ears. what will i use
to stir this admixture into my cynical
brain, i wonder, now that the king of
snide has become grandpa sweetheart.
the logic of portraying everyman’s
sweeter side when he once was
the singular resonant voice of
cynicism before the world even
needed it. and so, we
apologetically get a grip.
on this, another day
of sweet sorrow.
