(no subject)

Right after your death you may be accosted by a stranger outside Dunkin Donuts who will want to show you an album with a brown leather cover. Don't take him or her up on this as it is a trick. Instead of photographs it will contain gemstones of every kind set in foam rubber, gemstones that will be represented as the best memories of people who lived more interesting lives than yours. When you reach out your hand to touch one the book will be slammed shut on your forearm, not painfully but awkwardly, with the few, thick pages of the album sticking out at different angles like the wings and limbs of a smashed mosquito. The stranger will explain that this album is in fact a fake because you are, and will say words to remind you of the first time you found yourself not saying quite what you meant or could ever back up but then, in the face of either opposition or acceptance, nevertheless pretended you did or could, thus entering the shoes of someone who didn't exist, thus leaving your own. The stranger will point in anger at the tooling on the leather cover, the faint digits of your birthday connected to those of the date of your first gratuitous deception. Will stub her or his fingers into these so hard that their tips will bend and slide, flash pale then red, perhaps even drag start and stop in two or three miniscule near-instant slightly skewed stages across the binding, like darts thrown not quite in a line in succession. The implication will be that you were never yourself again after that, or that instead of being the moment of losing yourself this was what proved you didn't have one. All the false stones will have hit the ground and rolled to rest by this point, or at this point exactly if the stranger has mastered the timing. If despite this text and all other warnings you have let things reach such a pass you must just then produce an album of your own. It should be filled with drawings, by preference in ink, of everything I have described to you. The final drawing must be of yourself entering the donut shop unmolested, as though the stranger had never arrived. In the stranger's confusion drop this open album among the stones, scream like Jimmy Page for silence, rip a garment, enter the shop. No one will dare challenge you again.