The mezzanine.

I was hungry, but under this sunlit noon mood I needed something insubstantial and altitudinous, like a miniature can of Bluebird grapefruit juice, or half an arrowroot biscuit, or three capers rolling around a paper plate, or: popcorn. On impulse, I let a complete dollar fall into the popcom vendress's hand and lifted a twist-tied bagful garnered from the cart's glass poppery, with its 1890s-style painted lettering and yellow heat lamps and suspended popping chamber, out of which individual white fulsomenesses were jumping from under a metal hinged flap, as if doing a circus stunt for the blank drifts that composed the audience-and I got no change back; no change at all to abrade my thigh as I walked or to overflow my bureau saucer that evening! How kind of her! As I jaywalked across several streets in the direction of the CVS, trailing the inevita- ble two or three particles from each handful that exceeded the mouth's capacity, moving between cars whose lacquer looked hot to the touch and pedestrians in white blouses and white pinpoint oxford shirts, I felt somewhat like an exploding popcorn myself: a dried bicuspid of American grain dropped into a lucid gold liquid pressed from less fortunate brother kernels, subjected to heat, and suddenly allowed to flourish outward in an instantaneous detonation of weightless reversal; an asteroid of Styrofoam, much larger but seemingly of less mass than before, composed of exfoliations that in bursting beyond their outer carapace were nonetheless guided into paisleys and baobabs and related white Fibonaccia by its disappearing, back-arching browned petals (which later found their way into the space between molars and gums), shapes which seemed quite Brazilian and intemperate for so North American a seed, and which seemed, despite the abrupt assumption of their final state, the convulsive, launching "pop," slowly arrived at, like risen dough or cave mushrooms.

My total appreciation for the escalator deepened, eventually becomning embedded along my spinal column, but each individual ride was no longer guaranteed to trigger a well-worn piece of theory or state of irritation. I began to care less whether the original intent of the invention had been to emulate the stairway or not. And when I went back to department stores after those early months of work, I regarded the big motionless backs of shoppers ahead of me on the crowded slope with new interest, and I relaxed with them: it was natural, it was understandable, it was defensible to want to stand like an Easter Island monument in this trance of motorized ascension through architectures of retailing.

As if in reward for this resolution, later that same day I was looking in a cooler in a convenience store and saw a plastic- packaged sandwich labeled "Cream Cheese and Sliced Olive. The idea of a cross-section of olive-encircled pimiento set like a cockatoo's eye in the white stretch of cream cheese hit me very hard as an illustration of the same principle I had rediscovered that morning: on their own, olives are old, pickled, briny, rusty-but set them off against a background of cream cheese and you have jewelry.

Progress like that did not come again until I was over twenty. The fourth of the eight advances I have listed (to bring us quickly up to date, before we return to the broken shoelaces) came when I learned in college that L. brushed her tongue as well as her teeth. I had always imagined that tooth- brushing was an activity confined strictly to the teeth, possibly the gums -but I had sometimes felt fleeting doubts that clean- ing merely those parts of your mouth really attacked the source of bad breath, which I held to be the tongue. I devel- oped the habit of pretending to cough, cupping my hand over my lips to sniff my breath; when the results disturbed me, Iate celery. But soon after I began going out with L., she, shrugging as if it were a matter of common knowledge, told me that she brushed her tongue every day, with her toothbrush. I shivered with revulsion at first, but was very impressed. It wasn't until three years had passed that I too began brushing my own tongue regularly. By the time my shoelaces broke, I was regularly brushing not only my tongue but the roof of my mouth- and I am not exaggerating when I say that it is a major change in my life.

first, before the stapler arm makes contact with the paper, the resistance of the spring that keeps the arm held up: then second, the moment when the small independent unit in the stapler arm noses into the paper and begins to force the two points of the staple into and through it; and, third, the felt crunch, like the chewing of an ice cube, as the twin tines of the staple emerge from the underside of the paper and are bent by the two troughs of the template in the staplers base, curving inward in a crab's embrace of your memo, and finally disengaging from the machine completely-

first, before the stapler arm makes contact with the paper, the resistance of the spring that keeps the arm held up: then second, the moment when the small independent unit in the stapler arm noses into the paper and begins to force the two points of the staple into and through it; and, third, the felt crunch, like the chewing of an ice cube, as the twin tines of the staple emerge from the underside of the paper and are bent by the two troughs of the template in the staplers base, curving inward in a crab's embrace of your memo, and finally disengaging from the machine completely-

I love the constancy of shine on the edges of moving objects. Even propellers or desk fans will glint steadily in certain places in the grayness of their rotation; the curve of each fan blade picks up the light for an instant on its circuit and then hands it off to its successor.

It made the sound of a flag at the consulate of a small, rich country.

After a night of poison, your brain wakes up in the morning saying, "No, I don't give a shit who introduced the sweet potato into North America."