A new day breaks, perhaps sunny, or foggy, or perhaps just plain cloudy, or even drizzling, or raining, or storming with winds howling.  But a new day.

Coffee, for many, first thing.  Colombia appreciates the gesture!  Then perhaps breakfast, or maybe just juice, perhaps orange juice, or grapefruit juice, or tomato or V8.  What to choose, what to choose.

Coffee smells great, even if you don’t care for coffee, but if you do, should it be black and bitter, black and sweet, or loaded with cream, or perhaps just milk.  Maybe skimmed milk.  And toast, dry or buttered?  And what about jam?  And eggs?  Scrambled?  Omelet?  Sunny side up or just fried, or what about a raw egg in a glass of orange juice, that’s supposed to be healthy.  On the other hand, what about pancakes?  Or waffles.  What to choose, what to choose.

A blank page but a keyboard full of promises, good promises but pretty bad ones as well.  That’s the nature of the inchoate.  What key to choose, what keys, there are letters and punctuation and numbers and symbols, upper case, lower case, what to choose what to choose.

It used to be a blank page on a typewriter, a real page, not just a virtual facsimile, but then, if you made a mistake, you all too frequently crumbled the page and threw it out with nary a thought for the trees.  That is no longer politically correct, or efficient.  No cut and paste back then, or spell checker, or grammatical suggestions (a poet’s bane).

Anyway, what to write.  Hmmm, let’s see.  Just start with a word, any word, the rest will come.

Maybe.  Hopefully; perhaps it will even be adequate, or even decent, maybe even good, or even great. 

But what if it’s crap and there’s no paper to crumble.

What to choose, what to choose.
_______

© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2023; all rights reserved.  Please feel free to share with appropriate attribution.

Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet) is a writer, political commentator and academic currently residing in the Republic of Colombia (although he has primarily lived in the United States of America of which he is also a citizen).  Until 2017 he chaired the political science, government and international relations programs at the Universidad Autónoma de Manizales.  He has academic degrees in political science (the Citadel), law (St. John’s University), international legal studies (New York University) and translation and linguistic studies (the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies).  However, he is also fascinated by mythology, religion, physics, astronomy and mathematics, especially with matters related to quanta and cosmogony.  He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at https://guillermocalvo.com/.