This is the mixed media blog of James Foreman. He writes things.

Favorite topics include art, history, modern life, pop culture, dating, sex, atheism, science, stories, whimsy, magic, writing and self-deprecation.

You can read a fiction story he wrote in the bestselling Machine of Death anthology, a true story he wrote in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette or a funny thing he wrote for McSweeney's.

He's working on a novel. It's going okay.

Today @ Panera

I don’t come to this particular Panera very often. It sits between my house and my mom and dad’s house, so I occasionally stop on my way to or from one or the other.

I see this lady here every time I’m here. She comes in, unpacks a stack of word find books, orders a single coffee, and spends hours working on them with a pen from her plastic purse full of multicolored pens. I’ve never seen her talk to anybody, check a phone, balance a checkbook, eat a danish or anything but what I just described.

I imagine that if she wrote a blog post about her afternoon at Panera, it would be about the guy on the Mac who orders a coffee and sits there with his headphones on all the time.



Also, I saw this lady come in with her young daughter and a man who is obviously the girl’s father. This woman only smiled for a little bit, when the kid’s dad went to the bathroom. Neither were wearing wedding rings. Every time the father tried to have any kind of meaningful interaction with the mother, she barely reacted at all.

I can’t imagine what they did to each other to make somebody act like this around her ex:

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