I woke up that morning,brushed my teeth,ate breakfast.

I've read enough books in my life that I do realize it goes against wisdom to tell a story about a person waking up in the morning and then following them step-by-step until the storyteller puts them to bed at night. But the way I figure it,no wild journey ever began without someone waking up in the morning.I mean,if I never woke up in the morning, there'd be no story at all.

So, getting back to the beginning: I woke up in the morning, had breakfast. The stamp-sized kitchen was a natural light-deprived airless room, its walls perversely painted dark purple-red on a whim by me and my roommate right after we'd moved in.The paint wasn't even dried when we realized that we mutually hated the color, which gave the room the air of a minuscule bordello plus four-bagel toaster (hers), but it would have taken more home-improvement initiative than either of us had to correct the Architectural Digest error of our ways.If we were going to revamp the place,we'd also need to replace the light blue-and-white tiled floor, turned yellowish with age, and the ceiling light fixture, behind which an extraordinary number of bugs gravitated to die. But this would have entailed more visits to Home Depot for just one room than I ever intended to make in my entire life. Let the ugliness ride.

I opened up one of the lower kitchen cabinets, pulled out an opened box of Cocoa Krispies,next to which were three more boxes—insurance—and poured some into a bowl.Then I rea