Seven Eleven, dice, and crispy foam

This morning I went to the local 7-Eleven to pick up something my wife had ordered. (In Taiwan it is common to have parcels delivered to a convenience store rather than directly to one's home.) One of the other customers there was wearing a T-shirt that said "If only I had a coffee and a donut!" Taking this as a sign, I decided my next stop would be a coffee shop called Donutes (sic).

When I walked into Donutes, I was greeted by this sign, which wasn't there last time I visited.

It was Amber that first caught my eye, since I had just had a dream (on which I will be posting later) featuring three sisters who were all named Amber.

Then I noticed the dice.

I had come to Donutes because of something I had seen at a 7-Eleven. My recent post "Rolling the bones" recounts a dream about a dice game called Seven Eleven.

Something on the menu also caught my eye: some ungodly concoction called "Crunchy Cheese Foam Coffee." (I only ever drink plain black coffee myself, so I'd never really looked at the menu.)

Crunchy foam is a strange concept -- it makes me think of those "Without objective morality everything is permissible" memes -- but as it happens I was just thinking about crispy foam yesterday.

The music video for "Gimme Sympathy" by Metric (also featured in "Rolling the bones") ends with a group of small children running into the room where the band is performing, running around a bit, and then running out the door. The first time I watched that video, those kids scared the bejesus out of me because my brain processed them not as children but as trooping fairies. (The kids are wearing butterfly wings and seem to be invisible to the band members, so this was perhaps intentional.) Something about seeing trooping fairies running triggers a very deep and primitive fear response -- Panic terror in the original sense -- like seeing a coiled snake tensed and ready to strike.

Trooping fairies as objects of fear made me think of Allingham's haunting poem about "fear of little men." I began mentally reciting what I could remember of it, and the mention of the fairies living on "crispy pancakes of yellow sea foam" struck me as potentially relevant in connection with recent posts (e.g. "The Golden Age") about the yellow sea. It turns out I'd misremembered that line -- it's actually "yellow tide-foam" -- but it was weird to run into "crunchy cheese foam" (cheese is often yellow) the very next morning.

When I walked into Donutes, the song "A Place Like Home" by Birgersson Lundberg was playing in the background. When I left some 45 minutes later, it was playing again.

These lines got my attention:

They don't get what it's like

To be no one, no one, no one, no one

This is a pretty clear link to "You don't know how it feels to be me" -- "me" in this case being Tom Petty. I posted that song in "Tom Petty death sync," which, as the title suggests, emphasizes the fact that Tom Petty is dead and could thus be said to be "no one." The mortal man known as Thomas Earl Petty no longer exists.

The repeated line "We don't wanna be running from the sun" is also a link back to the Metric song, with its repeated references to the Beatles song "Here Comes The Sun." The idea of running from the sun suggests another Beatles song: "When the sun shines / They slip into the shade."

For me, it is this one song that establishes Ringo's claim as the greatest rock drummer of all time. Remarkably, though, Sid and Susie managed to pull off a successful cover with no drums at all.