According to Julia Camron’s The Artist’s Way, “Morning Pages” are a daily ritual of writing three pages of stream-of-consciousness thoughts by hand first thing in the morning. No editing or planning allowed. So often they can get quite weird…
The state police decided to build their new headquarters in the middle of the Amazon rainforest. No one was entirely sure how they planned to police anything from that location, but the decision was made, and so it was done. Equipment was loaded onto a truck and packed tightly: desks, printers, file cabinets, computers, and an entire room’s worth of police-issue uniforms all readied for the big move.
Lieutenant Jeffrey Alan (pronounced “A-LON”) gathered everyone for a meeting. Concerns had been raised about the long commute. Would the squad cars be able to make the trip every day? Would their salaries cover the necessary gas? At what point would they simply turn around and go home? A hundred questions, none of them answered. Not everyone was pleased, and a faction within the force had quietly begun forming against the plan. Sergeant Phil Sanderson emerged as the ringleader of the resistance. He and Officer Liz Cronin searched for any way to sabotage the relocation, exploiting every sign of weakness and looking for angles to make the entire thing collapse before it did so on its own.
Meanwhile, on the other side of town, a new bakery had just opened its doors. The owner — a former circus clown with a questionable past — began mixing ingredients for a lemon wedding cake. It would be his first chance to show the town the kind of pastries they could expect, and every advantage would be taken to ensure a flawless debut, even if it involved unsavory clown-like activity.
A car full of police officers pulled up to the bakery. They hoped to take a box of fresh doughnuts and muffins back to the precinct — something with lots of variety. Maybe even nuts.
As six officers walked through the door, Dan Bubbles watched them carefully. He knew a gang of cops could be just as troublesome as a gang of hoodlum teens. More so. Last year, he’d spent six painful weeks in the county hospital after a run-in with a rogue cop gang. He endured several spinal surgeries and what may have been an unnecessary prostate massage. It was the last time he would ever let the janitor back into his room. Certainly not without gloves.
“Greetings, fellow citizen!” one of the officers shouted, far too loudly for an indoor space. “We would love a box of your freshest morning pastries. Mixed in flavor, styles, and genres, like the neighborhood of Plynthdale!” Every officer laughed, large and excessively.
“Make sure there’s something with marzipan in there,” one said. “I don’t actually know what that is, but it sounds like something a bakery would sell.”
The other officers stared at the floor in embarrassment.
Officer Marzipan quietly exited the bakery.
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