No, this isn’t a law post or one about ice cream cakes, per se. Rather, it’s about a beautiful Wednesday night and my own love for found objects – or in this case, found language. One of the great virtues of my current job is its location. Drexel is less than a mile from Center City Philadelphia and two blocks from the very Ivy campus at Penn. It was there, by the Van Pelt Library, that I found myself spending twenty minutes channeling college. Students were milling about, debating whether to hit the books or head directly to Quizzo. Couples were strolling by, holding hands, laughing. A lone individual here and there was enjoying a cigarette. And all around me I heard people chatting. And as one of those talkers passed me, on a cell phone, she left a single phrase in her wake: “Ice Cream Cakes Equal Love.”
That was her gift to me – a snippet of the English language. My own Duchamp readymade. What could she have meant? Was she discussing birthday cake choices, agreeing with a confidante that her loving boyfriend had made a telling choice? Was she explaining her own decision to forgo the usual Duncan Hines (or was it Betty Crocker?) and instead shell out for the Carvel? Or is there a more obscure explanation? I’ll never know, and am left to project my own meaning on the words.
Perhaps I needn’t even do that. TM charges good money for a mantra – for the which the main required trait is its inscrutability. Now I can sit quietly under the elms and ponder my ice cream phrase for hours.
Once upon a time, I would have tried to transform the phrase into a short story. Today, though, it will have to stand on its own two feet. A piece of art all on its own. A readymade.