JetLag Slow Font

The annual trip to my Guru's shrine in Tierra Del Fuego; the long hours spent cleaning snails from his mausoleum. How he hated snails! The dear old boy! (While still of course loving them as God's creation. Still they made his skin crawl, and I don't much like them either, except with a nice mole sauce and a very dry Sherry.)

On the Helicopter back to Santiago- where I'd catch the evening jet home, I fantasized about that very dish.The snails in my backpack were for when I got back at last to Annika and Valerie and could forget about weighty spiritual matters for a while- I pictured my self watching the girls frolic quicksilver in the garden- the very antithesis of hunting snails!.

But you know how snippety airport security can get. They seem to think that anything the French like is potentially dangerous. They made me flush my golden bounty down a toilet while one of their cadre- not a high-ranker- watched and, for some reason, counted the snails.

On the plane afterwards, my appetite lost, I was served perchance a bowl of alphabet soup. And succumbing to the fit of nostalgia that that induced in me, I got out my pen, gathered up some napkins, and made drawings of the letters floating there in their thin tomato broth as they slowly disintegrated.

Sleep evaded me and I was dreadfully tired by the time we landed. But Annika had come- like a Valkerie- bringing the old Porsche with it's soft chamois seats and whisper quiet engine to sweep me peacefully home-

-to where Valerie was putting the final touches on the meal they'd spent the day assembling. (There was to be a rum-soaked white cake for desert, I was given to understand.) But I was quite unable to do justice to the celebrations: jet-lagged, I drifted in and out of focus all that evening. The girls giggled and tried to make conversation in English. Alas, to no avail!

I awoke well before dawn on the davenport in the little salon, covered with one of Annika's fun faux furs, and with only a hazy memory of desert. Unable to get back to sleep, I went to the computer- and found that the girls had scanned in my little "soup" drawings while I dozed! they had, all by themselves, put together a rough draft of this font!

So I spent a few happy hours spacing and kerning- bringing it home, as they say- as the golden light of a fresh new Cote d'Or morning slowly filled the solarium.

Myself, I'd have named this "Soup-regular", or something equally unpretentious (and/or spiritual) but the girls had taken a liking to the thing and had an exaggerated sense of its utility and importance. They wanted a more provocative moniker attached to what they rightly felt was at least partly their own work. And so they protested- and pouted so prettily- that I let them do the naming.

So JetLag it is! Use it for political manifestos or for the more serious sort of love letters! Use it when you need to be pointedly- or poignantly- unpretentious (forgive me, my dears?)