A Definition of Irony

There's man all over for you, blaming on his boots the fault of his feet.
— Samuel Beckett

The Irish, claimed Freud, are "one race of people for whom psychoanalysis is no use whatsoever"—a quote that usually comes to my mind after a few shots of Jameson's, when I get that hard-to-suppress urge to punch something. Usually, I have the (relative) good sense to pick an inanimate target, at least, so that the only person I hurt is myself (which I think is why people go into psychoanalysis in the first place...).

I'd like to posit a theory, based on the evidence provided by two of Ireland's more famous—Sam Beckett and James Joyce. Clearly the Irish have a refined sense of irony. ("Nothing is funnier than unhappiness, I grant you that. Yes, yes, it's the most comical thing in the world.") And for an ironic, there's no higher station than that of a sad clown. The Irish are impervious to happiness because anyone with a heightened sense of irony is in love with his own sadness. Ever the aesthete, he will go out of his way to sabotage his own life, because only then can he fully savor its irony...

Alt-Country

alt-country. "Lost my job, my house, my truck.

"Got new ones."

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Autoschadenfreude

autoschadenfreude. Noun. A malicious satisfaction in the misfortunes of yourself.

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Cloudscape

"The certitude that everything has been written negates us or turns us into phantoms." - from "The Library of Babel," by Jorge Luis Borges

I'm sitting in that chair in the corner of my bedroom, and my hand is bleeding. The morning is quiet. The sun shines in through the window and casts the shadow of the pane onto my bed, and I can hear distant traffic, and feel a breeze coming in.

I'm watching the blood run down my hand onto my wrist, onto my arm, a bright red rivulet, so bright, shockingly bright, candy apple red, and I think, "This is so shockingly bright. This is the color of vivid, the color of vitality, and seeing this color, it is a memorable experience. What is happening now is special. It is unique."

The same thing happened yesterday.

I cut my hand two days ago, or maybe it was the day before that, and since then, every morning, when I get out of the shower, I sit in the chair in the corner of my room and I notice again that my hand is bleeding. I see the angle of the sun through the window, I hear far-away cars, feel the gentle breeze, and think that what is happening right now is unique, never having happened before or ever again, though it happened yesterday, and (one might conclude) it will happen tomorrow.

I watch the trickle of blood wind across my wrist and down my arm without fear or concern but only deja vu, as if I am stuck in a single point of time, while the world around me has continued to move and change, almost imperceptibly, like the passing of a cloud.

Right now—is it today or yesterday? And if this has all happened before, why should that make this moment any less unique? If time is truly infinite, then won't this all happen again—not just my bleeding in this chair, but the repetition of the bleeding, and the musing on it? And again and again. If the dimensions of the universe are as boundless as mathematics, then is there not someone else, somewhere else, doing this same thing, even now? And writing about it? Hasn't it all been written before? Even by me.

The bleeding stops, on its own, for now, and I go on about my day.

Command Line Existential Crisis

$ whatis whoami

Computer Head

I've had my head in a computer for days now, and it's had an unsettling effect that I call, simply, "computer head." Computer head comes after too many hours or days of writing code, of passing variables into functions, of running if-then-else conditionals and for-next-while loops.

Non-computer people may not understand how beautiful a computer is, how perfect its mind. Things work, or they don't. Conditions are met, or they aren't. A function is performed, and it returns a value, true or false. The job of the programmer is to mediate between this immaculate computer logic and the sloppy unordered world. A programmer takes a world of chaotic choices and judgments, and systematizes it.

The world, of course, puts forth such little effort to comply. At 6pm, the programmer may have fit everything into a tidy system, but by 11, nodding off to sleep, that same programmer will suddenly realize whole scenarios for which that system won't work. There, in the dark, staring at the ceiling, where people might count sheep, the programmer sees brackets, parentheses and semicolons flying by; and there will be no rest till every loose end falls neatly into some predefined place. It's why programmers are notorious for working late hours, for staying at their desks and living off M&Ms (M&Ms, by the way, won't muck up a keyboard...): while the world goes unreined, there is no peace in the would-be-tidy mind of the programmer.

I'm in this frame of mind when a friend calls. I can't pick up the phone: I've already made the transition into fastidious computer-think, and I can't afford to undo it with a human interface. "Human interface." I actually think this. I see my caller ID and immediately reduce this to a variable, $Caller = "Peter". Before I can stop myself, I've built a function in my head to decide whether or not to pick up:

function PickUpPhone ($Caller, $q) {
	# where q is the "friendship quotient"
	if (!($AnswerPhone) {
		$Caller["pissedOff"]++;
	}
	while ($Caller["pissedOff"] >= q) {
		friendship = FALSE;
	}
	return friendship;
}

I don't take the call, and I think there really is a decent chance that $Caller["pissedOff"]++. Instead, I break for lunch, and at the deli, I start codifying their array of menu items:

              <item><sandwich><tuna>; 
              <item><soup><splitpea type="vegetarian">;

Stop it.

But I can't stop it. I get back to the office and it's worse than before: "Hello, $Accountant;" "If MeetingLength > 1 hour, then Morale = (Morale -1);"

By the time I get home, I can't feel my body. I'm not sure I have one anymore, and I'm not sure I need one. I think of taking a bath, or going for a walk, but instead, I go straight to a computer, to tweak some code. After all, "$TrainRide > 15 minutes," which gave me plenty of time to discover new ways that my system could be improved, and the world could be made more perfect. It's almost there...

Dreaming on the Tooth Fairy

I haven't seen C. since I don't know when. Months—enough months that counting them seems beside the point. Someone I thought I'd see every day forever.

I keep expecting that I'll "get over her," and then I keep winding up disappointed that I haven't already "gotten over her." Finally it begins to come to me that I'm not going to "get over her," and I suppose I don't really want to, which is why it's been so hard, all these months....

Instead, immeasurable bit by immeasurable bit, the future I dreamt with her will fade away. Rather than thinking of her twenty-four hours a day and sadly, it lessens to twenty, and some of those thoughts are happy memories; and gradually, fewer hours, and a better ratio, till some day, the idea of "us" will seem faraway, wistful, a little ridiculous; and it will be replaced by some other idea of who I am and what my future holds.

For now, though, the idea has been loosened, only, not fully dislodged, and certainly not replaced—and like a loose tooth, it dangles awkwardly, annoyingly, sometimes painfully. Once it's pushed out, I'll admire it as such a surprisingly small thing; I'll tuck it under my pillow, and it'll be replaced while I sleep, one dream for another, like a baby tooth for a few small coins.

Embrace the Kafka

Some mysteries will never be solved.

They say people are creatures of habit, and I am no exception. I have a favorite mailbox, at the northwest corner of 34th Street and 7th Avenue. It's conveniently located at the top of the stairs as I get off the subway, and it gets emptied several times a day. Sometimes I drop mail there and discover that it's been delivered to its destination that same day. My mailbox is big and it's blue and I find its big blueness reassuring, as if the rivets that anchor it to the ground also anchor me: every time I drop a letter in this mailbox, I feel connected to the vast, powerful permanence that is the United States of America. (Anyone who thinks I'm exaggerating clearly hasn't watched Kevin Costner's The Postman, the premise of which is that a lone mail carrier is able to bring order back to his anarchic, post-apocalyptic country.) Say what you will about the United States Post Office: grumble about your mail carrier, long lines, or the economic inefficiencies of state-sponsored monopoly. I find it to be the most reliable and least nefarious manifestation of federal government that there is, and it makes me proud to be an American.

Maybe this preamble will begin to explain the shock—no, let's call it distress—I felt when I came out of the subway the other day and found my mailbox was missing. I looked to the spot where it had been, immovable, the day before, and there was no trace of it, just a little dent in the snow. I had a letter that needed mailing and I didn't know what to do; I walked back and forth, envelope in hand, in stupefied disbelief, while people passed by as if nothing catastrophic had happened.

How could a mailbox be missing? There must be some mistake.

Calm down. Take a breath. There's another mailbox at 36th and 8th. At least I hope there is. I hope to Christ there is.

I grabbed a mail carrier who was passed by. "Excuse me," I said, trying to slow my breathing. "What happened to the mailbox?" He looked back quizzically, and I had to consider the possibility that he wasn't yet aware of the crisis at hand. "The mailbox," I explained. "It's missing."

Oh, I'm sorry. Was I screeching?

What is it about the Post Office that taps so deeply into my bureaucratic paranoia? My grandfather worked at a post office, a big urban sorting center, and I still shiver remembering his tales of the vast underground network of sorters and filers, of conveyer belts and mail sacks, an entire underground city, layer upon layer of unfathomable bureaucracy. When a system grows large enough, it takes on uncomfortable resemblance to an organism: it grows desires, appetites, even sicknesses. My grandfather joked that people had gotten lost forever inside his sorting building, but I never thought it was very funny.

Why did I care about a missing mailbox? Even the reasonable explanations weren't reassuring: as when anything unusual happens in New York City, I blamed it on terrorists. "Al Qaeda took my mailbox!" "Full of anthrax and in CDC custody!" "Dirty bomb!!!"

But this fear was followed almost immediately by another, deeper one. If the Postal Service persists in the face of rain or sleet or snow or dark of night, then what worse catastrophe could have befallen my unmovable mailbox? The mailbox is representative of a law and order that I have been able to take for granted as fundamental, impervious to attack and immune to entropy—until now.

Sure, the lid was a little creaky and it didn't always close. It's completely possible that my mailbox was in for a repair, or had been retired after years of dependable service. But even this didn't offer me much solace. I thought of the de-commissioned aircraft carrier, the USS Intrepid, only a few blocks away—a giant steel symbol of aging, rusting empire—and wondered, is my mailbox another, smaller one?

It's all so strange, as if I awoke from unsettling dreams one morning, and found myself transformed...

Emergency Preparedness

I hear the chirp from a policeman's walkie talkie outside my window, and see a small group of them (gaggle? pack?) standing next to my apartment. And a fire truck. I can't tell what's going on and I wonder if I should be prepared to evacuate—which right now I'm not, because I'm sitting here in a towel and nothing else. I've been sitting here in this towel since I got out of the shower a half-hour ago; and I was in the shower at least a half-hour (so warm!)—which makes me realize that when the time comes to evacuate the building, whenever that is (and that time always comes, sooner or later), the odds are pretty good that I will be horribly unprepared, and quite possibly naked.

It all reminds me of the time I was evacuated from my apartment, after the building sort of exploded.

I woke that morning to an enormous thud that shook the walls of the Lido Apartments, where I lived at the time. The Lido was a relic from old Hollywood, a once-glamorous hotel turned into a five-story brick slum with aspirations to gentrify. Typical rising and falling of Hollywood dreams. ¹

On this morning something shook the building hard. This by itself wasn't too unusual, it being earthquake country; but this was a different kind of shake—not the slow, growling rumble of an earthquake; more like someone had driven a truck straight into the building. A big truck.

I poked my head out my window to see what was going on, and saw everyone else in my neighborhood doing the same—a hundred sleepy faces dangling outside a hundred windows. I thought of Whac-a-Mole. Then I remember thinking something bad was happening, something possibly disastrous or epic. ² I remember thinking I should throw some clothes on and leave the building.

Instead, seeing nothing, I decided to go back to bed.

[When the time comes to evacuate the building, whenever that is (and that time always comes, sooner or later), the odds are pretty good that I will be horribly unprepared, and quite possibly naked.]

The firemen banging on the door shouted, We needed to get out "NOW NOW NOW." But I couldn't get out, because there were four of them standing in the doorway, and they were the biggest, widest, thickest people I've ever seen. So instead I grabbed some essentials—my laptop, some chewing gum—and waited for them to disperse.

Out on the street, the longest line of fire trucks ever assembled stretched from horizon to horizon (or at least up Wilcox to Cahuenga, and down to Hollywood Boulevard). Helicopters swarmed the sky, and police held curious passersby behind yellow "Do Not Cross" tape. I strolled through it casually, weirdly unbothered, almost dissociated. I declined a TV interview and instead made a beeline for Mann's Chinese Theatre. I watched Blade II (which really was bad, a disaster of epic proportions), and wondered, every now and then, if I'd have an apartment when the movie was over, and if I should have brought, I don't know, a change of underwear or at least a jacket.

I learned the full story when I got out of the theatre: a few people had seen my building on the morning news ³ and called to see if I was OK, and I pieced together the details from their string of voicemail messages. An underground had fire spread to a natural gas line, causing a muffled explosion that blew off the manhole covers all around my block: this was the initial thud. But it turned out that my building also sat on top of a major intersection of gas mains, and if the fire had spread, it'd have blown that entire part of the neighborhood sky high. Boulevard of broken dreams.

I'm not sure what the moral of the story is. Maybe take short showers and don't sit around in your wet towel too long. Or maybe just that some people never learn.

1. The Lido was best known as the location for the lobby shots of the Eagles "Hotel California." My own favorite thing about the Lido, apart from its location and dirt-cheap rent, was the view it afforded to the luxury condos across the parking lot. Forty-eight windows shaped like wide-screen TVs faced toward my apartment, like forty-eight channels of television, and without fail, two or three of them featured women taking their clothes off and dancing. No one ever believes me about the dancing, but it's true. This was, after all, Los Angeles.

2. I can't remember for sure whether this was just before, or just after, September 11. I'm going to say it was just after, because that makes a better story. And maybe accurate.

3. Who in L.A. watches the morning news? Or any news?

Errand

er-rand. Noun. An expedition involving the acquisition of some good, usually perceived as essential, when in fact completely unnecessary. Because errands involve a component of travel, they are often confused for a leisure activity. From the root, errant, aimless.

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Everywhere You Go, There You Aren't

You wake up before the alarm and you're completely disoriented: the way the light comes through the window makes you think you're in that apartment you had in Santa Monica, all those years ago. When you come to, you head to a coffee shop down the street, which reminds you of one you visited a few times in Berkeley. Later that morning, you stroll through a park, a copse of trees that looks a lot like a section of Valley Forge, near where you grew up, and that bend in the stream reminds you of another spot, in Westchester County. That afternoon, you're riding in a friend's car, suffering deja vu from a road trip somewhere in Arkansas, and you pull into a parking lot that strikes you as looking oddly like one you visited in Phoenix. Your destination, a grocery store, is laid out exactly like the one you used in Ithaca, New York. Finally, you get your bearings in Harvard Square, a place that looks, thankfully, like Harvard Square, but as you look around, you're nostalgic for another time, ten years ago, when you and some good friends spent a summer here. You duck into a movie theatre—escapism from all of the escapism you've been feeling—and once the lights go down, thankfully, you could be anywhere. You could be nowhere. By the time the movie is over, you sincerely have no idea where you are...

Experiments in Magnetic Poetry (pt. 1)

Furniture

Think about your furniture.

Your first coffee table was made from a pair of milk crates you found laying on the curbside one trash night. You brought them home, dusted them off, and propped them in front of a mangy easy chair, and they were good for holding coffee, unread mail, tired feet, the TV remote control.

Later, you made a bookshelf out of those same milk crates.

You had a bureau of drawers made out of plastic, made by a company better known for its trash cans and dust pans. At some point you upgraded to Ikeaware, semi-disposable pinewood furniture. This was adequate and more, too: it offered, if not permanence, at least substance.

Gradually, pine gave way to ash and birch, the furniture took on more mass, became weightier, harder to move, harder to throw away. After the passage of no small amount of time, you saved up a little money and, eventually, spent some of it on a "piece"—when furniture is nice enough it's called a "piece." You like this piece; you feel an affinity for it that is almost fetishistic. You know in your heart there is nothing categorically different between the piece, the hand-carved antique oak coffee table, and those milk crates: they're equally good at holding coffee, mail, tired feet. But the point is, over time, you managed to acquire some things that speak to you, things that make your life just a little bit better, things that appropriately express who you think you are.

Then you move to another city and leave all of your furniture behind.

Then you realize that furniture is a metaphor for everything else in your life—restaurants you like, parks, grocery stores, radio stations, friends, lovers. Unexpectedly, you find yourself combing the streets on a trash night, looking for milk crates and thinking about time, and thinking about time...

Having Cake Versus Eating It

When does anyone ever, ever have cake without eating it too? I thought that's what having cake was...

Insomnia

The sky is a lush curtain of purple and the house I'm in is washed out of any other color—that one hue only, and the rest is silver gelatin. And hints of pink in the clouds, from a sun that has long ago set but still stubbornly throws light from below the horizon. The night is long but I'm more awake than I've been in months, years, maybe ever; and the air is so clear it carries every last smell to my nose and I breathe it in. First among them is the sweet sweat of my lover. Her cheeks are flushed and she's breathing short breaths. I have a hand firmly on her waist and the other has a grip on the back of her head, and from there, her two centers of gravity, head and womb, I hold her sway, and seize into her with a hungry kiss. She collapses almost imperceptibly into my body, moans slightly. Then the blood starts. It is spilling from the corners of her mouth down the line of her jaw. I am sucking her blood up through her lungs, gulping breathfuls of it, but spilling more of it than I'm swallowing, and a small river of it runs runs between her breasts and begins staining the belly of her white dress from the inside. She can't breathe.

Finally, I ease her down into the grass. She put up no fight, even at the end, because she loved me. I am a vampire, but she loved me.

* * *

The freighter at sea groans like a creature breathing, its metal subtly twisted by relentless underwater waves, so the hold is full of sound even though I'm alone. I climb a ladder to the top deck and try to make out details—landmass, iceberg—but the dark is too thick: I see shapes where there aren't any. All I can see are different grades of darkness.

I look a minute more: I'm desperate for some confirmation of what I'd just learned, with absolute certainty but no proof, down in the hold. A single tangible fact to make my next acts easier. But there isn't one, and sadly I turn away from the railing and start climbing the short ladder to the ship's bridge.

It's warm when I step in, lit by an amber lantern, and all of the people there—my family—are huddled around the lantern like it is a campfire. When I throw open the hatch, they look up with expectant eyes, relieved to see me. It is my job, I know, to get them out of this, to save them, and they know I will. And I, too, know I will. But I know something they don't. I know with absolute certainty that the ship is about to sink, and this room full of people I love will soon fill with water, and every last one of them will drown painfully in a dark arctic ocean. I don't know how I know this but I do, and that's why I have the machete behind my back, and why I used it already on all of those people down in the hold. I must kill them to spare them. Because I have failed them.

* * *

Am I dreaming? There's something not right. I don't remember leaving the door unlocked, and I can't explain the smell of cigarette smoke in my studio. Nothing looks amiss, but ... something isn't right.

Maybe I'm dreaming.

Or maybe he was here.

My heart surges thinking about it. Maybe he was here. I haven't turned the light on yet and I'm suddenly glad I didn't. I move slowly toward the window and peek through the half-open curtain. Is he out there? One of those parked cars across the street? Or any of the darkened windows in the apartment across the way?

Has he seen me come home? Because if he has, I'm a dead man.

An axe, I think, is what he used last time. Against the last person he hunted. A hatchet.

How I wish it were a movie, or a dream—I'd have a box hidden in my closet with a handgun. Bullets in the nightstand table. I'd have some way to fight back. But it's just me, inside my dingy apartment—a pile of books, a few pots and pans, dirty laundry. Nothing that actually matters, now that it comes down to it. The tinny set of kitchen knives that seemed like such a bargain now seems worth every penny I paid for them and not a cent more. Barely cut a tomato; useless on meat.

I'm going to die here. And I can't even remember why.

Has he seen me, yet, through the window? Is he walking, even now, quietly up the stairs? I don't know. But if I run for it, he'll see me for sure.

I sit on the floor. With inevitability, I find, comes calm. Maybe I hear him, down on the stairs, the hatchet man. He's coming. Now, or later. There's nothing I can do to stop him.

Maybe I'm only dreaming, and I'll wake up, tired, sweating, frightened, but alive. Or maybe I am awake, and this is exactly why I've been having so many nightmares...

Intro to Philosophy

or, How Looking for Belief Can Lead to Believing Nothing

My life has been a series of apostasies, and I blame this on Norman Kretzmann.

Against the advice of my high school guidance counselor, I entered college as a philosophy major. My last year of high school had been a strange and spacious one: since I'd completed most of my requirements the year before, I took it upon myself to spend my senior year doing whatever I wanted, despite the diligent efforts of hall monitors and truancy officers. I was delinquent, but in the best possible way: if I skipped class, it was usually to work on a film I was shooting through most of that year, a sort of thesis project that (in my mind) gave me carte blanche to wander the halls, as long as I carried a camera. If I wasn't working on the film, then I was reading a book I'd stolen from an English teacher the year before, by Will Durant, called The Story of Philosophy.

People have romantic notions about philosophy, and the purpose of this book was to shatter all of those notions. People imagine the study of philosophy to be a lot of cloudy, heady and generalized musing about the meaning of life. But Durant's book was dry, dense, and merciless. He didn't care what you thought about the meaning of life. He cared only to explain the rigors of Spinoza and Schopenhauer—this, to high school students who would laugh at the word "monad" because it rhymes with "gonad."

Somehow, I found purchase there, in that book: I was unprepared for the mathematical precision that the discipline of philosophy required, but I did love the questions, and I would skim the dense passages over and over until I could understand them in their cloudy, heady, generalized forms: I loved philosophy in spite of itself.

I wound up at a college with a world-class philosophy department, and quickly discovered it was one of the easiest majors, requiring only thirty-two credits—just one class per semester. Since I'd just spent a year cultivating a love of free time and a disdain for requirements, it seemed a perfect match, and I declared my major immediately.

My first class: Philosophy of Religion, with Norman Kretzmann.

Kretzmann was famous in esoteric circles, but his celebrity (like that of most of my professors) was lost on me. Instead, I was excited by the subject matter. Young philosophers want to know, "How should we live?"—and it seemed to me that any discussion of religion would have to address this cloudy, heady, general question.

Instead, what happened, more of less, was this:

Kretzmann wrote two or three sentences on the blackboard, and amended the wording of them until the class could agree that they were true. Once he'd established these initial statements, he'd add to them, line by line, allowing us to argue at any point until we all agreed with what was written—so that the truth of each statement was airtight. Methodically, for an hour and a half, Kretzmann constructed a logical proof, and at the very end of class, exactly on cue, he'd arrive at the proof's conclusion.

On Tuesdays, he proved that God existed.

On Thursdays, he proved that God did not exist.

And it went back and forth like that for the entire semester.

I can't remember if the class ended on a Tuesday or a Thursday, or if, in the end, Kretzmann ever tipped his hand to reveal what he himself believed to be true. Belief, in the end, had nothing to do with it. Those sixteen weeks shattered all belief, and that must have been his intention: those proofs proved that you could prove anything. We were theists and atheists on alternate days, and after that, nihilists forever.

On the Road

or, Outside It's America

It's like a dream. There's some kind of country music coming from the car stereo and no traffic on the road. The windshield wipers keep slow time, the car's own heartbeat, while the dotted white lines running the center of I-95 flicker by in a rapid staccato—the road spools out like film, and it all reaffirms the sense that I am the star of my very own road trip movie. A full tank of gas and an atlas that points to anywhere. "Take me away," I say to the car. "Take me anywhere."

Exit for point south. Exit for shore points. Last exit before toll.

Each road trip reminds me of the others—this jaunt from Boston to Pennsylvania reminds me of that midnight drive drive Chicago to St. Louis, the slow saunter through rainy Arkansas and Texas panhandle; reminds me of the cool crisp air in Flagstaff during that morning dash across northern Arizona; reminds me of Montana, reminds me Big Sur, reminds me of.... It's as if it's all one big continuous road trip, driving in circles, always moving, always leaving somewhere, always going somewhere else. Digesting America. And taking short rest stops—three months, two years—to go through the motions that other people think of as life.

The road is life.

Scenic overlook ahead. Caution curves. No rest for 57 miles.

Connecticut welcomes you. New York welcomes you. Pennsylvania welcomes you.

America welcomes you.

The gas station attendant asks, "Where you headed?" The gas station attendant asks, "Where you coming from?" The gas station attendant wipes the windshield, checks the oil, checks the tires. "Good luck." "Drive safe." "Have a nice trip."

More road between here and there. The leaves are changing. I remember this place. Have I been here before?

"A little lucky; a little unlucky; a little better."

Last exit before toll.

Thanks for visiting. Please come again.

Shiva the Destroyer

We were on the train and we were going toward important places, and that is what allowed us to disappear into ourselves, and pass by station stop after station stop, staring into books and newspapers and windows and each other, as if we were nowhere, as if we were people without souls.

The man shuffled onto the train announced by his own stink, a sticky vinegar that attached itself to the inside of the nose. He shuffled his feet and he shuffled his cardboard cup, mostly empty but with a few coins, like a broken toy tambourine.

He spoke too quietly to draw us from our reverie. It was the stink, rather, that drew us, and pushed most of us to inch away from him without looking, nor hearing his mumbled words: "I am Shiva," he said, "Neelkantha of the blue throat, eye of fire, skin of tiger, greatest among gods, destroyer of worlds." He chanted this quietly and made his way among us, while we withdrew from him without looking up.

Not listening to him or even hearing him, we never imagined that his words were true, that he was indeed the great deity incarnate, nor that our failure to love him or care for him was a final act of disastrous consequence: that we had failed so exhaustively, failed in our very humanity, and, undeserving of it, would live to see it stripped from us, while we, unaware, listened to our headphones, read our magazines, and recoiled from the stink of the misfortune we'd helped to create.

Stella of the Angels

I lost focus so I went to a fortune teller. I picked the first one within walking distance who took credit cards. She asked me to hold out my hands, and as soon as she touched me, I got a hard-on. Within ten minutes we were fucking on the sofa.

"You've got a really strong love line," she said.

I moved in that night. That was three years ago.

*    *    *

(Did she see it coming? I always wondered, and I never knew.)

*    *    *

Her name was Stella Luna, like the children's book. That's what it said on the sign in her parlor. Her real name was Stella DeAngelis, but she changed it. "I thought Luna sounded more mystical," she explained.

"More mystical than, 'From angels'?"

I asked if she came from a long line of psychics, and she laughed. "My daddy was a plumber." But she also had an uncle who made a good living betting on horses, and legend has it that her grandmother predicted the assassination of JFK, in vivid detail, including the phrase "grassy knoll." She claimed she saw the face of the third gunman, and could have picked him out of a police line-up. "But who knows?"

*    *    *

"You're going to struggle a while," Stella told me, as we laid naked on her sofa, she finally reading my palm. "Because you're a seeker."

"What do I seek?"

She ran her finger along my palm but didn't answer.

"What do I seek?"

"That which you don't have," she said finally, and got up to pull on her clothes.

"That's obvious. That's everyone. That's tautological."

"I don't know what that word means."

*    *    *

She knew the future but she didn't know that certain truths follow from their atomic propositions.

*    *    *

"You're going to go home and pack a bag of things and move in with me," she said.

"Is that a prediction? Or just something you want?"

She smiled and kissed me. "It's your destiny."

*    *    *

I went home, packed a bag, and moved in with her, which was a shitty thing to do, because I'd lived with a woman at the time, a woman who told me often that she loved me.

"I'm moving out."

"What? Why?"

"It's my destiny."

I paid an extra month's rent and let her keep my share of the deposit, and since she was justified in saying all of those bad things about me, I never tried to stop her. I still think about her sometimes.

*    *    *

Stella and I took a trip to Vermont, after I'd been living with her for a few months. We rented a car and took turns driving up the coast through the rain. Halfway through Connecticut, she said, "Pull over. I want to fuck you."

I stopped the car, and she unbuckled my pants and climbed on top of me, somehow squeezing her lithe body into the space between me and the steering wheel.

"That was great," I said, and she laughed and wiped the fog of our breath off the windows.

Up ahead, a tractor trailer had jack-knifed and killed twenty-two people—the largest single auto accident in Connecticut history.

"Did you know?," I asked her.

"I just wanted to fuck," she answered.

*    *    *

"Do you believe in predestiny? Are our futures written?"

"Of course." She looked at me like I'd questioned the roundness of the Earth, or gravity. She didn't understand why this idea put me into a three-day sulk and got me wondering about suicide. "Do you ever think of killing yourself?," I asked her.

"That's stupid."

*    *    *

"What do they say?"

She looked at me impatiently.

"Nothing about sinking ships, right? Nothing about death at sea? I couldn't bear knowing I was going to drown."

"When I read your palm," she explained, "I am reading your palm."

"That's tautological."

"But when I read the cards, I am reading the cards. And the cards are reading you. Do you understand?"

"No. I mean of course, yes, but, no, not at all. Why does a random shuffle of cards offer meaning about my life?"

"Right? Why does a random shuffle of events, or a random shuffle of jobs, or a random shuffle of girlfriends, offer meaning about your life? Exactly."

"So what do the cards say?"

She looked at them quietly for a while. She didn't like telling my fortune. Or maybe she just didn't like my fortune.

"You're going to struggle a while," she finally said.

"That's vague."

"The cards are kind of hard to read tonight. I'll look at them again tomorrow."

"I want my money back," I told her.

"Then you should have paid me." She kissed me sweetly on the cheek. "Let's go to bed."

*    *    *

She held a bag in her hand and she told me she was leaving. She gave me an extra month's rent, and said I should keep her share of the deposit.

"What? Why?," I asked. But she didn't answer.

"I've loved you," she said. "I'll always love you."

"Did you see this coming?," I asked.

"Did you see this coming?," I asked. "Because I didn't see this coming."

But I was shouting at the door. She was already gone.

*    *    *

We were lying on the sofa, and she was kissing my hand. "What am I seeking?," I asked her. We were both so relaxed, the way lovers are. "I don't know," she told me. "What are you seeking?"

"I don't know," I told her. "I don't know."

Stranger Than Fiction

or, The Movie of My Life, part 2

"I'm going to let you in on a little secret: every day, once a day, give yourself a present. Don't plan it; don't wait for it; just let it happen. It could be a new shirt in a men's store, a catnap in your office chair, or two cups of good, hot, black, coffee."

- Special Agent Dale Cooper, Twin Peaks

"Damn good coffee!" exclaimed the passenger sitting next to me on JetBlue flight #176 from Seattle to New York. "Damn good coffee." He actually said this. I had to bite my tongue to keep from chiming in, "And hot."

This passenger had rung the flight attendant with what seemed to be a very specific, elaborate, whispered coffee order. The cup she brought back looked normal enough. She stood around, as if waiting for his approval, and he sipped it while she watched. That's when the phrase left his lips: "Damn good coffee!" And the phrase nearly left mine: "You've got to be kidding me"—not because I thought the coffee was bad, you understand, but because the passenger sitting next to me was Kyle MacLachlan, who, in the 1990s, as Twin Peaks' Special Agent Dale Cooper, enjoyed nothing more than a good cup of coffee, and maybe a slice of pie.

"And you," the flight attendant asked me. "Anything to drink?"

"I'll have what he's having."

* * *

PASSENGER ON MY LEFT: (nervous) Excuse me, aren't you Kyle MacLachlan?
PASSENGER ON MY RIGHT: (friendly, collected) Yes I am.

Awkward pause. No further conversation.

End of scene.

* * *

Movie stars in public. What a surreal phenomenon. Years of living in Los Angeles and working in (or at least near) the entertainment industry have numbed me to it a little bit; I've gradually chalked up the oddness to this:

Movies and television are alternate (better?) realities from our own. To see someone from that dimension in our world ruptures some kind of fabric; it is no less disconcerting than seeing a person from the future or from a faraway planet. "You are fascinating! You don't belong here!" In its best instances, the celebrity is like an errant cartoon character in our otherwise 3-D world, à la Who Framed Roger Rabbit. In its worst instances, it's as if the celebrity crawled, obnoxious and horrifying, straight out of the television set itself, like Samara from The Ring.

Kyle MacLachlan might have been coming from a mundane visit with his family, or a banal school reunion—but he brought a piece of Dale Cooper with him on to our airplane. Shouldn't he have to pay for two seats, like the woman with the cello, or the man with the pet cat?

* * *

I fiddle furiously with the brightness control on my little 4" JetBlue television, trying to bring it to life. No matter how many times I press the button, the screen will not come on. Typical: 230 seats and I get the one with the broken TV. Just to be sure, I try changing channels a few times and finally punch it in frustration.

Kyle MacLachlan leans over: "Actually, that one's mine. Yours is on your left."

Thanks.

* * *

Last month, while pretending to cast a movie of my own life, I wondered about the "rules" of the game. "If I have blonde hair," I asked, "do I have to cast a blonde actor?" The reason I asked had something to do with Kyle MacLachlan, whom Rolling Stone once described as the "boy next door, if that boy spent lots of time alone in the basement."

He was right: it was damn good coffee. And hot.

That Guy

When I wake up, I can't tell what's going on. It's dark and there's sharp thudding. After a few seconds, the morning snaps into better focus and I understand: it's that guy. That insomniac road crew guy who runs the jack-hammer. He's at it again.

As I sit up in bed, I feel vaguely like Roy Scheider, who, having vanquished the giant predatory shark in Jaws and then again in Jaws 2, sees his family flee from Hawaii to Florida, only to have the shark follow them, in Jaws 3-D, looking for revenge.

* * *

We first met in upstate New York: I lived in a sleepy college town, in one of those broken-down, overpopulated old clapboard houses that make up these towns—the kind where the walls are all crooked and the doors never quite line up, and rooms seem to have been haphazardly appended to the original structure till you can't tell what the original structure was, rooms just slapped on here and there so that the building resembles a hamster's Habitrail—even before one considers the rat's-nest decor of piled laundry and food containers that are the closest thing the house has to insulation. You know—one of those houses?

We lived a little ways off the road, but they were doing some work on a water line or sewer line or something, and that's how I met that guy.

That guy, that orange-vested guy with bulging triceps and a penchant for early rising, was an up-and-comer: he had everything it took to be a very successful jack-hammerer. And he knew it. Every morning he'd be up and coming right outside our window, hammering away into our driveway, into what felt like the foundation of the house, into what felt like my molars and my cranium, at 7am. 7am! No regard was given to the fact that we we'd been up all night working studying drinking and playing guitar. 7am, on the button, every morning. This guy was a German train. This guy was the Cal Ripkin of jack-hammerers.

The resulting lack of sleep led to more than half of the house coming down with mono.¹

There was no evidence to support the obvious theory—that guy enjoyed waking us each morning from our privileged (and often hung-over) sleep.

* * *

I didn't see that guy again for a few years: we drifted apart and went our separate ways, and I kind of forgot about him. Maybe I caught a glimpse of him in L.A., but I couldn't be sure, because the steep angle of the sun threw the shadow of the hard hat across his face, and all I saw for sure were his white teeth shining out from his gleaming sadistic 7am smile.

* * *

It's only natural, I guess, that we each wound up in Boston: it's an obvious destination for private contractors and for over-educated liberal arts grads. The entire city of Boston is always under construction, constantly.² Road crews are easier to find than T stops, and at least as prevalent as Dunkin Donuts.³

[Construction is the status quo in Boston, along with its evil twin, destruction. Put aside the exceptional example of the Big Dig and consider instead the thousands of smaller-scale fiascos: i.e., the entire time I was in Boston (so, two years) saw work on the Congress Street Bridge, a major passage across the Boston Channel into South Boston. Work started before I arrived and it goes on to this day. Construction in Boston is so common that you might never twice take the same route from one place to another: like the Hogwarts staircase, the road itself will bend and twist and reshape itself over time.]

That guy found me a week after I renewed my lease in Boston's South End. I had plenty of misgivings about signing on to another year of that apartment (in particular) and another year of Boston (in general), but I made some peace with these misgivings, and decided it was for the best that I stay. I inked the new lease and settled in for another year.

The wrecking ball showed up the following week, there to tear down the adjacent building and replace it a new set of luxury condos. Yes—wrecking ball. Since we'd first met in that sleepy college town, that guy had diversified: he was now adept in many new tools of noise and destruction, including (but not limited to) the pile driver, the bulldozer, the wrecking ball, and even explosives.

The amount of time it takes, apparently, to level an old building, clear the rubble, and then build, from the ground up, a new set of luxury condos is exactly one year—exactly the duration of the lease I'd just signed. They were just installing the windows when I drove my U-haul out of town.

I hope that guy forgives me for not saying goodbye.

* * *

From the window of my Brooklyn apartment, I can make him out, in his too-familiar hard hat and orange vest. He's surrounded by an army of rubber construction cones and he's blissfully jack-hammering away. Sitting there on the curb, off to one side, there's a coffee from Dunkin Donuts. Even from this distance, through the light rain and through the cement dust that rises up around him, through the shadow that the sun casts off of his hard hat, I can see his bright teeth smiling, as he hammers his way back into my day.

1. Or maybe it was all the kissing.

2. Given the number of liberal arts grads, it's probably under constant deconstruction as well.

3. It's completely possible the prevalence of Dunkin Donuts in Boston is a direct result of the prevalence of road crews, because you will never see one without the other.

The Bogeyman

The bogeyman came over last night, and
he wasn't as scary as I'd remembered.
We made dinner. He said the wine went straight
to his head. At the end of the night,
We started kissing, and I fucked him
On the same bed where he used to lurk,
slovering and snarling, clawing at my ankles.
Now he's snoring while we spoon,
his sleeping face lit in moonlight, and
I know I haven't conquered fear, just
moved it somewhere else, still undiscovered.

>

The Cleaning Lady

His apartment was too large and his schedule too busy for him to have time to dust, or clean toilets, or scrub floors, so he got a referral from a co-worker, and hired a cleaning lady. "Look at all these nice things you have!" she exclaimed upon her arrival, and promptly threw them in the trash. "There. Everything is cleaner now," she said, and indeed it was.

The Ids of March

"I had a vision of myself right now, as a kind of wandering bachelor Mendican poet, wandering all the way down the beaches of Malaysia, eating magic mushrooms all the way as I went until I reached Bali and evaporated in a state of ecstasy in the sunset."

- from Spalding Gray, Swimming to Cambodia

* * *

I'm crazy. Or at least I was crazy. Or at least there are some pieces of paper somewhere in the world that would indicate that I'm crazy. Or was crazy. Sometimes it's hard to tell about these things.

I went to an eye doctor when I was in fourth grade; I had no idea I was near-sighted until he flipped some lenses in front of my eyes and the world suddenly snapped into focus. I never thought to ask why the world was fuzzy; that was just the way the world was. Crazy is like that, too: a doctor presents a theory, or a prescription, or a suggestion about how to look at the world, and, like the eye doctor, asks, "Better or worse?"

Better or worse.

Better or worse.

Fuck if I know. The thing is, whether the world is blurry or not, we keep stumbling through it. What choice is there?

What choice is there?

* * *

I'm home now. Except I don't mean the home where I live; I mean the home where I grew up, the home where I was a kid. My parents' home. Except I don't mean that home, either, because my parents moved a few years ago. They packed up all the furniture and books and trinkets and all the landmarks and icons of "home," and unpacked them in this other place, so that this new place seems familiar even though it's completely different. The house is full of memories that I never actually had.

They pulled off a funny trick when they moved, managing to fit a full house worth of stuff into a smaller house. I try to pull off a similar trick when I visit: I try to fit all the experience I've acquired since I moved out; I try to sneak those ten-plus years into this place; but it never fits, just like the high school letter jacket doesn't fit. So one sense I get, coming home, is that nothing fits.

* * *

I find a stash of old books and CDs in the basement. This was me, then. This is what my world sounded like. These are the words that went in and out of my head.

Better or worse?

I try to explain to the stylist why it's so hard for me to get my hair cut. I don't know what I want. I don't know what I'm supposed to be. She seems to understand: "The hair," she says, "is where the superego meets the id. And it's right there in the mirror, every single morning."

Sometimes it's hard to tell about these things.

Some days I want to evaporate.

"He is a dreamer; let us leave him. Pass."

The Margarine Manifesto

Part One: Counting My Blessings

In no particular order:

1. My apartment
2. My neighborhood
3. My city
4. My education
5. My quirk
6. My steady reliable income
7. My family
8. My friends

Part Two: Setting the Scene

I considered making toast for breakfast. Instead I ate half a chocolate bar and had four cups of coffee. I'm still in pajamas.

Part Three: Panic / First Response

In order:

• Sleep in
• Take a long shower
• Go for a walk
• Indulge long email threads with old friends
• Take the subway somewhere you've never been
• Read job listings in other career fields
• Flip through the dictionary, learn new words like feasance and outre
• Write a manifesto

Part Four: The Woods

The woods are lovely, dark and deep
But I have promissory notes to keep
And I have promissory notes to keep.

Part Five: Panic / Second Response

In no particular order:

• Take a class
• Get a dog
• Leave the city
• Leave the country
• Move to the country
• Enroll in grad school
• Get a houseboat
• Get an Airstream
• Get a horse
• Hike the back country
• Join the army
• Join the Peace Corp
• Join anything
• Start a magazine
• Start a novel
• Start a memoir
• Start a religion
• Finish something
• etc.

Part Six: Things That Sometimes Hold Me Back

In no particular order:

1. My apartment
2. My neighborhood
3. My city
4. My education
5. My quirk
6. My steady reliable income
7. My family
8. My friends

Part Seven: Capitalism

Capitalism is the system by which we (the capitalists) take whatever amount of initial wealth we are dealt (the capital), and then, by hook or crook, make our best effort to multiply this wealth through the opportunities afforded to us.

If one's wealth is zero, then no amount of opportunity will lead to more wealth: zero times anything is zero.

If one's opportunity is low, then no amount of initial wealth will lead to more wealth. Pursuing a poor opportunity (i.e., a multiplier < 1) may in fact lead to less wealth—even if it is the best opportunity available at the time.

The model is complicated by the fact that greater wealth leads to greater opportunity, and lesser wealth to lesser opportunity.

Part Eight: On Margarine

I considered making toast for breakfast. The making of toast presents a choice. One may:

1. apply butter to one's toast
2. apply margarine
3. leave one's toast as is

Butter is a bad choice, because it contains saturated animal fat, which leads to heart disease; and because it contains lactose, which is hard to digest.

Margarine is a bad choice, because it contains hydrogenated vegetable oil, which is high in cholesterol and is associated with cancer; and anyway, it tastes a little funny.

Dry toast is a bad choice, because it is not very satisfying, and one only eats breakfast once a day, so it should be satisfying.

Sometimes all of the choices are bad. Hence, I had half a chocolate bar.

Part Nine: Global Free Trade

The premise of global free trade is that, unfettered by local restrictions, we are free to choose from a wider set of capitalistic opportunities: if Country Y offer more opportunities to multiply one's wealth than Country X, logically one should pursue those opportunities with Country Y. One is "free" to "trade" loyalties and obligations, when presented with a better chance at greater wealth.

Thus, if one has the opportunity to flee a country, and leave the jurisdiction of one's massive debt, thereby breaking the promise to repay, for the sake of a fresh start, then this is simply holding with the premise of global free trade:

An outre solution: not submissive feasance; not irresponsible malfeasance; but legitimized non-feasance.

Part Ten: The Woods

In the deepest parts of the woods, there are no forking paths, because there are no paths. The eye looks at the spaces between the trees and, connecting them, imagines a path where there is none. We walk these imaginary paths, marching forward into the woods, unafraid, till something causes our faith to waiver; and then we wonder: Am I lost? Is this a path I'm on now? Or am I merely in the unconnected spaces between trees? Am I on a walk, or have I gone for a hike in the back country? This thing that I started, this thing that I am doing—is it something I can finish? Can I finish anything? When a path seems to fork, are any of the choices good ones? Or is there no path at all?

This Is Your Life

You wake up a little before sunrise. You sit up but you can't see; you have a cracked pair of glasses around somewhere but who knows where. You must have been sleeping on your neck, because it feels like whiplash. Something's not right: an amber flicker on the wall, which your myopia reads as sunrise till you glean that it's the candle you left burning all night. You reach for the plastic cup of water by your bedside, and drink half before it slips and spills on the bed. You roll to the opposite corner and fall asleep.

You wake again an hour later, the sun now bright enough to find your glasses on the windowsill, next to the half-liter of whiskey that survived the night before. Outside: the small yard filling with brown leaves where squirrels find some refuge. Across the way: a symmetrical grid of darkened windows, ethereal in a morning fog, like row after row after row of Mark Rothko. You see all this, like you see every morning, through a set of wrought-iron bars. They are there, you remind yourself, for your own protection.

Your body is sore and your mouth is dry and you can't say why, exactly, you feel so bad. Winter and its too-short days. You think of recent events and how the sum total of them should add up to more than this, this vacant feeling, this deep-down boredom and disappointment. You think back to a doctor's appointment earlier this week, as he ticked down a list of test results, each one "Negative." You found yourself wishing, Please, let me have something. Please, let there be some measurable deficiency, some quantifiable cancer or lurking parasite, some infection, something. Let there be an explanation, or at least an excuse, instead of this general malaise, this incurable unwellness.

You refill your plastic cup and drink it. You blow out the candle. There's no reason to be up, yet, so you don't bother. You return to bed, confident or at least hopeful that by the time you wake, next time, things will look better. They often do.

Time Lapse

"And if you can, at nineteen, count the people you love on one hand, you will not, at forty, have run out of fingers on the other. There are so few people given us to love and they all stick."
- Anne Enright, The Gathering

The trip put me in the mood of a birthday, or a New Year: something about transiting from one place to another offered me just enough pause, and distance, to reflect on what has been: there is the version of the story of our lives that we tell ourselves we're living, and then there is the version we're actually living; and sometimes it's not clear or obvious when those two diverge. Suddenly a year has passed and we're altogether someone different than we thought we were. There are lines on our face we never knew were there, and that small hole in our heart, the one that's been leaking the slow trickle of joy, at some point during the year that hole got larger, and the leak turned into a flow, and now has maybe caused structural damage, which, owing to the slow passage of time, we have till now failed to notice. This pause, this one flicker of quiet amidst the inexorable crawl-forward of time, this snapshot of the status quo, motion-blurry but clear enough, certainly, to discern this: the status quo not working. Then the pause is over: time has stretched its legs and now marches onward, and our momentary glimpse at clarity is insufficient to change the momentum of anything.

Tomorrow

Tomorrow, when we elect Barack Obama, all my worries will go away and my blood pressure will drop twenty points. The stock market will soar and the price of oil will plummet. The weather will be sunny and cool and breezy, like for flying a kite.

The pothole outside my house will fill in, and the garbage smell will lift away. Mail will never be lost again. Sinks will flow with chocolate and champagne. Credit card debt will be forgiven. We will all lose ten pounds. Our teeth will floss themselves.

Tomorrow, when we elect Barack Obama, the world will fill with flowers. The milk carton children will return. Heartbreaks of the past will turn to wistful happy memories; we will shed our fear of all things, and we'll dance and make love in the streets, except the streets will be better, too, and won't give brush burns.

When results are in, and he has made his acceptance speech, we will gasp in genuine awe at the rightness of things; we will get choked up to have rediscovered our lost faith; and we will believe, like our forefathers believed, in the power of democracy, and in the good that lies buried (sometimes too deep) inside the human heart, tomorrow, when we elect Barack Obama.

Vacation to Saturn

"Dreary winter so far. I was thinking we should get away. Take a trip."

"Where you want to go?"

"New place I keep reading about. Saturn."

"I saw pictures. Supposed to be nice."

"A lot of frequent flier miles. Like seven-hundred million."

"People go to Saturn?"

"Yeah. Well, no. Titan. Moon. That's where I was reading about. Oceans, beaches. Maybe some wildlife."

"We should do it. It'll be nice."

"We'll sit on the beach, we'll look at the sky: it'll be a full Saturn out."

"I love you."

"Love you too."

Vegan

ve-gan. Noun. A vegetarian who doesn't like you.

Read more from The Urban Sherpa Dictionary ->

Want-Induced Psychosis (pt. 1)

By the time we end a relationship, usually the person we loved is already gone.

Or, maybe it's more accurate to say that person no longer exists, or never existed: that person with whom we'd built a home, raised our children, celebrated so much happiness and hope—in our imagined future—that person never existed. We've been in love with a phantom, an objet d'art of our own creation, inspired by a real-life counterpart who, it turns out, doesn't want those things at all.

We wake up to find that our bed, our house, our future, is empty, and that it has been for some time. It's the simulacra that's been keeping us warm. A beautiful ghost.

Love, then, is a kind of psychosis. ¹

The sun comes up on a day as cold and empty as it ever was, but brighter and colder, for want of a new illusion to keep us warm.

1. The gravitational pull of our desire, strong enough to warp space-time.

When Ulysses Returned to Ithaca

When Ulysses returned to Ithaca, it wasn't what he'd remembered. The streets were dirtier and narrower, the people furtive, unhealthy and short. Climbing the hill back to his palace, the road was worse, too—pocked, uneven, steeper, it seemed; and the palace itself had fallen into ruin: the ceiling was collapsed in spots, and the front door was rotting off its hinges.

"Penelope?," he called out. "Penny, are you there? It's me, Ulysses. I'm home." His voice echoed off the crumbling walls, and scattered a herd of stray cats that went into hiding under a pumpkin plant that had grown to take over what used to be their living room.

He sat down on what was left of his old throne: it was covered in moss and decayed leaves. "This is where we lived," he mused. "This is where we loved," though he'd been gone ten years without a word to her, without so much as a postcard. She'd left and left no forwarding address.

"What now?," he wondered. The master strategist of the Achaeans had failed to contemplate this—a life without Penelope.

"What now?," he asked again, and he sat back to look at the stars through the holes in the ceiling, arranging them into shapes and then giving the shapes (for the first time) names. He named them for his friends. When he'd filled the sky with "Orion" and "Perseus," with "Andromeda" and "Cassiopeia," he still hadn't found a set of stars to call "Penelope." He loved her dearly—he was sure he did—but he couldn't quite recall her shape; and he didn't want to get it wrong.

Work

n. nautical. to sail against the wind.

A co-worker asked me to lunch, and when I said "No thanks," she replied, "Why? Because there will be people there?"

Which made me like her even more than I already did.

But I still didn't eat lunch with her...

* * *

n. physics. force acting upon an object to cause displacement.

Someone at work just told me I'm "more blunt and less charming" than my usual
self today. When I told her to "Fuck off," three people turned around like there was about to be a fight.

Can't anyone take a joke?

* * *

n. fine arts. a creation, such as a song or a painting.

"Chris, what are you doodling?"

"Oh, it's nothing. It's ... a little duck."

"You mind paying attention to our meeting?"

Well, since you asked...

* * *

n. religion. a moral or righteous act or deed.

"The slavery of civil society is ostensibly the greatest freedom, because it appears to leave the individual perfectly independent. The individual considers as his own freedom the movement (no longer curbed or fettered by a common tie or by man) of his alienated life-elements, like property, industry, religion; in reality, this movement is the perfection of his slavery."

Note to Self: when you start quoting Marx in the office, it's probably time to call it a day...