Doe-eyed, Po-faced, and Half Dotty Already

Earlier, while duskily languishing and hanging upon the cheek of night like a French Hook in an ecdysiast's ear, it occurred to me how pleased I am that I am no more in need of recourse to clip-on hair. In fact, I have so much of my own now that it frequently gets in my way, and I have alternately to Put It Up, Pull It Back, Smoosh It Down, and continue to work on my own tragic version of the French-Twist-with-a-Pouf, wherein all the extra bits that would otherwise make me look like a daughter of Akhenaten were they stuffed in with the rest are instead pitched topside, in a studied simulation of the sort of Devil-may-care posture I'll never quite pull off. At least not until I'm convinced that the Devil doesn't care very, very much and is not standing to my left at all times and pulling little pieces of it out and around and straight up, to illustrate that the only way in which I'll ever resemble Brigitte Bardot will be in my looming dotage when I'm so potty over animals I have no idea what I'm saying about anything else.

Certainly it won't be for supporting Le Pen. Nor, I suspect, for having an affair with Serge Gainsbourg or encouraging massacres in Algeria. Still, it would be nice to be able smolder abandonedly every so often, presuming there were no German playboy astrologers around to render it all cosmically de trop.

This is the only happiness; and is a rare instance of advantage in the body overpowering the Mind.

Said Keats regarding indolence, and while I to this day hate that Ode, I still love Keats and admire as always his respect for indolence. We devalue it tremendously, of course, the sitting, being, the taking in, and allowing...

We are no doubt fearful that passivity or unalloyed receptivity in one area will leech out and become some overarching guiding principle in our psyche, or life. That we'll wake up one day and find we've unwittingly morphed into swarthy, layabout Mediterraneans who say 'five' when they mean 'six-thirty' or worse. This is one reason, amidst poor taste, uninventiveness, ignorance, xenophobia, and fear of solitude, that we spend our vacations righteously doing things, ticking off Chartres and Epidavros on our lists, snapping the requisite few hurried shots of St. Basil's and St. Peter's before making our way to consuming the Great Wall and Kyoto's daibutsu.

I have no such fears, myself, but certainly if you are the sort of person who needs to, you can check my resume and see that I have worked hard enough, and worked long enough, to have 'earned' the right to spend the day doing nothing but making melon balls I never intend to eat or sitting around Montmartre doing nothing other than doing nothing and calling it a holiday all the same. And that's what I did. That was my vacation. I ate quite a bit of pastry, drank a lot of both coffee and wine, talked to my friend and my friend's friends, and bought a book hoping it would help me reproach one of them in German. It didn't, and anyway I expect his French and English were better than mine, so I stuck with those and reproached away and got a foot massage out of it so all was fine.

We did make it to Champagne, which is where the reproaching, the Teuton, and the feet come in, but it wasn't a 'goal' of mine, or even my idea. And we almost didn't make it (European gas mileage is a thing of beauty, but only when there is gas in one's tank to get mileage from), but we did, and we sat around there, too. This litttle sojourn to France was very nearly the only short trip I've ever taken except for ones close to where I happen to live right then, and I was very tempted to stay there, too, except that that would mean the loss of both my bed and a truly fabulous coat.

Maybe I'll move there next year. It couldn't possibly cost more to ship my bed than what I paid in overweight charges for books and shoes when I left Greece. And by then I could have conceivably winnowed my current supply of both to a manageable level, so that it would only be the 100-piece Chinese bed and the 50-pound coat with which I'd need concern myself. And since it will no doubt remain true in a year that the only German I know consists in a few cabaret songs and the occasional singspiel stanza, I won't have worn out my welcome with anyone.

Happy Birthday, Ferdinand

Who, indeed, knew that your given name was Mongin, or that you were English at base?

Geneva, 1857. Dead, 1913. Atherosclerosis and pneumonia.

Mongin-Ferdinand de Saussure. French. Calvinist. Synaesthetic. Seminal. The Without-Which-Not for all the social sciences and liberal arts that have come after his quiet existence.

--But it is language itself, not merely pronunciation, that is always teratological, darling, as your descendents have amply shown. And as you along with Freud and Marx stripped the human- out of humanism, we have only a desiccated -ism to cleave to now, without a handy (PIE!) root to grab onto. Still, if you hadn't lived, I should never have been able to have read Zizek, and for that I thank you, if not now or at any other time for haute Structuralism at its hautist...


My life flows on in endless song;
Above earth’s lamentation
I hear the sweet though far off hymn
That hails a new creation:
Through all the tumult and the strife
I hear the music ringing;
It finds an echo in my soul—
How can I keep from singing?

Wo ist der Schnee vom vergangenen Jahr?

I don't know. I tried to write an entry about how senior citizens aren't what they used to be anymore, and I thought I did the math wrong, so I scrapped the whole bit, only to try it one more time after deleting everything, upon which I discovered I had it right all along, up until the point I redid it. I didn't have to 'borrow' from the zero at all, since I was subtracting a 0 from a 7 before that... Which means, to those of you who don't know math as well as I do, that 2,007-70=, as I previously and rightly believed, 1,937.

So, nothing about Chuck Taylors versus Novachords, or Gene Krupa or Bing Crosby before the 'Road Pictures.' It's sad, too, because it had funny bits. Moreover, it explained things much better than 1927 did, an equation I found inscrutable in many ways, most of all the heads tilted sideways when I mentioned things like Lyonnaise Potatoes and Pork Chops, or Holländer, or the shock of the New Look.

And then I read a story about a seminal philologist that moved me so strongly I actually attempted to 'contribute' a 'comment.' At which I also failed, apparently, because I don't know what I pushed instead of 'Yes, show me, I'm trying to do something here!!' when Firefox let me know it had shut down a popup and did I want to see it. Nothing happened, so I reloaded and recocked, and whether it's the firing pin or the trigger assembly or the action is too light, something went awry and I went straight to the Technical Issues page, and by this point I was all in (seminal philologists can do that to me, even Calvinist ones), so I had to set up my Outlook, as that's the address the Technical Issues office wanted, even though they could reach me far more handily elsewhere.

But I seem to have achieved greater success with the manly Hand Balm I started, which makes sense because you can blunt some of the technical issues of scent and still have good results. It seems quite likable now, but we'll see as it cures. So far it is strong on oregano and saffron, as I wanted, with vetiver, cedar, and oakmoss in the bottom, and very little bergamot for a tiny bounce and to coax out the citrus notes in the vetiver. Who knows, but it smells great on me right now, and the oregano is settling in so beautifully.

Happy St. Calvin's Day!

Today we celebrate Thanksgiving here in the US, and along with The Harvest, the fruits of This Great Land, squashes of all sorts and can-shaped cranberry puree, the changing of the seasons, colonialism, imperialism, Manifest Destiny, the Noble Savage and the White Man's Burden, we also pay homage to the undying legacy of John Calvin. He gave us hard work and Blackberrys and fax machines, to be sure, and quite possibly timeshares and cruiseboat holidays, as well, but the full measure of his influence cannot be appreciated without taking into account the Puritans' sumptuary strictures and their enduring significance.

'Original sin, therefore, appears to be an hereditary depravity and corruption of our nature, diffused through all the parts of the soul, rendering us obnoxious to the divine wrath and producing in us those works which the scripture calls "works of the flesh."' - J.C.

I do not mean to imply that I think the whole Reformation was a bad idea initially, or sprang from bad impulses. I would not like to have lived in Burgundy, for example, during a certain period, if I did not happen to be recognized as exactly and precisely orthodox by the Benedictines. I would have preferred not to live in Spain, either, from about 1500 to 1800, regardless of my affiliations or lack thereof. And I am grateful not to have been in the position of attempting to lead a devout life in some of the less-than-devout monasteries that reform and renewal put to right. However, if the end result would have been that no one, ever, centuries later, when I wouldn't even know, except in Heaven, where I could no longer feel pain, would have had to wear polyester masquerading as 'gabardine,' or drink 'white Zinfandel,' or stuff themselves into hideous little rooms on boats the size of cities with thousands of other holiday-makers, only to spend their days gorging on cafeteria food, playing shuffleboard, swimming in chlorinated pools in the midst of the Aegean, and debarking in growling hordes to buy up gilded replicas of Attic treasures and machine-made lace, I would gladly have submitted to whatever tonsure, penitence -- or cloistered aristocratic licentiousness -- were the case in my region.

'You must submit to supreme suffering in order to discover the completion of joy.' -J.C.

But because I didn't, we live in a society that continues to view pleasure as dangerous and the senses as Satan's inbuilt handmaidens. We oscillate between wordless orgiastic feedings of Grande Meals at the Big Hombre and the next day's punishing asceticism. Neither tastes like anything, but one causes self-loathing while the other promises redemption -- and flatter abs. We eat salmon-colored tomatoes in February and think nothing of it; we pump 'cheese' out of an aerosol; we have diabetes and hemorrhoids, cancer of the colon and hypertension, and our only consolation is At least we didn't enjoy ourselves getting to this point...

'Though Satan instills his poison, and fans the flames of our corrupt desires within us, we are yet not carried by any external force to the commission of sin, but our own flesh entices us, and we willingly yield to its allurements.' -J.C.

A handily reductivist version of Calvinism is that Adam screwed it up for all of us, and we're never going to get back to anything close to a prelapsarian state, in spirit or conditions or behavior, but it is our duty nonetheless to try to - even if we're some of the ones God has already decided He's not that keen on letting back into Heaven - with every waking breath, in each act and thought of our lives, and thus anything that distracts us from this is proof of our fallenness, our 'total depravity' (a phrase which came after Calvin himself but is not an unrepresentative distillation of his point of view), our hideous natures which draw us away from, rather than toward, the Good.

'Man's mind is like a store of idolatry and superstition; so much so that if a man believes his own mind it is certain that he will forsake God and forge some idol in his own brain.' -J.C.

This is an exceedingly long leap from the Roman Catholic position of 'don't get so drunk that your judgment will be clouded and you risk making bad choices and ending up in an opium den in Chinatown.' In Calvinism, we've already tied off our arm, flicked the needle, and had sex with the dealer. We are meretricious, deceitful, murderous, lazy, avaricious, gluttonous crackwhores from the start who would sooner kill you than wish you a good day. No wonder, then, that we can't stand the idea of enjoying a good meal in pleasant surroundings: one bite of the medium-rare filet with a delicate shallot beurre blanc and we have paved the way for lechery, idolatry, pederasty, income tax fraud, bestiality, and unbridled killing sprees. Enjoy anything too heartily, and it's only a matter of time before the stakes have to be raised, before the beurre blanc just won't do, it will have to be pounds of some ponderous Norman cream sauce, poured all over the steak and dripping down your chin, and the med-rare will mutate into saignant and before you know it you will be starring in a Bosch painting, eating babies, buggering lobsters, and never combing your hair.

So it arises that we take pains not to have too good a time. When that doesn't work, we endeavor to convince ourselves we are not really enjoying things but doing what we must, such as rampant overspending cloaked as necessary Christmas shopping or renovating yet again what we just discovered to be a hugely outdated living room. Or, we deny our urges so habitually, and in such illogical ways, that they perforce irrupt disguised - that they might for once be satisfied - and we rather than buy one pair of fancy shoes, or get a bit giddy on two glasses of port, or quietly watch the setting sun from the shore of a lake, instead order sixteen shots of whatever, stuff down some onion rings slathered in synthetic 'mayonnaise,' and try to convince the drunk girl next to us to go back to the apartment for anonymous, detached, barely conscious casual sex.

'So indulgent is man towards himself, that, while doing evil, he always endeavours as much as he can to suppress the idea of sin.' - J.C.

And that isn't what the Catholics warned us about, either. It's not the alcohol's fault. The alcohol is there in order that the rest can take place, in order deliberately to renounce judgment sufficiently that we can be as mindless of sin as of either genuine pleasure or redemption, and thus get on with our half-hearted quest for the bad food, the unsatisfying company, the superficial conversation, and the mindless, soulless, fumbling sex. We're no longer worrying about God, or Calvin, or Burgundian excesses. We don't even know where or what Burgundy is, for that matter, since we don't drink nice wines, or read books that aren't assigned, or travel to places where they don't speak American. And we no longer believe we're damned, nor care; we're chained to the ramified legacy of Calvin, without any recollection of how we got here or what the original argument was. We just know we're not supposed to enjoy ourselves. We should be multitasking on our Blackberrys while chasing the four-minute mile and listening to management seminars on our iPods, not idly reading the TLS on a Saturday morning and sipping mimosas in deck chairs amidst birdsong and evergreens.

'Every one of us is, even from his mother's womb, a master craftsman of idols.' -J.C.

So, when the dam breaks and the need for genuine pleasure mutates yet again into a virulent need to consume, we are stuck. It's too late to decide to keep fresh flowers in the house. Gone is our chance to enjoy the walking tour of the Piedmont, or to start wearing clothing that doesn't punish all the senses. And no longer will poetry or color or silky sheets or taking up ikebana or cheesemaking sate our deranged, repressed need for something, anything, that can stimulate a sense of even the most distant, third-order simulacrum of the commodity called 'enjoyment.'

But we've become by that point the crackwhore Calvin warned us about. Now it can no longer be about nuance or joy. We have ground ourselves down to nearly insensate lumps from alternating between compulsive and overarching gravitas surrounding work/'success' and puerile outbursts of mindless grasping that we can no longer just be. We have annihilated our receptivity so thoroughly that our whole outlook reduces not merely things but people, as well, to instruments. I see you for what you can give me, just like the obscenely large truck or the Patek Philippe or the ten numbing, dumbing vodka-and-Red-Bulls. But don't worry; as soon as I've eaten you and the four-pound McNasty and the 'craftsman style' high-end bathroom renovation, I'll spend two hours on the electronic bicycle and commit myself to at least three more memos a week and do a colon cleanse and take a Men's Retreat and swear off booze and find my inner child again and give him the kick in the teeth he so roundly deserves.

'I consider looseness with words no less of a defect than looseness of the bowels.' -J.C.

La Plus Haute Tour

I went on a good date tonight.

And shut up you for thinking what you just thought: if I hold out no hope I am in no danger of being misled or misconstrued. My approach is neutral; therefore my reading should rightly be presumed accurate. In fewer words, it was a good date, and I should be trusted on this. I had rather seal my lips, than, to my peril,/ Speak that which is not.

But yes it is true in the end: I am as shocked as you to discover that people other than me should be simultaneously nice, thinky, and as engaged as they are engaging. And I think I was mostly fine, too, which is something. Except for the beginning, when I had to call and ask was that him the guy I just squinted at and walked away from or was he not here yet which would be preferable as if he was that guy and it looked like he might be because they looked the same it might be better if we tried this another time because I could leave now and not walk up to the guy who just looked at me weirdly and then again at the end when I didn't know what to do and so barged ahead the better to get the ending ended and opened the door on my own which I hate doing and anyway am no good at either because physics gets in the way but didn't see much of an alternative at that point.

But the middle bit was fine. I hate pickles but I ate about sixteen, and there were no real knives so that was challenging because I do think they are an integral part of the eating part of a meal, but apart from that I'm sure it was fine. Well, there was the part where my hair hit the limit of its (purported) 'style' and I discovered far too late that it was not merely listing leftwards as I had only recently come to suspect but was instead fixed entirely on the left rear of my head, undoubtedly with all the end bits exploding in an unprepossessing fountain-like structure above my left ear, but I'm used to that since my lack of cosmetological expertise lends itself daily to hairstyle tragedies. Perhaps I shouldn't, but I do take it in stride and always assume my companion(s) understand it is a failure not of conception but merely of execution and, my being bereft of an engineering degree, such things are likely to happen and should be excused without prejudice.

Anyway, it was far from hell. By-and-by is easily said, but we both avowed something or other with appropriate levels of genuicity and advienne que pourra. I don't mean to sound as though I'm thinking anything other than What (overdressed) couch is the neighbor's cat hiding under, and why isn't he in the armoire where he belongs, but, as Fats Waller said, One never knows, do one?

Life Is Short, and So Is Money.

That's what Brecht says, and I believe both and accordingly despise 'shopping.' It is not a grand political stand, and I don't live in a treehouse: I freely acknowledge that sometimes there are things that one needs, and that some of those things must be bought, with money, rather than fashioned from twigs and pre-chewed gum saved up for the occasion. And the things I buy I want and/or need, so once I have them I am pleased that I do. For example, the car without a puddle on the rear floor was a much-appreciated replacement for the one with the puddle.


But I don't like the process of it, certainly, nor do I enjoy the near-Las-Vegas levels of visual and auditory stimulation I have to go through just to get the thing I need. I also am not usually thrilled that there are so many other people there doing the same thing I am attempting to, except doing it more loudly, more assertively, and far, far more happily, with an unmistakable air of being where they belong and where, indeed, they wish to be. Many, in fact, are patently there to savor precisely the process, rather than even obliquely striving to pursue, and succeed at, a goal-directed mission. Myself, I have a list (and yes, fine, sometimes it is one item, but I am likely to forget even that when confronted with Shrek on thirty different widescreens while still trying agitatedly to figure out if plant lightbulbs are by lamps or potting soil), and I want to use that list, find the things, pay for the things, and get home.

But today it didn't work like that. The goal of the mission was a new computer. This had been coming a long time, and the last couple of days had made it urgent. I had done all I could with the old one, but tweaks and external crutches can only get one so far when it is the machine inside the machine that is dying. There are many cars on the road with 300,000 miles on them, but few have the original engine or transmission, and none have the original tires. And if the car spent most of its lifespan being driven in Labrador, at some point it is reasonable to step back and rationally consider whether putting a new engine in that old shell is the best course of action. In this case, it was not.

So, having looked for weeks and months at various offers, and becoming slightly conversant with where it is people for the most part go to buy computers, I decided I felt safer buying a new one than a used, and that a cheap one was fine as long as it had ample memory. I also decided against buying one online, as the wait would be longer, it could arrive damaged, and there was no way of telling at what precise moment the old one would completely stop working. It is not easy using it as it is now, but it is handier than not having it at all, especially if a lot of what I am doing with it is researching my options for replacing it...

The story didn't start off terribly. I had heard on NPR that the Great Satan of discount shopping, Wal-Mart, offered (cheap, obviously) computers now. I drove to a Super Wal-Mart at about 3 AM after having looked at the Wal-Mart website and seeing that there were many options. The drive itself was very pleasant, about an hour each way in the calm dark of the early-morning freeway. And inside the store, although it was admittedly hideously bright, it was as deserted as the roads. Nice. Very nice. But what is on the website isn't what is in the stores, and there were only a couple laptops, and they were ghastly. Even by my standards. I did, however, locate some Diet Coke and Fiddle Faddle, even a bottle of the rare Wild Cherry Diet Pepsi, but I got confused trying to find nutrition bars, and gave up. Still, the Fiddle Faddle added immeasurably to the pleasantness of the ride home, and the BBC had a very idiosyncratic long reportage on Kazakhstan's burgeoning oil-fed Wild West.

It didn't solve the problem of the moribund Pavilion, though. The next morning I got serious about used ones. That stern resolution crumbled upon itself after the first (interminable) conversation with the first seller, who didn't really have what he said he had but who would be getting other ones soon, tomorrow, even, from his 'purveyors,' if I wanted to wait, although he could never be sure, of course, what exactly those 'purveyors' would purvey to him, nor how long it would take him to get the computers into working order, but he would be happy to et cetera and I could rest assured that.

Thus.

I went to the Best Buy. At that point, it was for me like shutting up and shutting down the GPS and taking the circuitous but well-known route, as I had looked at their website the most, once I heard of the Best Buy about a month ago. I even had a piece of paper I had written their specials on, but that was at home, next to the computer.

I found the Best Buy easy to navigate. They had large signs with large letters hanging from the ceiling, and I was relieved that I didn't have to walk through cramped aisles of fishing tackle and foundation garments to get to COMPUTERS. Likewise I enjoyed the approach of the salesmen, whose low-pressure tactics could easily be taken for apathy and boredom. I didn't have many questions, either, since most relevant facts were on cards below the display versions of the laptops. When I did ask one guy why this one with so much memory was the same price as a nastynasty Acer with a processor from 1972, he said it was on sale and a very good buy and I said I think I had that one written down and I'd take it. I figured I had the cat in the bag by that time. Certainly at least a very large bird in the hand. In this I was mistaken.

I have never had anyone 'set up' my computer for me before, but he said it was standard and free and quick. I figured it must be quick, if it is quick for me and I don't do it all day. Then, he said that for only $29.99 they would configure? orient? what was it? --oh, yes, Optimize and Personalize -- it for me and that that would be quick, too. I am an idiot, and I said yes.

I had no idea what was to be 'personalized' about it, since they didn't ask me any questions or, as it turned out, input any information about me into it, but at that point I just wanted him to stop talking. I did want to be home soon, but at that exact moment what I wanted more was for him to cease speaking. I felt that $29.99 was a reasonable price for that service.

However, it wasn't quite over, as he had to ask various people if they could call Bill so that Bill could count the money a second time. Once Bill arrived and counted the money again, it took a few minutes for the two to figure out my change ($9.21), as the change drawer had already opened on its own and thus not displayed the correct change to give back. My salesclerk confirmed with the technical people that my Optimization and Personalization would be done within forty-five minutes. Of course, had I opted out, within that time I would have already been home and online...

Nonetheless.

I had it, at least in a sense, and that was closer than I had been at 3 AM in the Wal-Mart by the Indian casino lost among the Little Debbies. While I was leaving the store, though, to begin my waiting, my phone rang. The noise from the parking structure was so loud that I said I would go to my car and call from inside. Except that I couldn't find my car. I was pretty sure that I was on Level Four, which is, except for the highest and as-yet uncompleted level, the top one. Thus, easy to remember, so I figured that if Level Four was sticking in my head, there was probably a pretty good reason.

I knew the area I had parked in. I was pretty sure, too, that I didn't just know the aisle but the space. But my car wasn't there, in either aisle or space, not on Level Four or Level Three. I called my friend back, and could barely hear, but said I had lost my car and was really going to call her back, just not quite yet. I went all the way down to the bottom level, figuring that perhaps 'extreme end' was what I was remembering, and just mistaking which extreme, but I was wrong about that, too. And the configuration of the floor was totally different, which was at least helpful, so that I knew I didn't have to walk the whole floor.

I did find it eventually, and detoxed a while inside, next to the vandalized BMW that had angered someone by taking up two spaces in a crowded parking lot. Once I felt a bit composed again, I decided against my better judgment to restore my blood glucose at the food part at the Target, the only source for food in the little mall. It really didn't help much, because, despite the presence of baby-changing stations inside the restrooms just a few paces from where we were sitting, a young Chinese couple saw fit to change their baby's soiled diapers in the cafe area as two teenagers ran around the tables chasing each other and yelling. When I had eaten as much cheese off my pizza as I could stomach, I left the food area, bought some nutrition bars, and went to spend the rest of my wait at Ross.

No one was changing diapers at Ross, which gladdened my heart. But now, I was officially shopping. Aimlessly wandering the aisles of a store I didn't want to be in, looking for nothing in particular and with no goal other than passing time. I picked up a brassiere that may or may not fit, found they did not have towels like mine or shoes in a 5 1/2 or little girls' pants size 10 with straight-cut legs, and did not like the shape of the Turkish wine glasses which I wanted to buy just because they were from Turkey and no one drinks wine out of stemware there except at American hotel bars. But I put the bra in one hand and some candlesticks for the bedroom in the other and waited behind the other twenty masochists for the lonely cashier to set me free.

After that I returned, diminished, enervated, soulless, to the Best Buy, to be reunited with my Optimized and Personalized laptop. I waited in the Service line for a long time. Ahead at the counter was a schizophrenic lady in earthy clothes gesticulating madly at every word. Also much of the time when there weren't words accompanying her gestures. I asked the two guys in front of me if they thought this was the right line to wait in if I was just picking up a computer I'd already paid for, and one just stared at me and the other very annoyedly said 'I DON'T KNOW.'

I didn't actually need Service. On the other hand, I also didn't need an Online Order Pickup or whatever the other line by that one was. So, I thought it prudent to ask an employee in Computers where I would stand to pick up a computer I had bought an hour and a half ago that had just been Optimized. He said, That line there - you'll be first.

And I was. For a very long time. And many employees went by me, around me, in front of me, behind me, and almost through me, but whatever duties they were assigned to did not include helping the person in the vanguard of my imaginary line. I waited a very, very, very long time. After a while there weren't so many people coming in and out by me, which intuitively felt as though my hitherto slim chances of being served were now circling Nil or NaN. Finally, I, the person who never sends back a scorched sauce Mornay, who lets every pedestrian cross and every car cut in front of me that cares to, said, rather loudly, Is there anyone anywhere who could possibly help me just pick up a computer I bought today?

The guy who had been standing in front of me on the other side of the counter for the last twenty minutes came up and told me I wasn't waiting in a line, that that's the line there, and I said I was told to wait here and that's the only reason I was waiting here and could I just please get my computer and go home, it should be done by now could I just please get it so I can leave now please thank you.

And he did get it, and it took about 4.5 seconds, and I made it to my car on Level 2A, and the banged-up Beemer was still unmoved, still unseen by its uptight owner, and by now the parking lot wasn't so crowded and I made it out quickly and easily and took the counterintuitive route home and found the neighbor's cat waiting for me and my monkey candlesticks at the door. Next time, I swear I will buy anything, everything I need online. Even if it requires replacing things before they are absolutely 100 per cent completely no question about it dead dead dead, even if it means I don't get to break out the baling wire, kebab skewers, and yards of Velcro tape, I will do it, because I can put on some Ella Fitzgerald and silk pants, I can eat sushi or a bowl of chili or Little Debbies or Fiddle Faddle if I feel like it, I can burn sandalwood or Livani or both at the same time, or I could be dyeing my hair or setting my fingernail polish -- and all this without screaming fluorescent lights, poopy diapers in the wrong place, pushing, shoving, stripped brakes echoing off concrete, lines that aren't lines, 'Personalization' that is anything but, and the wretched sense that I've been had in some vague yet disturbing way at the end of all of it.

Who is a hero? He who conquers his urges. -The Talmud.