American Fez

Jonah Works From Home

Despite being a morning person, I'm still irritated by Jeremy's cockcrow chirpiness. 'Let's make today a great day' he says every day; and it usually was until his arrival. 

Like a human-shaped locust swarm, Jeremy's appearance in the office blights everything. The switchboard jams; computers freeze up unexpectedly and the Internet fails; coffee suddenly goes cold, muffins disintegrate into inedible crumbs; and I haven't checked but I'm pretty certain our sales fall as well.

He is our equivalent of Coleridge's ancient mariner. God knows what occupational albatross he killed to bring down such misfortune on the company. Someone from the mailroom? A corporate consultant? The guy who fills the vending machine in the cafeteria?

'Let's make every day a great day.' Jeremy might as well be invoking an ancient curse for all the good this cliche does. It's actually a howl of neurotic paranoia in positive thinking clothes. Obviously Jeremy thinks it will magically come true if he repeats the mantra often enough. But then he immediately breaks the printer. 

Unfortunately our office is open plan, otherwise we could confine Jeremy to his cubicle. For his own protection, of course, before an exasperated colleague walls him up in the conference room or buries him alive beneath the reception desk. 

Recently, of course, we've found ourselves working from home because of Coronavirus. We can't blame Jeremy for a public health crisis, but it can't be coincidence that our virtual meeting software frequently cuts out when he is talking.

Rationalisation Springs Eternal

Spring cleaning started early this year: the cuckoo, the daffodil, and the All-Purpose Spray Disinfectant all appearing in mid-March. They usually make staggered entrances from the beginning of April through, in the case of detergent and scouring pads, as late as the end of July. Nevertheless, there I was, on my hands and knees, fighting the cobwebs and dust in the hallway closet on March 17th, St Patrick's Day. 

I suppose St. Patrick's Day is a propitious day to begin any type of cleaning, as he famously evicted all the snakes from Ireland, but his serpent-handling exploits seem a minor achievement compared to my heroic struggle of organizing and fumigating the hallway closet. Even HP Lovecraft would find difficulty describing the things that have crawled away to die in its corners; those unknown and unnameable forms that lurk in a closet's shadows defying categorization.

Originally, the hallway closet was where I kept my rain boots and winter coats, but it quickly devolved into a clothing graveyard where I bury things I never wear but can't bear to throw away. Mostly uncomfortable shoes that I failed to break-in and stylish but impracticable lightweight jackets, but also a variety of useless accessories: belts that became too big when I lost weight, itchy scarves, hats that make me look stupid, and an ancient leather satchel still full of the random junk that accumulates in bags. I hoped there might be some forgotten money stashed in the pockets and, indeed, I got lucky. Alas, it was only a nickel and two pennies.

Seven stinking cents, hardly the glittering bounty of a treasure hunter's dreams. There wasn't even an old packet of unopened tissues or a virgin notepad or anything that could be repurposed. Just the small change, a wad of crumpled receipts for purchases I wish I'd never made, an abandoned granola bar emerging stickily from the remains of its wrapper, several business cards for now defunct businesses I'd written their competitor's phone numbers on, a handheld calculator, and a medium-size metal key. Of course, finding a key could spark the start of an exciting adventure, except I immediately realized what this key unlocked. 

Wedged into the very back of the hallway closet was a safety deposit box. Bought with good intentions of keeping my important documents in, the box soon became merely a smaller version of the closet in which it resided. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if there was yet another box inside that one containing more worthless ephemera; and so on ad infinitum down to a box no bigger than a thumbnail housing microscopic mementoes invisible to the naked eye. So much dross and dreck, so little spring cleaning time despite getting an early start.

This is why I believe my task is harder than St Patrick's. He chased a few snakes into the sea from the comfort of his monastic cell. Big deal. I need to collect my unwanted junk in garbage bags, stack it all in the back of my car, then personally drive it to sea. Who has the time for all that palaver these days?

I got up off my knees, giving the inside of the closet one last brief critical survey, pocketed my seven cents, then shut the door. Later, I'd take care of it later. There's a beautiful day outside, after all, don't waste such great weather. Surely spring cleaning can wait until the sky turns grey and overcast?

And besides, I might need all those old bits of papers for a papier-mache project, for example, should I feel so inspired, so it would be foolish to consign them to the trash without carefully thinking it through. Never discard today what you could need tomorrow. I'm sure I read that in some book of commonsense quotations. Excuse me while I go lay down on the couch for a moment and try to recall the author's name.

The Bridle Path Mystery

There is a dirt track called The Bridle Path near my childhood home. Once an equestrian route from countryside into town, it has become the domain of dog-walkers, recreational cycling clubs, dressing-gown and slipper clad wanderers from an adjacent lunatic asylum, and rural vandals whose hobby is apparently smashing crockery in the open air, specifically Blue Willow patten china. 

Judging by the regular appearance and sheer number of these tiny blue and white fragments appearing on the ground, I'd guess the vandals have easy access to an unlimited stockpile of entire Blue Willow dinner services. Could the vandals be disgruntled employees of a restaurant supply store? Or maybe they are violent partisans of the Royal Copenhagen pattern, driven to such desperate measures by the figurative nature of their Chinoise rival? Can the mystery ever be solved?

Let me take a little reconnaissance ride down the Bridle Path on my bike to see what I can see. Laying in that grassy verge beside the track I observe the shattered remains of a soup tureen, a gravy boat and four teacups; underneath this hedgerow are what's left of six plates and a milk jug; and just now I've ridden over the sharp edge of a broken bit of saucer and my bike has a puncture. So much for my amateur sleuthing, the hooligan masterminds have outwitted me once again.

Frankly, devoid of clues or leads, I doubt even Sherlock Holmes will find anything "elementary" about the Blue Willow case. Hercule Poirot's "little grey cells" are completely stumped. And disconsolate Inspector Maigret surrendered long ago, retiring to a quiet cafe to drown his failures in a glass of pastis. I'm only guessing, but a crime involving decorative crockery with an Oriental theme must surely call for the combined talents of Miss Marple and Charlie Chan. Now that would be a detective story worth reading.

Through A Glass, Virally

The street below my window resembles a Spring cover of the New Yorker illustrated by Jean-Jacques Sempe: the sun shines; the flowers bloom in pink and white, little fat figures go about their business, and an overstuffed oblong dog can't decide whether to run right or left. The cartoonist is in his pastel heaven and all is right with the world.

But, alas, it isn't, of course. A virulent virus stalks the land and we are forced to work from home or 'shelter in place' or practice some other form of self isolation. It's not quite the Black Death but it's certainly becoming the Grey Illness. Instead of gangs of self-flagellators roaming the countryside we have gangs of medical experts appearing on TV, often with contradictory advice. So all we can really know for sure is that we must wash our hands regularly, avoid close contact with people, and not to panic because trillions of stimulus dollars are being released into the economy. They also say don't hoard essential supplies but, being mindful of logistical failures of the past, I'm not entirely convinced on that score.

So I wonder what the street below my window will look like come early summer? A colorful, cute cartoon where life goes on as usual in all its sunlit glory? Or a piece of brown plain paper slowly disintegrating into the sidewalk? Frankly, I'll take anything by Charles Addams at this point.

Done And Dusted

Frank has cleared out his desk. After thirty years he leaves behind nothing but a carpet-thick layer of dust, ancient crumbs, numerous coffee stains, and a heavy snowfall of dandruff flakes: the detritus from which Frank and his increasingly obsolete career have long since become indistinguishable. Send in the clowns. And the Hazmat team.

The robots will come for us all in the end, he announced on his lugubrious farewell tour of the office, ignoring the obvious fact that eliminating his job barely required the services of a pocket calculator, never mind 'the robots' to whom an antediluvian factotum such as Frank would be beneath notice. 

His departure was euphemistically described as Early Retirement, much like euthanasia is politely known as putting someone to sleep. In truth, he was given a choice of leaving of his own accord or being fired within the month. Still, we all pretended to believe he'd be spending the rest of his days on a golf course rather than staggering desperately across the scrapheap.

What are you going to do with all your spare time? I asked him, knowing full well it would be divided between diligently but fruitlessly scouring the Help Wanted ads and bouts of heavy drinking. He told me he'd take a month or two off, maybe do a trip west, see a few people he hadn't seen for a while, then he'd come back, better than ever, and see where things stood. Whatever, he'd be fine, he claimed.

Things always have a way of working out, they say. I hope for Frank's sake that's true, even if the machinations of things are somewhat vague in his case. Meanwhile, the company custodians came to remove the desk and vacuum the area, so now even Frank's dust is gone.

His empty cubicle has become a beige Stonehenge of which future generations will ask 'What was this built for and why?' And, to be honest, I'm not sure I know the answer to that question myself anymore.

The Stars Stare Down

Having reached that easily exhausted age where my "rhythm of the night" is the same tempo as my rhythm of the day, best described as a sort of awkward Bossa-Nova, I put my dancing shoes away and seek more comfortable, arch-supported footwear, provided it has waxed and rounded braided laces and not the dreaded flat athletic style. 

And I would never ever, ever consider wearing sandals. God forbid my standards should fall so low despite the advancing years. The only excuse for a man wearing sandals, and it's a poor one at that, is when staggering somnambulantly around a hospital ward after being bed-ridden for at least six months. Or, and this excuse is also fairly thin, you are dining unexpectedly at a sushi restaurant and do not wish to appear rude.

The rhythm of men's sandals is a sound unsuitable for either day or night or any time at all for that matter. It is the unedifying rhythm of a single gong clang followed by an embarrassed silence; a rhythm that you cannot even tap your foot to; a rhythm that inspires nothing but immobility. In fact, a man wearing sandals does not deserve to possess feet at all.

I'm not quite sure how I arrived at such a draconian judgment in three short paragraphs. One minute I am merely bidding farewell to painting the town red and the next I am advocating guillotining the legs. Forget all that nonsense about awkward Bossa-Nova, I guess the goose step is really the perfect interpretation of the rhythm of my night: a blood-soaked moon illuminating a demented old man, albeit a demented old man in very presentable shoes. 

Presidents Day

This coming Monday is Presidents Day, or Washington's birthday (observed), which happily coincides with National Apathy Day; a day for reflecting on the sheer pointlessness of voting for Presidential candidates of any political persuasion except, perhaps, representatives of the Ruritanian Reunification Coalition. 

The current resident of the White House, a strangely tinted emanation of disreputable Goetian conjuration, does not appeal. The enjoyment of golf is always a deal-breaker for me, ditto the wearing of baseball caps with a suit, and double-ditto the application of self-tanning creme to the face. These may seem trivial reasons to you but they are hills of varying size upon which I am prepared to die. 

His potential "Democratic" challengers, meanwhile, pace back and forth upon the deck of the Ship of Fools, some posing as the figurehead, others barely clinging to the rigging, and quite a few already forced to walk the plank. Joe Biden is the Cap'n Ahab of this unseaworthy vessel, doggedly pursuing the great white whale of his own political legacy until he shipwrecks everyone.

So I shall spend my Presidents Day watching a Three Stooges marathon, reminding myself that in the binary world of American politics there are really only two stooges, neither of whom, alas, is the silent one.

The Enigma Machine

Receiving tax documents in the mail, I immediately sense Franz Kafka's shadow lurking in that dark M.C Escher alleyway where IRS agents perfect their notorious double-cross system known as Form 1040. 

My annual income for 2019, masquerading as W-2s and 1099s and the mysterious "capital gains," approaches the Berlin Wall dividing a healthy refund and the dark world of money owed. It makes underground network contact with various exemptions, deductions, and the treacherous Schedule C, hoping the auditors have their searchlights switched off and their guard dogs shackled. 

Encrypted messages, secret codes, impenetrable ciphers, and esoteric symbols: the sleight-of-hand stock-in-trade of the surreptitious number-cruncher at tax time. I sometimes think it might be appropriate to file my return in a dead letter drop, then hide in a safe house until I receive official clearance from the Feds.

I have nothing against paying my fair share of taxes, but I can't think why we allow the laws that govern that payment to be written by the combined efforts of Ceausescu's politburo and the Sphinx playing with a random number generator.

God knows it is easier to guess what song the sirens sang, what name Achilles assumed when he hid among women, or what Ruritanian strategy in the Balkans might have been than to figure out how much tax I should pay each year.

The Numbers Don't Lie

Raymond, exhibiting all the shortsighted impulsiveness of a lepidopterist who mistakes moth pupae for those of butterflies, has hired a new assistant. Her name is Sharon and her eyelashes are longer than her curriculum vitae; her lipstick redder than the red pen with which Raymond strikes through the names of the other, unprepossessing candidates. 'Sure, they have more experience," he explains. "But Sharon brings freshness and youthful pizazz and we can certainly use some of that around here. Plus she's really cute."

I can tell Raymond is already dreaming of Sharon dolled up like Marilyn Monroe, heavy breathing her way through "Happy Birthday Mr. CFO" when he turns sixty next year. He imagines she will order a cake decorated with innuendos in icing and organize a Viagra themed card. Such puerile displays of office flirtation are what Raymond's aging but still sophomoric mind means by 'youthful pizazz.'

He's never been married and I can't remember the last time he even dated anyone. I suppose he can be excused his peccadillos provided they don't affect the rest of us. Fortunately, he's more of a balding sloth than a silver fox, so there's probably not much for HR to worry about on that score. And anyway, the receptionist tells me Sharon called back this afternoon and rejected the job.

Apparently she got a better offer elsewhere or we just couldn't pay her enough to occupy a cubicle with Raymond all day. It seems our business can afford experience but not pizazz, for which I am truly grateful. Meanwhile, the sex pheromones visibly evaporate from Raymond's sweaty body as he receives the news, rising like the last wisps of pale smoke from a cigarette crushed in an ashtray. His attention slowly returns from its erotic interlude to the company's ledger books, from dollar bills stuffed in garter belts to invoices emailed to clients, not that there's many of them these days of course.

Lamentations in the Canteen

Throughout the day, the staff kitchen at work is cursed by so-called classic rock radio. The relentless sound of sledgehammered, unsubtle chord changes and melodious yelling pervade the air like the bad smell of somebody's stale tuna fish sandwich. Frankly, I would prefer to listen to just the buzz of the fluorescent lighting but apparently silence, although reportedly golden, isn't an option. God forbid we should find ourselves alone with our thoughts. There is enough existential angst to be found at our desks, enough silence to be heard on the other end of the telephone when calling our clients. 'We'll be right back after these messages,' the disc jockey says as if anyone might fear he and his horrible music were gone for good. Then the jingle-happy radio advertising begins, an insult added to injury in the canteen of a company that can barely afford classified ads in the Yellow Pages.

This morning, While My Guitar Gently Weeps was playing as the coffee pot was percolating. 'This one goes out to the calculator belonging to Bob in accounts,' I announced for my own amusement. 'Which is also in deep distress.' In fact, all the utilities and appliances in this office are more upset than George Harrison's instrument, many of them even wailing with despair and perhaps suicidal. This coffee pot, for instance, will surely soon shatter from the slave-driven misery of brewing bitter-tasting sludge each day. The microwave will explode with frustration after reheating one too many breakfast burritos. Only the radio will remain, obliviously broadcasting Queen and Led Zeppelin into the tear-stained ruins. But for the time being our business blows its nose and wipes its eyes, somehow manages a smile and staggers forward into another sales pitch.

From Greek God To Gray Geek

The only thing necessary for the triumph of back hair and blotchy skin is for middle-aged men to do nothing. I would apologize to Edmund Burke for the paraphrase but, well, just take a look at the old,  double-chinned windbag. He should have written it, or at least thought about it. I know I do, every day. For when I was younger, I looked like a George Platt Lynes image of Adonis: chiseled, toned, smooth, and symmetrical. Pert, even.

Oh, how Time has withered my body on the vine, brought the scourge of winter to my skin and deforestation to my scalp. Nowadays, instead of homoerotic Hollywood art photography, I resemble something by Diane Arbus that's gone wrong in the darkroom. 

My new year's resolution, therefore, is to be fitter and more mindful and ruthlessly efficient when it comes to my personal grooming regimen. Apparently such so-called manscaping requires not only constant vigilance and endless willpower but also special tools.

Behold the electric nose hair trimmer, the macho moisturizers, tiny pots of "essential" eye cream and enough particularized deodorizers to make Caliban smell like Oscar Wilde. There is even a long scimitar-shaped razor for removing unwanted tufts of dark air from beneath my shoulder blades and wherever else it has strayed. The danger, of course, is that I end up looking like a plucked turkey with inadequate stuffing. But better that, I suppose, than Bigfoot's puny brother and his associated odors.

New Years Vignette

My table provided a good view of the bar, formerly the serving hatch of a genteel Victorian home that was now the only restaurant within walking distance. Steaming piles of boiled vegetables and slabs of beef had once passed through this portal; now it was all craft cocktails, obscure varietals, and black lager although the architectural details and lighting remained the same. The shadowy figure drinking and the colors in the room reminded me of pulp novel cover art, so I quickly snapped a picture with my phone, as if I were some grizzled gumshoe tailing an errant husband meeting his mistress at the bar, a routine assignment suddenly turning tricky when a murderer concealed behind one of those fluted pillars shoots my subject in the head. Smoldering cigarette smoke twirls in the air and a smoking gun silently disappears into the black ether from whence it came. 

Then my cassoulet arrived, delivered by a Kohl-eyed waitress who belly-danced her way around the tables like she was auditioning for a Sultan, one hand holding the plate high above her head, the fingers of the other conducting whatever music was the soundtrack of her thoughts. Is there anything to do around here? I asked her. She shook her head and told me to just eat, drink, and be merry. I guess I'll have another one of these, then, I said, pointing at my empty wine glass. And can you bring me a new knife? Mine fell on the floor when I was taking a picture of the bar.

Advent Vent

Far from being "merry and bright," I often feel that Christmas is an ever-expanding black hole into which I am inexorably drawn by powerful calendrical gravity. It is not atheistic armies that wage the war on Christmas but Time. Behind every door on my advent calendar is an anxious man with a worried expression. He has too much to do and not enough hours in the day and there is a deadline of December 25th that cannot be missed. If only the festive season was a simple and straightforward as just showing up at some lowly cattle shed.

Only bringing a single gift each? The Three Kings of Orient had it easy if you ask me. And I cannot but conclude they put little thought into their offerings to the Christ child. Gold was obviously the ancient equivalent of a Target gift card, Frankincense a cheap department store aftershave, and Myrrh a vaguely festive-smelling lump of tallow picked-up last minute at Yankee Candle. But perhaps they were in a hurry, crossing all that desert on unreliable camels to make in time for the virgin birth. That star of wonder wasn't going to wait around while they shopped for the perfect present and selected just the right card.

And Christmas is on a Wednesday this year, the middle of the working week, also known as "Hump Day" to the commuting masses. Shepherds watched their flocks by night and I'll have to keep an eye on my email inbox in case there is a client crisis. Many people will be working Christmas Eve and even St Stephen's Day ... because, apparently, it doesn't make sense to take Wednesday and Thursday off and then come in again on Friday for the one day. Scrooge would be pleased.

The Winter Waltz

November's early snowfall, wispy, intermittent, and non-sticking, what the weatherman calls 'a wintry mix,' otherwise known as sleet. Imagine icy rain floating down to Earth wearing a white parachute of flakes; rain in a fur coat rubbing cold shoulders with rain in a polyester anorak, there is no social barrier in the late Autumnal air. 

It's a hint of Christmas Yet To Come, Yuletide directly ahead, the Compliments of the Season we are walking into, and therefore Jack Frost's nose-nipping reminder to rehearse jolliness instead of misery, even when your fingers and feet are frozen to the marrow and your blood feels like it's turned to sub-zero slush.

Easier said than done, of course. You've forgotten how itchy that scarf is, how cumbersome your heavy Duffel coat is, how this bobble hat barely offers protection against a slight breeze never mind skull-shattering wind chills. And why did you buy those fingerless gloves again?

Nevertheless, fa-la-la la la la is the tune we must aspire to dance to every day, no matter how frigid it is outside. So put on your dancing shoes (the waterproof ones you can wear with thick, woolen socks) and take your positions for the winter waltz.

Orchard Precautions

Per old wives' instructions, I eat an apple every day (usually a Gala) to keep the doctor away. Obviously, at a certain age, this becomes a mostly ineffective strategy and, although not exactly shoulder to shoulder with me on a daily basis, the doctor can still be found lurking at an indiscreet distance. "Bugger off," I want to yell. "Can't you see I'm eating an apple?" But the doctor merely laughs maniacally while whipping his stethoscope around his head like a cowboy with a lasso. So much for Mother Nature's medicine cabinet. At least eating apples is enjoyable, which can't be said for drinking those revolting and equally worthless kale smoothies that the New Wives' Tales suggest.

In my imagination, I saw doctors reacting to apples much as vampires react to garlic: a hiss and a snarl and then cowering away back into the shadows of the examination room. But I now know this was pure fantasy. I don't know, maybe I should be eating two apples every day? I could even mix it up: my regular Gala and a Golden Russet, or even 'go-green' with a Granny Smith. I could wash both apples down with a pint of cider, cold in the morning and hot-mulled at night. And since I'm upping the ante, why not add a nice slice of apple pie every evening to my regime? You are what you eat, they say, and I'm prepared to turn myself into a human orchard if it means I can avoid my annual check-up at the clinic.

Boo Hoo

According to the weather forecast, this year's Hallowe'en festivities will be haunted by the specter of relentless rain. Flickering flames in Jack O' Lanterns will surely be extinguished by the torrential downpour and just imagine all those damp phantoms and sodden wraiths floating around, dripping water all down the whispering gallery and leaving puddles beneath their portraits in the study. Spooks will need to hang their shrouds up to dry after stalking the streets and ghostly revenants should wipe their feet before crossing any thresholds. It's going to be a dank and swampy night for those returning from the grave; as if the dead don't smell bad enough already! 

I suppose we should feel sorry for them rather than afraid. After all, this is their one big night of the year and it will be a total washout. Skeletons must feel it the most, being bereft of protection against the elements. I mean, they are literally going to get soaked through. Dry as a bone? Not tonight, skull face. If they come trick or treating I'd be inclined to hand out umbrellas and sou'westers instead of candy or whatever it is the spirits actually want. Of course, they probably don't know themselves which is why they're always so gloomy and point portentously at nothing in particular. The rain is obviously only going to make their mood worse but I hope you have a happy Hallowe'en nonetheless.

Shopping Mallowe'en

Hallowe'en is here once again: a pumpkin-shaped cauldron crammed with monster masks and vampire dentures, luminescent skeletons and styrofoam tombstones, stage blood, too much chocolate, and enough fake cobweb string to weave a web so large it could ensnare an automobile. Free shipping via broomstick or expedited bat on all orders over a hundred bucks. As usual, this year my costume is an easy to assemble 'sexy' killjoy frown and grimace. 

The observance of All Hallows Eve, of course, was transformed into the modern holiday of Hallowe'en many years ago, so mine is an ancient gripe. But I often wonder when the consumerists will exploit currently under-commercialized observances like Ash Wednesday with collectible stickers for your forehead, palm leaf theme home decor, and confessional trading cards. Perhaps they already have and such items are sitting in a warehouse somewhere awaiting hype and promotion by Instagram influencers and a TV show tie-in. Then, just after New Year's Eve, we can complain about the local stores, "They've put the Lent stuff out already and it's not even St. Valentine's Day yet."

Crypto Currency

One of my pipe-dreams is to issue commemorative gold coins of myself. The obverse will feature my head in smug profile winking; the reverse an image of the Pied Piper with his rats. Around the coin are engraved the immortal words "This Coin's Value Is Frequently Debased," rendered in Latin and so small as to be unreadable without a microscope. On the other side is stamped the bad advice, "Make Important Decisions By Flipping." The coin will cost twenty bucks to special order, not including postage and packing, although I'll shave the gold down to a mere eight or nine bucks' worth before I actually release it into circulation Alas, I've yet to be involved in an event worth commemorating so the world of numismatics is short one very shiny but very fraudulent collectible.

Not that there would be much demand for my coin anyway. Most people do not carry cash around with them these days, preferring the convenience of plastic debit cards, and I'm sad to say this modern consumerist trend is true of me also. But I have a good reason for dispensing with dollar bills and small change. For a nominal fee, my bank allowed its customers to decorate their debit cards with a design of our own choosing. I suppose many family portraits or favorite works of art were sent to the bank's printers, but I uploaded an image of a plain blue background emblazoned with the caution "Are You Sure You Want To Buy This?" in bold yellow letters. If nothing else it's a conversation piece at cash registers and other points of purchase and makes me happy until I can finally mint my coin.

Distressing Tresses

One afternoon in October of 1987, on my first day of work at a real job, Sarah the receptionist went home in a flood of tears. It was nothing to do with me, thank God.

Apparently, there had been a mishap at a hairdressing salon during her lunch hour; either her hair color was now a displeasing shade or her permanent wave was too frizzy or perhaps not frizzy enough. The exact circumstances surrounding her distress were not explained to anyone, especially new members of staff like myself. Suffice it to say that Sarah could no longer answer the phone with such a disastrous hairstyle. An executive assistant sporting a low-maintenance pixie-cut took her place for the rest of the day.

As this was my first day of work, I callowly assumed all this commotion to be standard procedure in any place of business. Hence, should I require time off, I could simply bribe some complicit barber to give me a ridiculously lopsided pompadour. 'Go home and let that mess grow out,' I imagined my boss saying, 'and we'll see you back here in a month or so.'

But, alas, when I actually did get my hair highlighted in a foolish-looking eighties fashion, my boss forced me to remain at work suffering the taunts and mockery of my more conventionally coiffed colleagues. How I wished I'd settled for a simple military buzz cut instead of trying to be the office David Bowie. I took to wearing a baseball cap at my desk to deflect the wisecracks. 

Nor was I granted a leave of absence when I detected my first bald patch a few years later. By then, of course, I fully understood that Sarah going home because of an upsetting experience at the salon was the exception rather than the rule. Our workplace was no nurturing cradle of compassion when it came to matters of personal embarrassment. In fact, it was a dark, Satanic mill where the best you could expect was graphic images of your humiliation pinned to the company noticeboard for weeks. 

I saw Sarah again recently at my local pharmacy. She was buying a box of tissues and a bottle of hair dye. I had no doubt the two items were related: the tissues a precaution should the new hair color prove unattractive once again. And would she call-in sick to wherever she worked these days if that was the case? The leopard cannot change its spots despite the woman unwisely deciding to change her hair color yet again.

My own basket contained a month's supply of rejuvenating scalp tonic and a jar of Bay Rhum beard oil. I'm pretty sure Sarah squinted at me but couldn't put a name to the furry face beneath the gleaming pate. At any rate, she left the store without saying hello.

Economy Class

The airport concourse is a parade of travelers clad in flips flops, sweatpants, fleeces, and plushy neck pillows that call to mind a resort-wear version of an Elizabethan ruff; so much synthetic fabric that you might imagine the airplanes on the runway are borne aloft by static electricity.

At the departure gate, a young woman in full-body pink polyester is sprawled across three seats, encircled by her personal technology devices, a fast-food feast, and a mountain-range of carry-on luggage. She might as well be at home curled up on her own couch for all she cares about her surroundings. I could never feel comfortable being as comfortable as she so evidently is. In fact, I'm only that relaxed when asleep in my bed at night, and even then I'm probably having an anxiety dream. 

Later, in Row Z of the plane, I'm squashed in beside a pungent man who's obviously spent a five-hour layover in the airport bar. He's dressed in a suit and tie but smells like he bathed in a barrel of beer then toweled himself dry with a pack of Doritos. Clearly my lifetime ambition should have been to buy a private jet. Alas, it's too late for that now.

You Can't Win

Many years ago, I was a gung-ho type of guy. "Geronimo!" I would eagerly leap forward to grasp the nettle at all hours of the day or night. Perhaps even a "Banzai!" escaped my lips every now and again when in an especially uncompromising mood. Then one day I landed awkwardly and hurt my knee. It was the demanding specter middle-age suggesting Tarzan relinquish his jungle vine forthwith; that the Kamikaze should surrender his headband. 

So I took the specter's advice and became a take a step back sort of person. Well, if I'm being honest, really a two or three steps back after grumpily waving his cane at whatever is in front of him sort of person. I call it curmudgeonly caution. Never send to know about whom the cranky old man is muttering; he mutters about thee. 

I don't recall my former gung-ho approach to life getting me into trouble. Mine has always been a curious nature and even in my most impulsively hotheaded moments I was disinclined to shoot first and ask questions later, preferring a prior interrogation before the commencement of gun firing. Sure, my questions were considered peremptory and I usually would still shoot after asking them, but at least I took the opportunity to get to know, however briefly, the target I was shooting at.

I still enjoy asking questions. Alas, taking a step back when asking questions means it's harder for my respondent to hear me because I'm further away. And if I decide to shoot when I've finished my debriefing I'm undoubtedly going to miss because the target is harder to see. My eyesight isn't as good as it was, in addition to those other aforementioned physical frailties that confound my aim. Oh, how I wish I taken a step back before listening to that damn demanding specter of middle-age. But I was too gung-ho back then.

Status Bar

These days, old enough to often find myself forced to follow instructions from clients young enough to be my children, I sometimes think I'm suffering from the workplace equivalent of clinical senility.

Behold the youthful movers and shakers of business dressed in sneakers, skinny jeans and superhero t-shirts. Visiting their open-plan glass-fronted offices in my gray flannel suit and old fashioned power tie, I feel as though I might just as well be wandering aimlessly around a sanatorium corridor in my dressing-gown and slippers.

In meetings, they reserve a rocking chair for me. An executive assistant drapes a blanket over my knees as I demand the Powerpoint volume be increased. On video conference calls, my young colleagues wear Bluetooth enabled earbuds while I wave my ear trumpet in the air, squinting at the screen. Here I am, an old man in a fourth-quarter, being lectured to by a boy, waiting for budget updates. Did T. S. Eliot feel so obsolete when he was aging in his bank?

Back in my grey cubicle, this ancient wheezing desktop computer chugs along in imitation of the little engine that could, dragging a spreadsheet installation over a mountain of processing hardware. Then it stops. Just taking a breather or did I forget to replenish the printer paper? The only thing around here with less memory than my computer is me.

Meanwhile, the youngsters have all decamped to Starbucks with those new-fangled lightweight laptops, working from their home away from home. I clock off at five when they are relocating to that trendy bar across the street, there to finish assignments between martinis and restructure modules after ordering appetizers, still working into the wee hours.

Get a life, I want to tell them, and enjoy it while you still can. Alas, nobody listens to someone old enough to remember when people worked to live instead of living to work. Perhaps that's why I'm always passed over for promotion. "When will he retire?" I can hear them mutter when they think I am asleep.

Who Is The Working Stiff?

"Good morning," says the grubby, unkempt man pushing a corroded shopping cart strung with greasy bags and other bric-a-brac. It's the traditional greeting of one commuter to another but this guy is heading for my curbside recycling bin rather than any high-rise office. He's looking for deposit-stamped cans and bottles to redeem for money at a nearby collection center, or even a faraway collection center; I'm sure he'd tramp a great distance to claim a few coins, enough to buy whatever it is he requires to keep going.

"Good morning," says the grubby, unkempt man, and he says it so lightly; as if he's just another nine-to-fiver with Powerpoints to present, reports to prepare, deadlines to meet, and not some unfortunate rat who got left behind in the rat race. Indeed, he bends over my bin like an especially diligent clerk searching for an important folder in an overflowing filing cabinet, so intent on his task I'm surprised he's not wearing an old-fashioned accountant's green eyeshade. Mind you, he can't be very good at his job if it's taking him so long to find my two cans of beer and a single wine bottle nestling amid the loose paper and crushed cardboard box. Perhaps such a demonstration of inefficiency is why he found himself cast out into the street in the first place: a non-recyclable human rummaging through recyclable stuff. 

"Good morning," says the grubby, unkempt man to my neighbor striding towards his car, who merely glances back in the man's direction and grunts. And that is the grubby unkempt man's tragedy, of course: the desire to be seen and acknowledged, the effort taken to play even the smallest role in daily life, only to fail at being normal yet again and be dismissed by a grunt. Meanwhile, after four years of living side by side, my neighbor and I have never exchanged a greeting of any kind except to occasionally nod silently in each other's direction, so what exactly is normal? Chastened by this unhappy thought, I sheepishly walk back to my recycling bin and return the grubby, unkempt man's good morning salutation. But he's too engrossed in his task and I don't think he hears me.

Sandy Cove Nuptials And Their Discontents

Invited to a beach wedding, I'm told that male guests are requested to wear Hawaiian shirts, apparently a surfer dude's idea of black-tie. Personally, I'd prefer to attend both the ceremony and reception in a rubber wet suit with snorkel and flippers, but I don't want to ruin the happy couple's special day by looking like a police diver searching for the drowned body of Uncle Jim who will probably fall into the sea after one too many Mai Tais. So I guess Hawaiian shirt it will be, albeit the cheapest and plainest design available for purchase.

There is a reasonably acceptable specimen at my local department store, mostly solid blue with a single pineapple embroidered over the right chest. It's not exactly Hawaiian but it's Kon Tiki enough for me. Alas, no S sizes can be found on the rack, just M, L, XL, XXL, 2XXL, and one so huge it presumably doubles as an emergency canopy to shade your entire family from the tropical sun. This means sending the stooping, apathetic sales associate on a stockroom search for the size small I need.

But it turns out there's no need for such an expedition. The store doesn't sell small sizes in anything, the sales associate tells me with a smirk. Most men refuse to consider themselves as small or short, he explains, so they usually size up to at least size medium. It's as if they believe buying larger clothing will magically make them bigger men, no matter how ill-fitting and inelegant their actual reflection in the changing room mirror. Apparently, the tiny size tag sewn into a seam can transform you from Pipsqueak Pete into Superman. Welcome to the irrational gymnasium of the inadequate male mind. Apparently, everything Gloria Steinem says is true.

No wonder there is so much macho rage in the world if men can't even accept they're just a few inches shy of average height. I would describe them as knuckle draggers but since their hands have disappeared inside too-long shirt sleeves it's their oversized cuffs that are scraping the floor. The sales assistant wasn't at all apologetic about his inability to help me. In fact, he clearly thought me weird for not caring I was diminutive, miniature, pintsized, or whatever his favorite disparaging term for short people happened to be.

In the end, I ordered a similar shirt in my size from the Internet with zero human contact besides waiting for the mailman to deliver the package. Of course, I looked conspicuous at the wedding, neat and trim in my size small, discretely pineappled attire. My fellow guests billowed around the beach in voluminous and extravagantly patterned Hawaiian shirts almost hanging down to their knees. Any casual observer might assume they'd wandered into the annual pageant of some Polynesian appreciation society. Pacific burlesque staged on an Atlantic shore for puzzling reasons.

I was certainly puzzled by the Hawaiian motif: the aforementioned de rigueur shirts for men; the fruity rum signature cocktails; the enormous plastic palm tree that threatened to topple over at any moment and crush the flower girls; and, God forbid, the bridesmaids' fluorescent Hula girl costumes. Neither the bride nor groom had ever been west of Pennsylvania as far as I was aware. It was like a destination wedding in the wrong location. At least the happy couple seemed happy. That's what counts on these occasions, after all. 

Anastasia's Armoire And Its Discontents

The homeless man had draped himself across a shaded park bench before falling into a seemingly imperturbable stupor. His meagre possessions, stuffed in plastic carrier bags emblazoned with the logos of a consumer society from which he was excluded, were carefully arranged around his prostrate form like the makeshift crenellations of some nomadic gnome's foul-smelling fortress. God knows what these bags contained: a few itchy blankets perhaps; scavenged spare clothing; that day's harvest of bottles and cans; maybe even one or two relics of his former life. Nothing anyone else would ever care about. But what interested me was the silver and pink plastic bag nestling between the Nordstrom Rack and Target bags. It was from Anastasia's Armoire.

Anastasia's Armoire is what my friend Jane calls her 'alternative atelier,' where she sells bespoke gothic frocks and corsets to customers desirous of impersonating Dracula's Daughter. At least, that's the vision the Anastasia Armoire brand evokes in my mind. Jane would no doubt prefer a less campy point of reference for her creations, but I call them as I see them, despite the reproachful punches on the arm I get. Neither of us would expect, however, to see a Anastasia's Armoire boutique shopping bag recycled as an itinerant's traveling pack; a disintegrating carry-all for the collected works of a disintegrating life. 

Sure, it's really just a plastic shopping bag, but it's silver and pink and (considering Anastasia's Armoire's infrequent commissions) exceedingly rare. The sort of boutique shopping bag customers keep in their closets because it's too nice to throw away. It was definitely incongruous amongst the typical workaday shopping bags of box stores and retail chains, like a fairytale palace in the middle of a slum or a princess trapped in an ogre's dungeon. I even contemplated rescuing the poor thing from the greasy clutches of its abductor, surely a fate worse than death for any aristocrat, even one with reinforced handles and a flashy printed logo. I'd be doing Jane a favor if I did. She certainly wouldn't want her 'alternative atelier' known as the official bag supplier to the city's bums and bag ladies. 

But in the end of course I left the homeless man in possession of his prize. Carting around his few treasures in an Anastasia's Armoire boutique shopping bag was the closest he came to being someone who can afford a fantasy life, never mind just a plain old normal life. Whatever notions of upward mobility he once entertained became the downward spiraling anxiety of daily survival on the streets. So what was the homeless man dreaming of now while slept, I wondered, for he seemed happy enough in his slumbers. And I thought of Shakespeare's Caliban who upon waking cried to dream again. Dream on, then, homeless man on your bench, dream of pursuing Dracula's daughter through the Mall of America in search of her shopping bag-shaped coffin.

Is Anybody There?

In the summer of 1989, on a remarkably stormy day in early August, I attended my first an only seance. Spasms of thunder and lightning wracked the sky all afternoon with periods of torrential rain. An ideal atmosphere for paranormal activity but not great for walking from the nearest subway if you've forgotten your umbrella.

To make matters worse, it was absolutely freezing in the seance room. Apparently, the spirits of the dead demand their air conditioning be set on high, as if the grave isn't proverbially cold enough already. In fact, it was so cold in the seance room that I worried I might catch my death and join them on the Other Side before the first candle had been lit. 

The medium was named Madame Susan but introduced herself as plain Susan. I insisted on adding 'Madame' to feel as though I was getting my money's worth. The full arcane and esoteric effect, as it were. "Susan" didn't sound sufficiently eldritch or appropriately European enough as a name for a person disgorging ectoplasm and interrogating discarnate entities. 

Besides myself and Madame Susan, there were five other sitters, exclusively female, ranging in age from middle-age to elderly. They all regarded the lone male twentysomething suspiciously, convinced I was there purely to turn the lights on mid-session and dramatically expose paranormal fraud by dragging a sheet-wearing actor out from beneath the table.

And much as I would enjoy participating in such a spectacle, the truth was I hoped to hear from my recently deceased uncle Chip. When he was alive there was always talk that I would inherit his souvenir silver platter commemorating the 1855 unveiling of the Smutney Monument, a simple stone obelisk originally designed to honor the town's first mayor but which quickly became a notorious phallic pick-up and drop-off point for ladies of the night and their patrons.

Suffice it say, the platter was not found amongst uncle Chip's effects when the family was sorting through his possessions. Where could this coveted object be? Nobody knew and nobody cared. Be content with his Omega watch, I was told, it's very valuable and that stupid Smutney Monument platter really isn't as funny as you think it is. Which is why I was forced to resort to disturbing Uncle Chip's eternal sleep via the medium of a spirit medium. Go to the source, I decided, even if the source has been reduced to ashes and poured into the second-cheapest urn available.

Actually, I was surprised and somewhat annoyed that Uncle Chip's restless spirit had not tried to contact me already. Surely he would be doomed to haunt his own house until the Smutney Monument platter was united with its rightful recipient. His phantom could easily arise from a cold mist in the basement storage area, pointing portentously towards where the platter was concealed. Then Uncle Chip could return to playing in the fields of the Lord or however else he planned to spend eternity. It wasn't hard. 

Alas, it looked as though I was going to have to do all the leg work myself, including forking over sixty bucks for an hour with Madame Susan and her beldame acolytes. We sat in a circle and held hands while the lights were extinguished and Madame Susan summoned her spirit guide, whom she claimed was an ancient Cherokee called Singing Crow. To my ear, when his ponderous voice materialized in Madame Susan's throat, Singing Crow's vocal intonation seemed more reminiscent of a Belching Owl or a Hiccuping Parrot than a warrior wraith from the happy hunting grounds.

'There is a spirit named Alec who wishes to speak,' Singing Crow announced as solemnly as his ethereal croaking would allow. 'Does anyone here know an Alec?' 

'Alec was my brother,' the woman to my left answered, then proceeded to furnish the circle with a lengthy biography of Alec and an even lengthier description of Alec's final days. If Alec wanted to speak he was going to have a hard time getting a word in edgeways with his chatterbox sister. I wondered what Alec's message from the spirit realm was: 'Stop talking,' probably.

When Alec finally did get a chance to speak, I was reminded of Jacob Marley as performed by an adenoidal teenager in a high school production of A Christmas Carol. Alec confessed he'd been too keen on life's material rewards, neglecting his immortal soul and other intangibles. He didn't want his sister to make the same mistake. She replied by offering to itemize what threatened to be an exhaustive inventory of her New Age credentials until Singing Crow wisely cut her short.

Uncle Chip was the last spirit to speak. Very typical of him to keep people waiting. That's how I knew it really was really Uncle Chip, despite the voice issuing forth from Madame Susan sounding more like my Great Aunt Daphne choking on a mouthful of Hot Tamales. Also typical of him, he was feeling very sorry for himself. Apparently, his immortal soul was trapped in Limbo, or perhaps Purgatory, or just drifting around lost in the ether. He wasn't quite sure where he was, which was yet another standard Uncle Chip idiosyncrasy.

This anxious inability to define his own current location trumped any interest Uncle Chip might have in helping me find the Smutney Monument platter. Every time I broached the subject he selfishly ignored me, responding instead with more tedious observations about his equivocal existence in the limitless void.

'Susan grows weary and the curtain between this world and the next begins to close,' said Singing Crow with evident relief. 'There are profound secrets of the afterlife that can never be divulged,' he continued rather sanctimoniously. 'Including the whereabouts of certain silver platters of no importance, and so we must accept that much must remain occulted in the shifting shadows of the astral plane, especially if it is something as banal as a foolish souvenir that only frivolous young men care about.' Then his presence faded with a puff of ectoplasm and Madame Susan slowly stirred from her trance into wakefulness. 

The seance was over and I wasn't satisfied. Sure, I had seen incontrovertible proof of the existence of life after death but if Sunday School lessons are anything to go by I'd more or less taken that as a given anyway. So what was the point of all this sitting in a circle and holding hands clairvoyant business? What was the point of contacting a ghostly revenant if it couldn't even answer a simple question about missing silver platters? And why do ghostly revenants make the effort of crossing over from great beyond if they're only going to complain about their present circumstances? They could at least impart a smidgen of ancient wisdom and timeless truth to the still living, even if it's completely inscrutable or in the form of a Sphinx's riddle.

But no. It's moaning and groaning in the dark for an hour with a woman called Susan and her snooty Cherokee compere. Furthermore, I could easily have purchased my very own Smutney Monument souvenir silver platter using the money I'd wasted attending the seance to locate Uncle Chip's. And I'd still have a few bucks left over to buy a bottle of polish to give it a good clean.

Which is why I decided from that point forward I to let the dead bury the dead, as the saying goes. No longer would I seek to peer beyond the veil of death to divine the secrets of the angels, for I had finally learnt the meaning of The Ineffable: it's simply demiurge and man having a discussion but never listening to what the other is saying. So what's the point?

Summer Sales

Waiting in a boutique while women browse the blouses or choose between very similar looking shoes, I am slumped on a purple ottoman, conspicuously bored, listening to the scrape and clatter of clothes hangars on the sale rack as last season's dresses and skirts are summarily dismissed. So much for the life's work of hunchbacked child laborers.

We have been here for hours without end but there is always another corner of the store to explore. It's like traipsing around C. S. Lewis' wardrobe with price tags attached to the contents. When the last piece of fabric has been examined we will suddenly stumble out into snowy Narnia where the White Witch is modeling the latest in puffer jackets.

Casting a cold eye around this boutique, I see so many unwanted clothes. Nothing fits correctly anymore; there is too much branding; polyester is back; the pattern is irregular; the stitching is poor and the seams are not straight. The hymn sheet of the cheap and disposable is an anti-Hallelujah chorus of complaints. 

As with everything else in the world, it seems the center also cannot hold when it comes to fashion. A little black dress costs either a thousand dollars or sixty bucks, available in satin or polyester, designed for either Mata Hari or a nun. There is nothing in between so take your pick. Even a simple pair of sandals can be over-complicated nowadays: your choice of a single strap or some sort of Roman legionnaire's lattice-work legging thing that buckles around the thigh. 

Eventually, we leave the store having bought, typically, a new bag. The bag makers can always be counted upon to provide just enough of a difference from a bag already owned that the bag becomes a must-have. But I'm not bothered about that. I'm just happy to escape the purple ottoman and the automaton shop assistants with their FBI head-sets.

Casting of the Prunes

The frequent casting of condemnatory stones is my great failing. Not just the first sinner to cast such stones, I'm usually the last also, and I'll be searching for yet more stones to cast when all the other Pharisees have long gone home. Jesus would be disappointed but he must know my targets don't feel the pain of cast stones anymore. They don't notice the persistent hail of judgmental missiles bouncing harmlessly off their bodies. Their thick-skinned foreheads are impervious to being bloodied by rocks of criticism thrown by the likes of me.

Years ago, I remember a prominent politician's vociferous response to my impertinent application of a Mark Twain quotation to himself. Nowadays I doubt any congressperson would acknowledge my existence, never mind reply in kind. And I don't blame them. No sane person would voluntarily enter the maelstrom of brickbats being tossed back and forth by anonymous maniacs on Twitter, Facebook, or whatever cranky, frazzled area of the Internet they inhabit. I live on this blog, which is obviously the lowest form of opinion, the most decrepit corner of the web from which electronic stones are cast, so my pronouncements are the least noteworthy.

But I'm not bothered about that. What concerns me is losing all sense of whimsicality and just being bad-tempered. Scrolling down this page to previous posts from ye olde blog entries from bygone times, I detect traces of whimsy and inspired humor when my herd of brain cells grazed in left field. God forbid that picturesque meadow has become barren and brown, a blasted heath where only ineffectual stones are scattered, where the Mount of Olives, Ozymandias' antique land, and my personal Waterloo all merge into one unreadable map reference. Meanwhile, I'm casting this stone at myself, a large prune pit, and "ouch" that hurts.

A Brief Rant

No matter how incontrovertible the fact or indisputable the evidence, no matter how indivisible the number or how finite the sum, and especially no matter how plain the nose on the front of his face, that implacable, pigheaded egoist who thinks he knows better than consensus reality will always be with us. 

In conversation, he refers to himself as a contrarian and everyone else as "the sheeple." At our office, declaring his methods are superior to standard practice, he browbeats management into rerouting tried and tested workflows into his own convoluted and confusing system, which takes much longer to complete and creates extra tasks for all his colleagues.

What is the root cause of the stubborn egoist's self-perpetuating, misguided self-confidence? Time and time again he is proven wrong in everything he says and does. But the lesson is never learned. In fact, he dumps objective reality on its head once more and insists he was right all along, despite a Bible-size paper trail cataloging his errors and illustrating his ignorance. His is a profoundly illogical application of (black) magical thinking. He is Socrates in negative: the anti-Aristotle; Plato forever exiled to the darkest crevice of his inescapable cave.

If such an irritating person may be likened to a pain-in-the-ass, then he is a particularly persistent ache that has made its camp at the base of your spine and is striking out to all parts of the body. He will become a human migraine; the personification of chronic constipation; every agonizing affliction that manifests itself as a spasm or a twinge in your flesh and bones. And there is no remedy for the torment his presence brings.

Vive La Revolution

Today is July 4th in the post-Julian calendar that we hang from our office walls, usually illustrated with photographs of places we'd much rather be. It's a public holiday, obviously, but the grim ghost of work still haunts your BBQ, manifesting as a cold, damp spot near the grill, then clanking its chains around the punch bowl and walking clean through the volleyball net. Sometimes it appears as a screaming skull in the sky during the fireworks, or the headless horseman with his head under one arm and a spectral manila folder under the other, galloping alongside the holiday traffic. No matter how much beer you drink, we can't escape this revenant of business-requiring-urgent attention, arising from the clammy tomb of last week's conference call. Jacob Marley in a pin-stripe suit materializing as a text on your phone instead of on a doorknocker. The restless spirit of job insecurity doomed to walk the Earth forever in search of the life it lost in life.

Which is why I like to think of July 4th in terms of the Revolutionary French calendar, where today happens to be quintidi 15 Messidor in the year of the Republic CCXXVII, celebrating the chamois, by which I assume they mean the shaggy goat and not the car cleaning cloth. Such a datebook trick doesn't entirely exorcise the ghost of work, of course, but it does help a little to think of tomorrow as sextidi 16 Messidor, celebrating tobacco, rather than just another crappy work day. My technique is not unpatriotic, either, because where would we be without the revolutionary French? Probably still hosting tea parties to honor the Queen's birthday on June 8th, with scones instead of hot dogs and hamburgers.

Penny Farthing For Your Thoughts

Apparently ignorant of the principles of kinetic energy and rudimentary mechanics, many adults fail to ride a bicycle efficiently. They pedal furiously along level surfaces in low gear. Their legs revolving at rates ten times faster than the wheels of the bike are actually moving. I'm reminded of the whirlwind feet of cartoon characters scrambling in thin air when the ground beneath them suddenly disappears. If it's possible to careen in slow-motion, that's how these floundering cyclists propel themselves forward, and I'm forced to cross my fingers they don't crash land like Daffy Duck always does. 

Of course, metaphorically speaking, wobbling uncertainly down the busy road is how most of us move through our daily lives. How foolish and decrepit we must appear to those A-type personality high-achievers on the fast track to success. 'Eat my dust loser!' You can see it in their eyes as they rush past. They are the winners who take all, including your pension. Whatever happened to the Tortoise and the Hare? Well, these days the tortoise gets kicked to the sidelines as soon as the starting pistol cracks, disqualified by his own prudence and sagacity. Don't think, just do it. There's no time for circumspection. And so we run as fast as we can in whatever direction we're told, sweating and grunting, trying to keep up with the pack, some of us capable of going through the gears, others not.

Poetic License

Reading an essay by Eliot Weinberger, I learn of numerous Plutarchs, (Plutarchi? Polyplutarch? Call this apparently Hydra-headed scribe from antiquity what you will), whereas before I'd only been aware of one.

There is the rather imperious-looking Greek Plutarch, who wrote engaging biographies of famous men and other, slightly less interesting books such as obviously tedious Moralia.

Then there is the faceless, so-called Pseudo Plutarch, author of many works originally attributed to the genuine Plutarch but later identified as the fabrications of mostly anonymous authors over a span of many centuries.

For some reason, probably innate facetiousness, I prefer the works of the Pseudo Plutarchs to those of the genuine Plutarch. On Rivers, for instance, and even Consolation to Apollonius, sound much more like my kind of read than the aforementioned Moralia, no matter how intellectually or artistically inferior the contents might be regarded after authorial reassignment.

In fact, I wish there was an equally prolific Pseudo Demosthenes, Pseudo Xenophon, Pseudo Hesiod, Pseudo Pliny, both elder and younger, Pseudo Catullus, Pseudo Suetonius, a Pseudo Cicero would be really nice, and so on.

There is a Polybius, of course, but alas I don't think his name means that there are many Biuses.

Anyway, I think I'm going to spend the next few days forging a text called On Actually Having Written What Scholars Don't Think I Did by Pseudo Juvenal. It's about time the Loeb Classical Library published some new material, don't you think?

Solstice Reflections

Consulting my calendar, I see it is the Summer Solstice. But looking out of my window at the weather, I'm surprised it's not the middle of March. Helios has apparently decided to leave his chariot at home, preferring to trudge across the sky instead, kicking the clouds around disconsolately as he goes. If Iracus had chosen an overcast, chilly day like today to fly close to the sun, the wax in his wings would not have melted, his cautionary tale would be unknown to mythology, and W. H. Auden's Collected Verse would be one poem shorter. It is the longest day and I am making it seem even longer with my idle, gloomy observations. So come on Helios, pick up the pace. Let's get that sun moving. I'll race you to Cocktail Hour along the Tropic Cancer. Loser has to buy the winner a Dark 'N' Stormy if the grey skies haven't turned blue.

The Team Meeting

Today, my colleagues and I are told to "keep the momentum going" yet also "find time to stop and smell the roses." Dueling directives issued by the same uninspired team leader during a pointless meeting of his apathetic team.

If we were landscape gardeners in the English style, I suppose this contradictory advice might make at least a little sense. But our labors occur exclusively indoors and involve the transportation of digital information from one place to another, an activity in which momentum depends entirely upon the capricious whim of networked computers. There is no odor of any kind, as far as I'm aware, floral or otherwise, unless there should be an electrical fire in the mainframe, and I very much doubt our boss would suggest we "stop and smell the burning data."

So we sit in the meeting wondering what to do. Maintain current workflow velocity, which certainly sounds like an acceptable management-speak agenda; or purchase a rose-scented air freshener for the office from the nearest pharmacy. Obviously, once an air freshener is successfully installed we can keep pace with required momentum while simultaneously inhaling its roseate bouquet. But the initial acquisition of an air freshener from the nearest pharmacy, a chore which will retard daily momentum by about twenty minutes assuming they have one in stock, leaves us in an existential quandary. Do we take the momentum hit now in order to smell roses today, or put off the rose smelling until tomorrow to maintain momentum today? Optimistically, I present a Venn diagram of concentric circles illustrating what I call "Work-Sniff Balance for the 21st century." Fortunately for me, no-one asks why no two circles intersect. 

The meeting ends with the team leader passing out a productivity chart displaying a prominent downward trend, the trajectory not dissimilar to that of a bird hit by a pellet in midflight and plummeting violently to earth. Apparently, our momentum, if we are to keep going in the same direction, will eventually see us fall so far vertically that we'll end up underground. And deep in the bowels of the planet, instead of roses, we can finally stop and smell the rotting core of all dead things.

No-one mentions this, of course. We return to our desks as if we have renewed purpose: momentum-o-meters to be synchronized, purchase orders for air fresheners to be printed. But we must check our emails first. Perhaps some charitable client has thrown us a bone, however meatless it might be, while we were in the team meeting. We can only hope.

Face Value

Resorting to self-aggrandizing contemporary slang in a desperate effort to boost my personal brand, I claim to be "money." Perhaps only a crumpled dollar bill, sure, one that's been forgotten in a back pocket and sent through the wash several times, but still acceptable currency. A good old dependable greenback. Take me to a cocktail bar, wave me in the air, and I'll be sure to catch the bartender's attention.

Yet there exist a few unkind and judgmental cynics surprised I even valued myself as high as a dollar. They were inclined to think of me as about as useful as a Canadian quarter. I was out of circulation as far as they were concerned. At best, their highest estimate of me might have been as a disposable penny inserted into one of those souvenir machines at tourist attractions, which are then stamped with an illegible design or unreadable motto. At least it's something, I suppose, to be a keepsake, albeit a keepsake that nobody really wanted to keep in the first place. 

So this personification of myself as cold hard cash is how I hope to bribe my way to relevancy again. Either under the table or neatly folded and slipped from palm to palm, you know it's taken care of when I'm being counted. Of course, I don't want to push it too hard and end up turning into "filthy lucre," or God forbid "spondulicks," but I do have to put on the big bucks show. Hence, I am announcing that I'm now available as legal tender for all your debts, public and private. Novus ordo seclorum.

Bureau de Change

Much like white light contains all colors, my black wallet contains the multihued currencies of many countries (keepsakes from a lifetime of travel and tourism). But, alas, this variegation of paper money does not comprise a full spectrum of wealth. In fact, it's really just a disappointing array of faded reds and dull greenish tones, fading into an indeterminate shade of brown. Hardly a chromatic spectacle never mind a rainbow promising its pot of gold.

Poor old depreciating crumpled bills. Even the faces of the famous worthies printed on them seem vaguely dissatisfied with their own valuation. For were I to exchange all the assorted euros, pounds sterling, Swiss francs, Carribean dollars, forints, and so on into a single currency, the total amount collected might be enough to buy me a small sandwich and perhaps a beer with which to wash it down.

Still, I enjoy admiring my little cache of cash from time to time. My foreign monies, crumpled though they may be, are far more inspiring than those crude plastic rectangles called credit cards; more romantic than whatever digital payment apps I could download to my phone. Behold the 200 forint note featuring the head of Robert Karoly and weep because the world of bitcoin is here. Oh to fill my pockets with a kaleidoscopic wad of tens and twenties from around the world instead of storing my bank account on a computer; to crack my nest-egg into a rainbow of legal tender rather than keep it in the digital cloud as mindnumbing ones and forgettable zeroes. 

A Pot Calling The Percolator Black.

Returning to the US after two weeks in Italy, the experience of waking up in America once more confronts me with that most pressing of questions: why is our Yankee coffee of such poor quality compared to their Neopolitan brew? An enigma which fittingly requires a great deal of caffeine to unravel. Some of us need a double espresso to address it, at any rate. 

I mean, it's not like American and Italy import beans from different countries: there is no hillside in Campania famous for its superb coffee crop; no state of the union that can only cultivate an inferior bean. The raw material comes from Brazil or Africa and Indonesia and is shipped to us and them. So why am I drinking less flavorful coffee at my local Starbucks than I do at the Gran Caffe Gambrinus?

No doubt the class of vessel into which the espresso is poured matters, as does the ambiance within which it is consumed. And the uniformed Marcello Mastroianni at Gambrinus is a coffee career professional versus the minimum-wage "barista" struggling with the Gaggia at the cafe around the corner from my house. But still. 

I could decant their respective espressos out into two plastic cups, blind taste-test them, and I'd instantly know which was American and which Italian. There is no contest: one is rich, dark and redolent of La Doce Vita; the other is, well, it is what it is, I suppose, and that's the best we can say of the substance. Come on, my fellow Americans, there is no excuse for this self-defeating state of affairs. We surely cannot make America great again without a decent shot of coffee to get us going.

Exchange Rate

When preparing to venture abroad to distant lands where foreign currency is required, I always feel a pang of nostalgia for the good old American Express Traveler's Check, that doughty companion of yesteryear. 

But once this rose-tinted, dewy-eyed moment has passed, I recall with a groan how it was necessary to provide about six forms of identification and a robotically exact signature before the wretched things could finally be exchanged for actual money. I often spent more time in the Bureau de Change trying to cash my traveler's checks than I did exploring the tourist sites I wished to visit.

Thank God for the modern convenience of plastic debit cards and automated banking machines, which make using traveler's checks seem about as practical as offering barrels of damp gunpowder and firewater to confused locals in exchange for information about the nearest Eldorado.

Of course, in these days of falling family incomes and ever-increasing household expenses, the biggest obstacle we face when exchanging our American dollars for Euros is actually having any American dollars to exchange in the first place, especially after we've already paid the extortionate transatlantic airfare to get to Europe, not to mention the price-gouging hotel room rate. 

So after thanking God for plastic debit cards, I pray He will also provide enough extra money in my bank account to get me around Italy, feed me, and even have a little left over to buy souvenirs. I call such supplication The Creator's Traveler's Check, and it's always easy to exchange anywhere at any time if you keep the faith.

The Unconsumed

Styrofoam cup tumbleweed careens through the city, colliding briefly with a carton containing the last quarter of a MacDonald's quarter-pounder, then gambols away again along the gutter where a half-eaten pizza slice is draped over the curbside like a melting Dali clock.

On the sidewalk, fragments of abandoned black bean and rice burrito filling form an intriguing trail for an urban Hansel and Gretl to follow, provided they don't slip on those discarded grease paper wrappers and snap their ankles. 

Come nightfall, you might expect the infamously ravenous city rats to gorge themselves on this improperly-disposed-of, all-you-can-eat buffet of fast food leftovers. But they don't. And neither do the squirrels, skunks or pigeons. Apparently, even the vermin regard such deep-fried and processed garbage as inedible poison to be avoided. It must await removal by the weekly street sweepers, or occasionally a concerned citizen might pick it up cautiously between finger and thumb and toss it in the roadside trash can if there is one.

Meanwhile, the Styrofoam cup tumbleweed rolls on down toward the river, either to drift out to sea or float off upstream to suburbia and beyond. So we bid 'bon voyage' to the non-biodegradable thing. No doubt we shall see it again, bobbing around amid the plastic bottles in the oil slick and silt in the polluted harbor of some distant land.

Ah, this waste is your waste, this waste is my waste, from the Dominoes Pizza to the Burger King, from the Waffle House drive-thru to the Taco Bell, this waste was made for you and me.

Only Happy When It's Seventy Degrees

In the bleak, dark depths of midwinter, I dream of high summer: lazy days beneath a tropical sun, lounging by the ocean, listening to the crash of the surf, slurping a Mai Tai in the shade of the palm trees. It's a paradise of the mind with poolside drinks. Fly me there, oh Helios, on the back of flamingo wings.

Of course, I've forgotten how uncomfortable summer can be. There is no heatstroke or sunburn in my reverie, for instance, no suffocating humidity, no sticky streams of sweat pouring down my spine and definitely no rough grains of beach residue sandpapering my private parts, and I'll suddenly remember that I start to feel sick from all the sugar of more than two Mai Tais.

Then there are all the ugly people: the crowds of camera-toting daytrippers, the hordes of heavyweight tourists, those barbarians at the gates of wherever it is you came to find peace and quiet ... and the sobering realization that I am someone else's barbarian (although I at least don't wear flip flops).

So come mid-August I'll be sick of summer's inconveniences and be dreaming about relaxing by a December fireside with mulled cider, having forgotten all about the intolerable winter weather with its wet snow and freezing winds, itchy woolens and coughs and colds. Fly me there, oh Jack Frost, on the back of robin redbreast wings. 

Which is why I'm only truly content during that short week of seventy-degree weather we used to call Spring, an ever decreasing, finger-countable number of blissfully temperate days sandwiched between Arctic Winter and Equatorial Summer. Unfortunately, I'm not sure what bird's wings would transport me there as Spring is more of a rabbit thing.

Survival of the Cutest

Wild rabbits, those proverbially indiscriminate progenitors, are appearing in ever increasing numbers in my neighborhood. They compete for backyard hideaways with the gymnastic squirrels, vicious turkeys, rodents of various sizes, and the smelled but rarely spotted skunks that already inhabit the area, much to the annoyance of my dog who is driven to distraction by all four-legged interlopers. Soon I'll be able to conduct safaris of the street in a Land Rover decorated with urban jungle camouflage.

It is Spring, of course, the season of bunnies and hares, long-eared hijinks and all things pastel. Nevertheless, it still seems as if I've been cast in a live-action version of Watership Down or become a character in a story by Beatrix Potter.

Born into a superstitious family, I was taught to recite the folk charm "rabbits rabbit rabbits" on the first day of every month to bring good luck into my life. This effortless magic spell has worked for the most part so I've continued reciting rabbits in triplicate to the present day, often afraid that I might forget and incur disaster. Fortunately, this current proliferation of rabbits provides an instant reminder of any such oversight as soon as I step outside.

I suppose I could say the same about the skunks should I neglect to apply deodorant to my underarms, but personal hygiene regimens are much easier to remember than the repetition of amateur enchantments in this modern world of ours. So the skunks can go extinct for all I care. Ditto the rats who recall nothing to mind. And as for the turkeys, well, I'm hardly likely to overlook ordering that club sandwich lunch, am I?

Mail Room Ghost Tour

Our company has no office dress code, so the contemporary grey flannel suit for junior employees is often just a sweatshirt, blue jeans, and sneakers. Tim from Shipping and Receiving, for example, wears a hoodie all the time with the hood obscuring his acne-riddled face.

He shuffles around the cubicles with his burden of packages like some gloomy hooded specter doomed to stalk the Earth until he rediscovers the reason he was ever alive in the first place. God knows I'd be more than willing to fetch my own mail if we could exorcize his lugubrious presence from the building forever. "The power of Christ compels you ... and no stopping by the water cooler complaining to your fellow malcontents on your way out."

Honestly, Tim being sent to his eternal rest would be the best thing for all concerned. He surely belongs in Happy Valley where he can play videogames and Facebook with other lethargic souls, instead of being chained to this physical world of responsibilities and endeavor and boring stuff like that.

Sacre Bleu

One of the recurring difficulties of learning to speak various romance languages is the complicated issue of gendered words. My new revolutionary language course solves this problem by introducing the concept of Transgendered Vocabulary For Tourists (TVFT). It is available as a conveniently pocket-sized and lightweight paperback you can bring on your vacations to foreign parts.

For example, when you are dining at a Parisian restaurant and the sanctimonious, reactionary French waiter smugly corrects your use of the masculine when the feminine was required, my handy woke phrasebook suggests many outraged en français insults you can hurl at the bigoted, right-wing garcon. 

Also, listed in most European languages in non-binary format is the protestation "Boycott This Anti-LGBT Restaurant," which you can copy out and post in the lobby of your hotel for other guests to read, regardless of their nationality (or gender). 

Obviously, I suppose you could just carefully employ the gender-neutral French or Italian words for 'they' or 'them'' instead of 'he' or 'she,' but where is the fun in that when you can be snarling reprovingly ad self-righteously with colorful epithets from my phrasebook? Besides, I wouldn't actually sell any books if my fellow travelers were so cautious and considerate with their language choices when abroad. And my sales are the important thing in all this, after all.

A Bridge Between Worlds

There is a poor soul who barely subsists on the banks of the river beneath the Boston University Bridge, sharing his makeshift bivouac with wild geese and water rats like some picaresque village idiot, or a modern-day Saint Francis preaching to his feathered and sadly uncomprehending congregation. Maybe he's a method actor preparing for his role as Troll in a theatrical production of Three Billy Goats Gruff, or an obsessive author researching a dystopian rewrite of The Wind In The Willows: the Piper at the Gates of Dawn become a police siren in the middle of a freezing night.

But he is none of these things, of course; just another have-not sleeping in the mud a short walk away from where well-heeled students pay upwards of seventy thousand dollars per annum to learn about the liberal arts. Their derelict neighbor, this keeper of the collegiate geese, must be praying he won't flunk out of Survival 101.

Walking over the bridge, I always look down to check that his camp is still extant. It always is. Life repeatedly renews his lease on the riverbank. The geese come and go, those students graduate to be replaced by another flock of freshmen, that shopping cart crammed with who knows what may even get swapped out for a less rusty model, but the homeless man remains with us as surely as the river keeps flowing. Yet somehow I forget all about him once I reach the other side of the bridge where the busy rat race traffic suddenly demands my attention. 

St Patrick's Day

Walking past the entrance to the Centering Center on St Patrick's Day, I was forced to check my stride by a distinctly off-centered patron charging through the doors like a snake being expelled from the land with extreme prejudice. So lightning fast and violent was this departure that I was almost sent tumbling into the gutter. Clearly, the Centering Center's numerous meditation classes had failed to ground this particular client in any kind of spiritual connectivity or just plain old peace of mind. In fact, I was reminded of William ButlerYeats' famous lines "Things fall apart; the center cannot hold; mere anarchy is loosed upon the world." 

Yeats, of course, is a popular poet with New Age groups on account of his interest in esoteric mumbo jumbo; the kind where Egyptology and Celtic fairy lore rub shoulders with Pre-Raphaelite fancy dress; Horus traipsing around an English country garden in the rain while Tinkerbell flies face first into a Chinoise birdbath. Imagine the Masons letting their hair down and sneaking a puff from a hookah pipe when the other brothers are not looking.

Despite being the sort of person who refuses to sit on the floor in any circumstances, I have always felt naturally quite centered. I certainly don't need to take Centered Center classes to learn how not to lose my temper. For example, It didn't even occur to me to hurl abuse at the inner child of the multicolored mass of neuroses that nearly knocked me down. I merely suggested in a moderate tone that it demand its money back. Yeats, on the other hand, would probably have cracked the yahoo's oblivious skull with a shillelagh carved with magic symbols. So whatever misfortune befell them inside the Centering Center, the person concerned should consider themselves fortunate they encountered me outside and not the Irish bard when exiting the building at such velocity without due care and attention. 

Joy No Longer Brought

Idly rummaging through the second-rate contents of a local junk store, an astonishing assortment of dusty ephemera stacked on crooked bookshelves and top-heavy antique tables, I came across a plaster cast death mask of some long forgotten Edwardian personality. Could it be Augustus Plumb? Or possibly Sunderland F. Twaddleforth?  Hard to tell in the poorly-lit conditions at the back of the shop. Who is this? I enquired of the gnomic, pince-nezzed proprietor.

It's my great uncle Fortinbras, he replied. Fortinbras died of complications of the spleen, a painful conclusion to life as can clearly be seen from the final configuration of his mouth and eyes. That record of his passing is yours for only twenty-five dollars. I won't accept less or may I suffer the same end as he. I've reduced the price before and the guilt occasioned by that devaluation has haunted me ever since. Death masks exhibiting facial features racked by complications of the spleen are very rare. A collector's item, in fact. 

Really? It looks like he's winking.

Yes. According to family lore, at the moment of expiration, Fortinbras was informing a second cousin of the existence of a second will, hidden midway inside a narrow and very dirty chimney, detailing the second cousin's sole claim to his vast fortune. This information proved to be his idea of a joke. When the second cousin climbed up the chimney in question, at great discomfort to himself, there was nothing to be found except a small parchment scroll with the phrase "Ha Ha" written on the surface in purple ink. 

So who did inherit Fortinbras' fortune?

Nobody. There was no fortune left to claim. That was part of the joke, apparently. Fortinbras had spent it all on cheap baubles and other worthless fripperies, all of which can be found within this store, unwanted and unsold over the countless decades that have followed their original purchase. And I have to say, Fortinbras' shaggy dog story sense of humor and wastefully rampant consumerism are not remembered with any great affection, especially by your present interlocutor who is forced to make living by trying to flog the rotten fruits of such an eccentric lifestyle.

Hmm. Twenty-five bucks for the mask, you say? Let me think about it and maybe I'll be back later. 

Of course, I never did return. In fact, that month's junk budget was spent on a 45rpm vinyl recording of My Favorite Things performed by The Pack Rats, an artifact that no longer brings me joy and which I recently advertised for sale in the classified pages of 'Novelty Song' magazine. Eight dollars including shipping is a bargain for such a slab musical of musical history, even if the sound quality is poor. No takers so far but it's only been in there for a single issue. Someone will want it, I'm sure.

The Clocks Go Forward

After Thursday night's storm, the Tumnus Street sidewalk was reduced to a narrow, icy path between two banks of freshly shoveled snow. Pedestrians were advised to navigate this frozen, rough-hewn avenue at their own risk. Some of them tiptoed along with exaggerated care, arms flung out wide for balance, like nervous children stepping onto an ice rink for the first time in borrowed skates. Others, clad in knee-high, clown-sized winter boots, stomped determinedly across the hazardous terrain, either late for an audience with the White Witch or maybe just wishing to express their contempt for her attendant weather.

Whatever the approach, progress, limited to single-file perambulation, was difficult. At one point, I became stuck behind an especially slow-moving, shapeless mass of hooded puffa coat and pantaloonish ski pants. It waddled down the street, head bowed and shoulders hunched, obviously staring at its stupid phone instead of looking where it was going. How rude. What an annoyance. Summoning my inner Baryshnikov, I scissor leaped past this phone-engrossed obstruction as soon as such a daredevil move was feasible, fortunately managing to land upright with one foot on the sidewalk and the other in a mound of snow.

Once safely ahead, I shook the snow from my shoe and turned around to deliver a withering and accusatory glance to the source of my irritation, only to discover it wasn't staring at its phone after all. The shapeless mass, identity still hidden by a massive hood, was actually obsessively shaking and gazing at a Magic 8 Ball toy, apparently demanding a specific response to a question that the plastic soothsayer repeatedly refused to provide. Whatever clairvoyant mechanism resided within the Magic 8 Ball probably felt the frigid cold as much as the human who consulted it. The runways of the Astral Plane being frozen over, surely celestial wisdom summoned from Beyond is equally as prone to bad weather delays as any Earthly courier service? In fact, the shapeless mass might just as well have resorted to its phone apps instead, requesting a Paypal fortune cookie text from some scam artist psychic hotline based in Las Vegas or Salem, MA.

The ancient Romans famously made their prognostications by studying the flight of birds. Alas, the sky is empty in early March as those telltale birds have not yet returned from the South, so that's no help. The only object that disturbs the clouds above is a passenger jet heading towards the Atlantic, which prompts me to predict I'll be flying to Italy in May: a prediction I know will come true because I've already booked the tickets. Fortune telling is easy if you take matters into your own hands. You don't need a Magic 8 Ball, a crystal one, or even a wizened crone with a deck of Tarot cards. Just declare your intentions loudly and purposefully into the void and you will hear the echoes of tomorrow. Meanwhile, and I use the word advisedly, the Future will immediately be here when we put the clocks forward on Saturday night, time-traveling towards the promised Spring with a simple adjustment of cogs and dials. Hurrah for green shoots, gamboling lambs, and freedom of movement along the sidewalk so that one can walk at one's own pace.

And the shapeless mass will have an answer to its question when the thaw comes also. I know this to be true because I actually stopped to ask what response the Magic 8 Ball displayed that required constant questioning. Its head still hooded and bowed, the shapeless mass silently held the ball out for my inspection like a sullen monk surrendering a sheet of illuminated manuscript ruined by numerous ink blots. Better not tell you now, I read in the black, opaque surface. 'It's waiting for the right moment, which is coming soon.' I told the shapeless mass. 'So put it away for now and concentrate on what's happening in the present. Have faith that truth will be revealed in time.'  Then feeling re-energized by my own wise inscrutability, I hopped over a snow bank and crossed the road to where there was less annoying foot traffic. 

Sonny Twistleton And Me

Sonny Twistleton sounds like he might be a second-rank alto-saxophonist from the fifties, perhaps best remembered for an especially wistful version of Blackberry Winter, or a witty, slightly self-mocking take on They All Laughed, somehow looking out of place anywhere except in mid-century monochrome on a Blue Note album cover.

Alas, the Sonny Twistleton I know cuts a very different figure. He's more of an out-of-tune and out-of-step sousaphone player in the country's most disorganized marching band, except this Sonny is so unfit and overweight he couldn't march very far without gasping for air and needing to stop. You are what you eat, they say, and Sonny's face betrays a sallow, greasy pallor not dissimilar to the appearance of packaged cheese.

His parents must have been overly optimistic when they named him Sonny. Windy or Podgy would be more appropriate. Even that surname, Twistleton, seems too lightweight and sprightly for the clumsy and obese being whom it identifies. It is a blue sky weather forecast sort of name that belies the disappointing gray clouds and oppressive humidity the day actually brings. At least that was my experience of meeting Sonny for the first time at my sister's wedding.

One of my social anxieties is a deep-rooted fear of being marooned for hours amongst a group of people I'd normally regard as a particularly contagious colony of lepers. So I was relieved when I saw "Sonny Twistlerton" printed in flowing script on the place setting that established his presence at our table. 'I'm going to get along with someone called Sonny Twistleton,' I said to my wife. Then he sat down and I immediately heard the ringing bells and began to imagine chunks of my flesh falling off.

For the sake of accuracy and fair warning, Sonny's name card should really have been printed in Comic Sans instead of a flowing script. Maybe even one of those unlettered, symbolic fonts that are composed of bold-face rhomboids and pineapple shapes. As the night progressed he proceeded to spill a glass of red wine all over the white linen tablecloth, demolish a tier of wedding cake with the elbow of his ill-fitting suit, and belch explosively during a sentimental and tender moment in my father's speech. I'm not going to mention his soul-crushing conversation, most of which concerned his many personal problems described in grotesque, too-much-information detail.

I thought I'd never see him again after the wedding but I was wrong. There is a large photograph of me making a toast to the happy couple prominently displayed on my parent's mantelpiece. Just to the left of my dapper frame, the unmistakable face of Sonny Twistleton emerges from the background, bleached by a flashbulb, resembling more the dulled off-white color of a dead fish belly than the packaged cheese of actuality.

Of course, it turned out that "Sonny" printed on his place setting was an egregious typo. It should have been "Sammy," a name that although carrying no unfavorable connotations for me is obviously not as ultra-cool sounding as Sonny. In fact, it is a name that could go either way if you ask me: oaf or fine fellow depending on geographical origin and upbringing. Whatever, suffice it to say, I would not be as surprised by a Sammy Twistleton with the personality of a flatulent baboon as I was by a Sonny Twistleton exhibiting the same alarming mannerisms. 

You might be thinking it a trifle ironic that a Stephen should be such a snob about names. It is, I must admit, quite a common name in all meanings of the word "common." The proximity of anyone happy to be called Steve must surely be considered a viable threat to the stability of Western civilization, as all sane people will agree, no matter what their names are. So I am thankful for the 'ph' in my spelling of Stephen. It adds that touch of class, the hint of quality that the 'v' spelling obliterates. And you know you'd much rather be reading the thoughts of Stephenesque than the ramblings of Stevenesque.

 

Transcendental Medication

Since the ever-increasing price of cholesterol medication nearly gives me a heart attack every time I visit my local pharmacy to pick up the wretched prescription, I've decided to switch to a cheaper pill. It's called Placebo and is manufactured by myself; a drug company I can trust.

I'm not sure what the Placebo's active ingredient will be yet, but I'm thinking it's probably going to be cheese. If so, it's going to be a very large pill indeed, best taken every evening with a glass of wine and a cracker.

Despite its high saturated fat content, regular cheese consumption, roughly an ounce of aged gouda per night, has zero effect on my cholesterol levels. Lots of sugar and carbohydrates do push the needle into the red, but not fat. In fact, I'd almost go as far as to say that my LDL and triglycerides and whatnot have dropped significantly since I started eating cheese again. That is the opposite of what is supposed to happen according to my cardiologist.

Perhaps if I ate even more cheese these results would further improve? But I'm not greedy and I don't want to turn my kitchen into a laboratory. And I've seen Dream Of A Rarebit Fiend and I'm not excited about experiencing that sort of melodramatic night's sleep.

Of course, I'm not advocating that other sufferers from heart disease should embark upon a pseudo-homeopathic cheese regimen like mine. What works for me may not work for them. It might even be a fatal mistake. We are all different, after all, and no doubt Big Dairy is just as insidious as Big Pharma. But we do know that Placebos are effective. Indeed, placebos are probably the most successful medical treatments of all time if clinical test results are anything to go by.

Which is good news because pretty soon Placebos will be the only pills the average person can afford. So start thinking about what yours will be and choose a substance that you enjoy and that lifts your spirits. A healthy body means a healthy mind, as the saying goes, and vice-versa, which is the part they usually forget to mention. Mind over matter will one day be the only alternative to over-the-counter extortion. 

Important note because there are many stupid people in the world. Obviously, I don't take a cheese placebo. I'm being facetious, as is the nature of this blog. I'd advise you to listen to your doctors, no matter how predictable and underwhelming their prognoses often are.

An American Abroad

I speak decent conversational Italian ... just as long as my interlocutors do not speak it back to me. If they do, I'm reduced to blank stares, inaudible gibbering, and wild gesticulation with my hands. In other words (English words, thank God) my Italian can just about be understood but I cannot understand other people's.

Consequently, my definition of "conversational" is clearly open to debate; a debate best conducted in German since only the Germans have a word for my peculiarly double-Dutch approach to defining the meaning of words: Schittenfraze. At least that's what I think the word is. To be honest, I've never heard any Germans actually say "schittenfraze," but then I don't claim to speak conversational German so it's unlikely that I would. 

My conversational Spanish is also poor. In fact, the only Spanish I know is the Spanish for "tilting at windmills," an expression that will get you absolutely nowhere at a hotel, restaurant, sightseeing attraction, or beach. It might get you a loan copy of Don Quixote from Biblioteca Pública Municipal Iván de Vargas in Madrid, but that great novel won't be particularly useful if what you really want is directions to the Prado.

All of which generally leaves me speaking conversational English when I travel abroad. Not only can I be understood, but thanks to the excellent linguistic skill of most Europeans in service positions, I can also understand.

Unless, of course, I happen to say "The towels provided feel like sandpaper," which concierges never understand for some reason, even though the sentence is said so often in European hotels you'd think it would be included in most hospitality phrasebooks.