I could tell you things about this wallpaper that you’d never ever want to know
Two girls who sit next to me at work have made the acquaintance of one another. They have exchanged information, and have planned a night out somewhere. For some reason, I find this peculiar. Today is only the second day of the job, and from what I could tell they did not know each other previously. That means, in the time span of two days, despite little communication while actually working, which I’m there to observe, that would leave a period of time comprising a little over an hour for these two people to hash out a plan on lunch break, determine that they are compatible in some fashion, and then actually go about the process of hanging out tonight. It could be, though, admittedly, just my horrible social graces at work. I will be the first to admit that my sense of social etiquette probably needs a little polishing. I must have been absent during that class in grade school, and thus it could be that I am the one standing so far outside the proverbial loop in this situation that in my video camera of perception I have it all wrong. But I still find myself hard pressed to imagine a scenario at work where some prospective friend is sitting next to me, and who I make some plan with. I’m not ruling out all possibilities, but it seems unlikely to me, on day two.

One of those church-front billboards I see tonight offers the following words of wisdom: Make friends before you need them. I wonder which passage of the Bible that comes from. It seems like logical advice, however. Because you never do know when you’ll find yourself outside the loop, with no one, nothing.


I am hanging out with McBeans tonight. I’ve had a bad day today, and it is McBeans who elicits in me some modicum of OK-ness. It's probably akin to telling about how great your child is, when to the average onlooker, actually, the dog is a bedraggled and hairy mess, wagging its tail and slobbering all over you. But I love McBeans. If something were to happen to him, if he hustled the first path out of town on a neighborhood jaunt some night, I would be devastated. And this is something that I contemplate often. It debases things when you explicate them. But I realize that McBeans probably has no further recollection of me than as the person who comes to take him out at night, complimenting him with a bone once in a while. And in his bedraggled, tail-wagging enthusiasm for those things, I am probably horrendeously misinterpreting his need for food and strutting around the neighborhood. Something like this. It’s a matter of need-satiation, on behalf of both parties. Something is exchanged, but we call it something else, in disguise. The church sign points this out clearly, and at the same time articulates my shortcomings.

Most of the people I know are out on dates right now, eating and drinking in dimly lit establishments. And it’s funny how you find yourself alienated in your friends’ romances of the moment. I can’t really say I blame them. There are superior forms of satiation, obviously, which the church sign may or may not be alluding to. Whatever the case, I am totally fucked (not fucked), as I have no one. I look in my phone and realize there are people I could probably call up right now, hang out, drink a few beers. But these are peripheral friends, who would probably be weirded out by such an offer. No, it will probably just be the usual, I have decided; I’ll probably just hang out and listen to depressing music again. Drive around town, wonder where things went wrong.

In my head I chided those girls for their arrangement. It seemed so mechanical and weird to me. In those well conscripted plans, I had a glimpse of the bare-naked neediness in people. Human beings seem comprised of one hundred different compartments, and one hundred different needs. And it’s only in the absence of those things that they become staggeringly large and overwhelming, an astonsihing technicolor rainbow of sadness and despair. Clearly, those girls were way smarter than me.