Goodbye stranger/ it’s been nice
I get phrases from movies and song lyrics stuck in my head. Short blips which correspond to nothing particular. My father was plagued by the same disorder: you hear something on the radio and the next thing you know it’s rattling around the cranium, bouncing around for days on end. My father’s problem was a lot more abstract, primarily intrigued by television commercials and Saturday Night Live skits. Often I would wonder if he was experiencing the onset of some sort of dementia, watching as he would spontaneously bust into song in front of my friends. Said friends would look at each other bemused, as I reeled in horror, often having no idea what he was talking about. Car rides to the mall were marked by the bad humor of my dad and the accompanying jokes which followed. It was a particularly sordid time, perplexed as I was by my dad’s precarious mental state. But here I find myself, impossibly enough, on a chance listen to the classic rock radio station, with Supertramp lyrics trapped in my head. Goodbye Stranger/ it’s been nice/ hope you find your paradise. The words and music cascade around my head, over and over. I whistle this in the office, the falsetto part sticking in your tar trap brain and eradicating all other contents. It seems weird whistling a song about a one night stand in the office, but soon others are plagued by its infectiousness, and everybody begins singing along. Which is unimaginable, even to me.

It is casual Friday, and the common people have brought out their duds, complete with white sneakers and general accessory. I have forgotten about this and am left looking not-so-casual, but that’s OK. My general affectation has already gone the distance of freaking out my coworkers, and I’m sure they have no desire to see my sneakers. But things are OK today: it’s enough to be stoked about the weekend, with its unlimited potential for nightlife and god knows what. The workaday mats you down; days and months accumulate, and your paycheck tells you 900 hours worked, which you look at questionably. Could I really have worked all of those hours, you think, seated at this desk? But all of that fades away. In three more hours the limitations will have been thrust off, and you will be impossibly seated at the blue collar bar. The next-day responsibility will have evaporated, and you will find yourself liberated totally and completely, ushering in the unlimited potential for who knows what. I see a coworker on her way out the door and she stops to talk. “Doing anything good this weekend?” she wants to know. “--Oh, I don’t know,” I say, perplexed by those same limitations being thrust off—the possibility of anything. “I’ll probably just,” I say trailing off, not knowing what to say. She looks back at me derisively, the disappointment of my complete lack of an answer. “Well, see you around,” she says. And then, a few paces away, at the threshold, she turns and tells me, “Goodbye stranger.” To which I can only shake my head. Hope you find your paradise.