Jagged brain slow refrain
My coworkers are talking about reality programming and I’m telling them how I should be the next bachelor on TV. “You totally should,” my coworker Melissa tells me, “You’re way better than that prince guy.” But I just don’t know: the last person to demonstrate some romantic interest in me, I ran away from, literally. I forget the exact dynamics of that conversation, but I remember specifically jogging away. I’m like some kind of inverse bachelor, with a built-in repellant mechanism, intentionally keeping people away, like mosquitoes. Although, there are always people who just end up misinterpreting the signal, the transmission showing up with some entirely different code. Some girl I see at the gym jumps on the treadmill next to me last night. It’s weird to talk to someone after seeing them around for so long. You end up developing all of these theories about them, tangling them up in all types of unfair preconceptions which they invariably break down, for better or worse. “Hey, what’s up?” I ask her. “Oh, nothing,” she tells me. Right…I trail off. And then, despite my wholehearted attempts at articulating what a horrible human being I am, and how I should be swept off the earth in some great cleansing flood, there is the invitation to, among all things, a hockey game. I stammer, looking for an answer which will absolve me, before coming up with something along the lines of, “I’m not really into sports, is the thing.” An answer which, at best, presents with a whole lot of transparency. But the whole thing is, since I’m already on the treadmill, I can’t run away.

Everybody meet Mr. Me Too
I have had a run in with the retarded neighbor. For months I could hear an incomprehensible yelling while washing my face, and I had imagined that the neighbors were harboring some Goonies, Sloth-style monster in there, all barred and caged in their living room. One day, I had imagined, I would come home from work and a mad person would dash by me, followed by a throng of torch-wielding men (an illusion which may just be facilitated by the elephantine man I see stumbling up Washington by the university on my way home from work everyday, an experience which no passerby fully covets. His face appears caved and deformed as he shambles up the road like a drunk person. I have conferred with several other people, and it seems to be the general consensus that it is the most cage-rattling, horror inducing experience one can have, driving down the road in the midday, second only to roadside explosions and ten car pile-ups). My neighbor shows by far more innocuously, making his way up the pathway as I’m coming home one evening. I give him a general nod, never having seen him before. But palpable alarm bells of warning emerge when he sees me going down the alleyway which separates our houses, to retrieve the garbage. It is this solitary act which separates me from a random visitor he has never seen before to the more sketchy-seeming burglar that I appear to be—imagery provided by the emboldened notions of Good and Evil engrained somewhere along the way. “HEY!!” he says in audible arena rock concert volume, “WHO ARE YOU?? WHERE ARE YOU GOING??” I wonder momentarily what will happen if I’m unable to sufficiently explain, but the situation is quickly diffused when I tell him that I live here now, and then receive the spontaneous weather report at top volume. “AT THIS TIME LAST YEAR IT WAS SNOWING!!!” he says. “AND ON EASTER ONE TIME, TOO!!” Hmm, yes, I tell him: maybe it did snow on Easter one year. He’s into the weather. And so we have one thing in common, at least.

It’s all slate grey and snowing today, the way a bad day should be.