We are ready for the floor
My coworker Joy is standing in the parking lot today as I arrive at work, waving enthusiastically to me as I pull into a parking space, her legs beneath a large midsection, like the small appendages of a barnyard chicken supporting too big a body. “Hey!” she calls to me as I get out of my car, “Have you ever heard the song ‘Love Shack’?” Yes, I assure her, I have. That song played like a motherfucker on MTV when I was a kid, creating strange notions of adulthood and the enthusiasm for hanging out in a shack in the woods, which in retrospect is a pretty understandable notion. “Yeah, well they were just playing that song on the radio!” she says to me. “Isn’t it great?” My enthusiasm is lackluster and grim-seeming at this time of the day and all I can do is nod my head in some vague gesture of agreement. “-Oh, you’re too young,” she says to me. “We used to love that song.” I do not doubt it, I tell her. It’s a real rocker.

On the drive in to work this morning I devised a scheme whereby I would construct a cardboard cutout automaton which would take over my position here at the office, unawares of my coworkers, who would continue to have base interactions with who they thought was me throughout the day, while I would conduct more worthwhile acts of business out in the world, hanging around at the pool or who knows where. I run this idea by Joy, who is also in the market for a similar, if not slightly more obtuse, cardboard cutout. “Well, what would you do all day?” she wants to know. “Oh, I don’t know,” I tell her, “Probably hang out at the love shack.” She laughs at this and is quick to remind me that I do not have a girlfriend, thus calling into question the whole nature of the love shack. Is it a mutually exclusive shack? Or do the lyrics imply some type of sexual ribaldry which is currently lost on my coworker? These are the real questions, the ones which require a little more of you.

Look, I tell her, it’s right there in the song lyrics: I’ve got me a car and it seats about twenty/ so come along and bring your jukebox money. She doesn’t really know what I’m talking about, but it seems moot, anyhow. My car seats about four, uncomfortably, and that’s with all of the backseat detritus cleared out. Let’s just hope they have some killer jukebox selections when we get there. Now if I could only figure out the cardboard cutout situation.