Back to the lair! You see how that sounds? It makes it easy for me to stay late at work until I’m tired and stressed because there is such release in knowing that as soon as you finish this one daunting task, it’s BACK TO THE LAIR!!!

At any rate, it took some kind of Karma of the day to just get me to lie down on the bed early in the day (instead of being the usual night owl) and just take a survey of my surroundings. Most everything here is something I did or created. When you really step back to look at it, it’s a museum. But MUSEUM sounds so boring. I much prefer lair. Several times this evening while drawing, i jumped up to get a pencil of a particular weight or an eraser, or more paper, and I had to search for none of those things. They were right there, just like the weapons of an art ninja. Nah, ninja’s are passé. Besides, my Epic Win character is Thorin the Thoughtful, Swarthy Dwarven Toiler. And I think I had a moment (several) of weakness this week. But lo, I am only fourth level, and there is very, very far to go!

It is useful to have a lair when one seeks adventure.

“Huh?” In the back corner of a booth in the back of a nicely lit, red dive bar, she was just about to put her lips to him. Then he says that.

“Oh god. Not this shit,” she sighs.

“What?”

“I’m not you’re bestest girlfriend just because we’ve hung out this much. Ok?”

“What!? You tried to kiss me!”

“Yeah, like, slutty. Stop trying to make us a ‘thing’.”

“Ok?”

“What?”

“I thought I was giving you a compliment…”

“Don’t, Gene…”

“You rocked my world tonight! Everything I said was different from what you had to say. But we didn’t pause on stupid contradictions. We just went from one subject to the next and there was no problem!” Gene pauses to smile—grinny— and through the froth on his beard he says, “We disagree on a lotta’ shit, but we still get along.”

“Well—yeah. We get along.” The one side of her cheek puckers when she’s being smug.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Copeland, but it was a computer error. There were two room listings for 400 when they’re should’ve been only one.”

“You can’t blame the computer, it’s a dumb machine. Someone in your department created two listings or entered the number twice. The computer didn’t decide to get it wrong. And that’s your department’s problem. And since you’re speaking with me, that makes it your problem. And if you can’t do anything about it, then you need to put me in touch with someone who can.”

And now, modern reader, can you guess what happened next? Yes! The geometric modern trajectory of phone calls, forms and hierarchies pulled Gene Copeland ever onward from office to office, building to building, hold song (“Dancing in the Moonlight,” King Harvest, 1973) to hold song (“Belero” Maurice Ravel, 1928) until he landed at last, in front of an old factory building. He’d won, yes, because he would not have a roommate in this place, but then, had he really won? The site of the industrial-era leviathan caused him to hear the faint shoomp sounds of pneumatic tubes and wonder to himself if we were really any better off.

Gene shrugs. Fair enough.

Dear Lost Jellybeans,

Okay, let’s get one things straight: pudding has to be, like, vanilla pudding or chocolate pudding—it doesn’t taste like anything on its own. On top of which, you’ve bought some shitty jelly beans here, it seems obvious to me. Tomato? Why tomato when you can have orange or frankly, anything that’s not tomato. Who makes tomato jelly beans? I seriously want to know because I’m shorting the stock in that company tomorrow. Finally, what kind of loveless marriage are you trapped in when you have to keep separate track of your snack food? Seriously, are there separate stock piles around the house? This is disturbing me. I think the clear answer to your question is: no. No, you cannot trust your wife because anyone who keeps stock piles of snack food from you is someone that cannot be trusted.

Now I have been feeling guilty about this several times today, but I have to re-think that. He demanded of me that I had a debit card—like he had a right to it. I have dealt with a LOT of beggars, and they don’t demand things. This guy could’ve been down on his luck, but then, I don’t know… he was pretty smooth with his story—never let me have a word in edgewise. He had a lot of proof without being asked a lot of questions. There’s also the fact that I am kidding anybody if I think I have money to just give away. Whenever in my life I have had a large quantity of money, I have generally given it away without much thought. It’s been a hedonist’s life for me! But I’m starting to think that needs changing. It’s time to start thinking about the future—long term. The world is just too crazy right now not to bother. I think doing so is like what’s-his-name fiddling as Rome burned. Funny, I just heard that analogy not too long ago—pretty salient. Did it change my mind, or did I just now to decide to use a salient memory for the purpose of establishing my reasoning and justification? That’s actually a provable hypothesis. Have people read arguments. Two weeks later, have them make an argument for something and see if any of the analogies re-surface. There was a study of Shakespeare that did something like this by assuming that Shakespeare was in his own plays—so the roles he played would have words that would show up more often in the next script. This is the same thing but more generalized. Think of it as a neuronal cluster of relationships; some more fired up than other because of recent usage.

He looks up from the world of his notebook and out into the world that he is trapped in, one in which there really is a train wailing and rumbling along. In Louisville, most of the cars are massive hollow beasts, big enough to fit trucks in, and drilled all full of holes. If you turn your head in synch with them as they pass, sometimes you can see the contents, but that they are hollow makes them wince and complain all the more as the metal bounces and shifts. Without weight to settle them, too, they bounce around like unruly elephants in a line never letting go of the tail in front of them with their trunks. From his pile of busted limestone—the same responsible for the filtered water that makes Kentucky bourbon grimace and take a long, deep breath—Gene looks to the rails that crisscross this rusty city more than maybe the circuits on any one of his machines. How strange, Gene thinks, to study the design of machines that will learn, that will think, in a city where the machines are already the bloodstream. He smiles at the rails, aforementioned train already in the distance, and then looks to the piece of graph paper in his lap. Life. Truth. His cheeks press up under the frames of his glasses as he whispers, “It’s an asymptote.” And you will never have the proof, no matter how long you live.

Having lost too much already, Erica and the baby, now fate lands him in the middle of a place where it seems the only sustenance that surrounds is the cold metal that oxidization thrives on. They call it the rust belt, this portion of America that the most despised (in Gene’s mind) Ayn Rand once proclaimed the glory of a United States broiling invention and spewing profit, a United States that would be rich on the back of laborers toiling beneath the gaze of rich men in top hats and not a United States that was yet to awake to destroying it’s fisheries, it’s livestock, plucking out the strings of that national guitar, the Mississippi delta, run dead with phosphates and fertilizer draining. If he was to work on the future, how was it to rise out of this smoggy darkness, punctured by poverty? How was a shining new Xanadu built of brilliant encoded pattern-recognition machines meant to ever rise above this simple kingdom of rust?

Enwrapped in the overcast sky, enwrapped in the eulogy of the low light of his room, Allen rubs his eyes. He isn’t speaking to anyone—just remarking on the lateness of his waking: 11:36am. Days like this one keep you in bed. An errant memory of Jodie laughing at his sarcasm comes to him and he still sighs shyly. He was never used to being the center of anyone’s attention but she shown spotlights of flirtation and joy at him, always leaving him overwhelmed. Producing an audible groan and then forced to laugh at his sloth, Allen rolls himself over to cooler parts of the sheets. His clock’s red digits buzz like guilt in his face and Allen looks to them for pity. Perhaps someone would be so kind as to blow a fuse or cut the power?

Brushing his teeth in front of the mirror, Allen saw that he had not slept well. There were no dreams to remember. There was nothing but a vague darkness beyond turning the light out—a consciousness of being unconscious. Allen’s thoughts drift toward death; that it must be an unconsciousness of being unconscious. Then he brushed his tongue, the bristles tickling, followed by leaning over the sink to gag because he had pushed the toothbrush too far back. Wiping tears away, he smacks his lips and sticks his tongue out flat to examine the million bumps and curves and crevices.

Standing with his wiry arms bent at his side Allen’s glance drifts to his chest, pale from a lack of sun. He takes a modest pose, looking over the contours of his pectorals and abs, and decides it has been way too long since he went to the gym. He grits his teeth and elicits a growl. “Oh yeah.” Turning sideways, he flexes and poses again. “Oh yeah,” with more emphasis, intimidating himself in the mirror. “You want some?” he says to the reverse Allen, leaning in to the mirror menacingly, toothpaste tacked to the corners of his lips. He relaxes and laughs. “No, I don’t. Thank you.” Leaning back in aversion with his hands up in surrender, he says, “No really. Please. No more,” and washes the toothpaste off his face.

Max Connor, he stares at an advertisement. He stares, his precise, design-mind torn asunder by this ad’s garish lack of any professionalism; totally devoid of style, proportion, measure, sensibility, schooling for God’s sake. It seems almost random with words crammed into the small four-foot-by-one-foot space that babbles—so much copy for such a small space!—on about Dr. Z’s miracle teeth whitening process; testimonials, benefits, details of the procedure and on and on. Dr. Z, an Indian or Pakistani man perhaps, balding and dressed in a white lab coat, is there as well, smiling a brilliant white hypnotic smile with a look that says, “The wisdom of the ages rests with me.” No, it says, “Studies have shown that people with brighter smiles are more successful and live more fulfilling lives.” And as if to emphasize the sheer miraculous joy of clean white teeth, there is a rainbow over Dr. Z’s head—a rainbow! Why! Connor clenches his fists, his palms sweaty. Is it the ad or another anxiety attack? He looks briefly around but none of the other passengers seem assaulted by this—this abomination of the senses! There is nothing clever or catchy or smart or chic or hip about this man or his product; he notices now that there’s a price in the ad, for God’s sake. How gauche! Yet his Bauhaus addled communication machine (some call it his brain) is compelled to stare at it, tired from the sixty hour weeks and josseling of this urban, mechanical python swallowed him whole, and stares at the pearly whites of the wide-eyed Dr. Z. It’s a horrible ad–but damn it’s… it’s a damn fantastic ad that is nothing like ads. It seems honest, and he hates the appeal. The millions spent on how to get you to wear Nikes and buy iPods–the millions! And here is Dr. Z; calm, collected, he will make your teeth whiter and brighter.