Improbably

I lost my keys and my wallet within one hours time. And I do not lose things. I know you don't have much to go on if you're just some random stranger looking at me.

After all, blogging is a form of lying at its core anyway isn't it? Resituating the truth in order to make it presentable.

And arguably, any resituation of truth -- ends up in a situation other than truth, right?

Most bloggers I've ever met are compulsive liars anyway.

But I am not lying when I tell you that I do not lose things. Of course, like everyone, I HAVE lost things. My aunt Bernice insists that I lost some pendant she had let me play with during a Christmas celebration in 1976. That's right, your vision did not deceive you. My 50something year old aunt is still blaming me for losing something when I was three years old.

And the crazy thing is:

These stories stick to your life like a criminal record. Because maybe in the rest of my thirty three years I've misplaced or had to look for three things (and I'm being generous with this number) and one of my siblings or my parent, or another of my damnable aunts would say:

Oh, but...

Remember!?

Aunt Bernice?

And these stories get leaked out of your family to the general public, too. If you ever have the misfortune of having the general public meet your family-of-origin.

Which is precisely what happened with Brittany. When I first brought her to a family Thanksgiving, Aunt Bernice (bitter old hag...) filled her ear with the apocryphal story of the missing pendant. That night when I delivered the mashed potatoes to the table without a serving spoon, my mother looked at me:

David, honey?

-Mmmm?

Did you forget the spoon?

A beat while I look around the table (my mistake. *this loss*, the loss of my presence of mind for only this second, is the only thing I actually regret losing in this post...)

Aunt Bernice, to my chagrin, did not miss a beat:

Or maybe he lost it!

HOWLS of uproarious laughter! (seriously, in general I would she away from characterizing laughter with tired words like Howling and Uproarious, but in this particular case these words MEAN something. This was the kind of hysterical laughing that sprung not from any genuine or improvisational mirth. This laughter was a collective expression of relief on the part of a group practically bereft of any common sensibility. But OH! this thing we share. Little David and his Losing Things. Ha. Ha. Fucking Ha.)

Seriously, they didn't stop laughing even when I brought the spoon.

My mother patted my cheek over her shoulder. Grown women should not pat grown men's cheeks in public. Even if, at some point in the distant past they did clean up their messy asses and nappies. This gesture on the part of my mother was proof positive that I had been scapegoated here. All the fears of the family that the recent falling out between Aunt Beverly and Aunt ReeseAnn would rent us into a million unrelated strands of loosely connected strangers (not unlike most modern american families and not unlike the structure of the internet...), were resolved in this laughter. We were sautered back together as One Whole. And where were the scar marks to prove it? No, nothing new. Just one more guffaw at David's expense.

So the fact that I'm owning this absence...Keys, Wallet....Is not a confession of general guilt. It is a repudiation of this large myth and a simple statement of frustrating fact. Improbable. But true.

I got the job!

It's completely perfect! I set my hours (within, as they like to say, "the company horizon").

My work is all project based.

I like the people I've met at the water cooler (though I can't figure out *at all* how or why most of them work here...).

There is a real water cooler and someone already changes it regularly (I don't take this lightly, given my "curse").

I'm allowed to...no, wait....(L2T) I'm encouraged to blog, do email and search the web.

Eric always used to say that the problem with bands was that as soon as they signed with a label, the angst drained out of them like a Hot Air Balloon on a cell phone tower. If we wanted to have good rock music, he said, we should force promising young artists to take jobs in fast food.

So before you cross-apply his arguments and get out of my blog like a bat out of hell...

Wait. There is a downside.

This perfect job? This fantasy of a workplace? This wet-dream employment?

I work in the boiler in the bowels of the earth.

That's right. A lovely pristine mac and drafting board, some nice IKEA shelves. All very neatly organized IN THE BOILER. You have to take a stairway hidden next to a broom closet. Once you get into the basement, you have to wander through a maze of file cabineted archives. You walk through these for about fifteen minutes, and then you arive at Hades, er, my "office."

Oh sure, it looks like it has a door and walls and such, but these MUST be a clever illusion, which MIGHT (if you were lucky) distract you from realizing that you were working INSIDE of a boiler for, oh, maybe, if you were really naieve, one full work day. Your first work day, when you were still dizzy from the nectar of your perfect job's benefits and work habits and 30 minute training. (30 minutes! Seriously! I've spent longer watching assembly videos for lamps I got for "Christmas presents"). Given how magical that day has been. How great you're feeling. You might actually say something like,

"No, this is great!" To someone giving you a tour and showing you your space, and incidentally apologizing for the slight inconvenience of your office location.

You might, somehow not hear the thunderous belches of motors, the wild banging of metal gears, and the shrill release of steam from the boiling lurching bowels that you now live within.

It might actually take three days of fruitless exploring to realize that there is NO heater, NO boiler that is accessible or locatable anywhere within walking distance of your "office" until you realize that all the sound and fury is best heard inside your office. You realize that you are actually working INSIDE the boiler.

Okay the banging just started again. I gotta go up to the water cooler.