Secrets are locked up everywhere

Upstairs in the walk in closet off of our master bedroom

(which is only party a master bedroom because, when the house was designed and sent around the united states of america like all the other sears homes of its particular model, our masterbedroom was supposed to be a sleeping porch),

behind the row of floppy collared shirts that i have collected at thrift stores all over the state of michigan,

down next to the floor, where i keep a line of shoes that i rarely wear because most of them barely fit me, but looked fiercely hip when I impulse bought them (also at musty cluttered thrift stores all across the state of Michigan),

There is a small two foot by two foot door. It is a door only because there is a knob in the center of it. It is not a door because it does not open. Did not open.

When we arrived in the house ten years ago, before we had started to buy it on time and based on the repairs that we did, I happened to notice that there was a very small piece of paper, college ruled, carefully ripped, written neatly:

"never open this."

And then taped over and over, carefully to the door with packing tape.

so last week, i was drunk and so mad that I couldn't imagine my life going forward more than a week, tops longer than it already had. and I knew once I blew out the thirty seven candles that Brittany lit thinking that candlelight could forgive a lot more than love handles and cottage cheese thighs, I knew that once those suckers were out, my imagination toward the future would halve its life expectancy, so in this state:

I opened the door.

I used a putty knife to scrape through the layers and layers of caulking and rubber and glue that sealed the "door" to its place. (Did I mention that it was hardly a door because it really, really, truly did not want to open.)

There was a point during the cutting that I thought to myself:

I'm so Drunk and I love this SO much because its such a fruitless TAsk that I might just disapPEar into nothing if I just KEep CHIPping awAY at such a fruitless TASK. If I PUT enough of myself into this ridiculous Cutting, then i might DIS appEAR Evetually.

(I noticed that I was thinking in words not feelings because of the way the words helped me leverage my body behind each cut.)

"What are you doing?" Brittany whined from the bed in the master bedroom outside of the closet which was too cold to be a master bedroom because there were no heat ducts into a sleeping porch, and it was absurd that we were trying to pretend that this porch was something it wasn't. We and the last seven owners. Maybe eight. The place was built in 1921.

When I got the door open there was a blast of cold air. I thought.

So. They didn't want me to open it because of the insulation.

And I was string in at the rafters seperated by an ancient looking insulation

...when she came around the corner. She was a very small woman. Not a dwarf or an elf though she was wearing clothes from the Victorian Era. It was more like she had been shrinking over the last couple of centuries than that she had born as a "little person" or with any kind of genetic predetermination of her height.

You could take a very convincing picture of her next to someone who was, say 5'10", only convince her to stand three steps closer to the camera, and then you would be able to trick the camera completely. Because she looks like a person who was 5'8" but gradually got smaller. She has curles and hair that doesn't really have any color.

I left the "door" ajar, and I check every couple of hours when I'm not at the office. She's still in there even though she could come out.

Remember multiple choice tests? She's like a single answer to a multiple-question-test:

A. How did a portal between strangely seperate realms come to exist in my walk in closet?

or

B. How did some clever trickster lure his diminuitive immortal girlfriend up to this closet before he got even with her for being so much better than him?

or

C. How long can a drunken buzz last after you sober up? Aren't there limits to the amount of time that hallucinations can STICK after they no longer fit into the grid of what you expect?

Non-Paper Assets Anyone?

Is it possible?

Hope still exists on the horizon? Could it be that this amber light cast across my world is but a sunrise, not the ironically beautiful sunset I've been assuming it was for the last six months.

Let's not, any of us, get our hopes up.

But. To be fair. I should tell you. I got the interview. The SECOND interview. The work team from G______. wants to take me to dinner to find out a little bit more about my "interaction style" and my "non-paper assets."

It's a little wierd that on separte phone calls two different people used these same exact phrases.

Sheila (who seems nice enough) and Paul (who seems dull enough) slid these phrases into really different contexts. Sheila was talking about what the company likes. Paul was talking about my interview. "interaction style" seems normal enough, though not exactly a phrase I've heard used in a job interview before, but this other one --

"non-paper assets"

what the hell?

I think maybe this must mean: what's good about me that's not on my resume?

so what happens after the interview? Do they write down my "non-paper assets"

because don't they, then become:

"paper assets"?

And now I'm feeling panicky. What are my non-paper assets?

I dreamed.

That a thousand finger tips were touching my skin. It wasn't sexual at all. Or unpleasant. Just a lot of touching.

I speculated as to why:

Did they need me? Love me? Were they healing me? Forgiving me?

Should I be grateful? Annoyed?

I decided instead to just go to sleep.

In my dream, I went to sleep while a thousand finger tips were touching my skin, and once I was asleep inside my sleep.

Nothing.

Productive Waste

I'm not exaggerating when I tell you that in the three hours since I have arrived here (the lovely cubicle i call "work"):

I have filled COMPLETELY one metal wastepaperbasket approximately one foot tall, one foot in diameter with used Kleenex. (Yes, GM actually springs for Kleenex Brand Name Tissues (!) I'm shocked that the cheap bastards would shell out, too. Wait. Maybe they own Kleenex.) And for the record, I'm not being immoderate in trashing these small bits of comfort & cleanliness.

I am filling the damn things with snot EVERY OTHER MINUTE. But who wants to use a sick day when the only symptom is sore, chapped nose holes? And an endless supply of snot?

So I was just wondering if we could find a way to harness the energy generated by nose blowing in the northern half of the northern hemisphere for the entire winter solstice...we might eliminate our needs for fossil fuels. If we could use productively the actual discharge or the kleenexi (one of those surprising plurarls) or some combination thereof...we might just render space travel uneccessary.

(because you know space travel, thus far, is the best hope we have as a human race for eliminating: cancer, aids, homelessness, and reality television.)

I dreamed ...

of busses drving up hills in the winter. The rest of the world was silently frozen under blankets of boundless snow, but city busses all over the city were climbing hills precariously, carefully, resiliently.

I could see them all, all the busses, all across the city and the city had grown hills in all the places you would never expect. Steep hills like the Ashmun Street Hill in Sault Ste. Marie where we used to go visit Great Nana before she died. I would look at that hill with wonder and longing as the city kids slid down whenever a big storm made them shut down the road.

In my dream, all of the busses started to lose their footing. They started to swerve back and forth, some even slipped backward.

The city remained silent, as it should be on a early snowy morning.

But in the silence people started to leap from the bus windows like those who leap from burning buildings.

People were throwing luggage(!) out and one person even tossed out an old electric piano.

Bodies and objects lay in the deserted road behind the swerving struggling busses like pollution from the turbines of a power plant in the lake.

And then the busses regained their steadiness and climbed to the top of the hill.

I work in an office full of armless people

That's the only possible explanation that I can imagine.

Here's the evidence:

1. Every other time (and I mean every other time) i go into the break room to fill my mug from the water cooler, the water cooler is empty. Which is not a big deal. Not really. Because all you have to do is take the empty water cooler off, pull off the top of the new water cooler jug and then very carefully lower the cooler upside down into the water cooler stand. If you can do this task without spilling water on the stand, your pants, the carpet and the wall...you're an F-ing genius.

2. Every time (and I don't mean that hyperbolically) that I go into the copying center the copy machines are all, as if they had coordinated their bad Karma to coincide with my arrival, ALL jammed. Inevitably the worst copier with the features that I don't need has the least complicated jam. The one that I need that will two side, hole punch, collate and color code? We're talking an E4, B3, L6, T7 jam. And the toner has spilled. Seriously. It's like that.

3. Coffee. The coffee machine apparently is in a constant state of being emptied. Apparently by armless invisible people. I don't ever really see anyone going into the coffee lounge. It's actually a converted custodians closet. And when i say converted, I mean that a coffee maker has been placed into a custodian's closet. But this closet is in a pretty central location in the Great Hall of Cubicles. I should be able to see the number of people streaming into and out of this closet that apparently drain this thing dry. But every time I arrive at the "Coffee" Closet. The burner is still going and the one ounce of coffee left in the pot is both scorched and solid.

So why the armless people theory?

Well you'd think that someone would do some of the changing some of the time right? Wouldn't they? Shouldn't they?

You'd think.