Today I wrote a bit of a nasty letter and thus burned a small bridge: I can no longer hope to sell my previously loved dog cage to Miss Citronelle Canada 2007. 

Sometimes, res vita loquitur, and what it says is absurd.

Seen today on a Coffee Crisp wrapper: "It's good to know: Your good health comes from a balanced diet, proper nutrition and physical activity."

No mention of the fact that Coffee Crisp plays no part in that equation, but one can imagine the blank stares and the reply of Nestle's PR and (knowing the lawsuit-happy United States) legal people when asked about it: "What's your point?"

I guess they'd be right. 

On July 13, 2004, I wrote this here: " Environmentalists are not an interest group like lobster fishermen or black lesbians! Oh world--and Nantucket Nectars--get this through your head."

As I worked on my internship research report today, I came across The Death of Environmentalism: Global Warming Politics in a Post-Environmental World, by Michael Shellenberger and Ted Norhaus. One of the chapter headings is "Environmentalism as a Special Interest". This, along with various other things that have been swirling around in my mind lately, spawned It's kind of a (much) extended version of my rant against Nantucket Nectars (and the world!).

1. I don't like hierarchies - especially when I'm at the bottom of them. I walked into work this morning right behind the president of the Agency. The receptionist immediately perked up and said, "Good morning, sir! Have a great day!" As I put on a friendly grin and prepared to bask in his Highness' residual glory, the receptionist turned back to her monitor. ("No hello for you!")

2. Why is playing with magnets so damn much fun? How can I be expected to get any work done? I have thumbtack-shaped magnets in my office!

While reaching for a jaycloth in my new office, I knocked a Post-it note off the shelf behind my desk. It flitted to the floor and I bent down to pick it up. Printed on it in messy block letters, ostensibly by the office's former occupant, was a single word: "Destruction".

There are probably perfectly reasonable explanations for minor everyday, but spooky, occurrences like this, but there are also lots of easily imaginable and much more disconcerting explanations. Was my not-to-be colleague testing a new pen with the first word that came to mind? (If so, how about "Stephanie" or "flowers" next time?) Was she absent-mindedly doodling...the first word that came to mind?

Or in the unbeknownst-to-me, but let's say angering and unjust, circumstances surrounding her departure, was she programming the office to reap revenge on its next occupant? In a building where access is controlled by fancy keycards and flashing lights, anything is possible...

Dog chewed her sweater;
her anger plays piano,
mine bangs this keyboard.

Ém and I went out to our "favourite" southeast Asian restaurant (read the only one in our town) last Thursday evening. It was a sweet, warm, but not sultry summer evening. I had one week left of school and very little work remaining. Sitting on the streetside terrasse, we had a bottle of rosé whose label spoke of Balzac's back-alley trysts in nineteenth century Paris. In short, it was the springtime of our lives, and we were feeling good.

Enter the downside of living in a town peopled by rich, snooty locals and richer, snootier tourists (and young envirophilosophers who should know better but make sweeping generalizations just the same). At the table beside us was a rowdy group of thirty-somethings, and in their midst--and right beside me, as luck would have it--was about the most distasteful schmuck with whom I've had the displeasure of meeting in space and time in quite a little while.

Plaid short-sleeved shirt, capris, sandals; wavy, greasy ebony-black hair down to his chin, pushed back off his forehead by expensive-looking sunglasses; skin goldly darkened by too much time off this summer. A real plastic Adonis and, at first, a seemingly harmless bon vivant with one too many glasses of wine in his belly and a few too many loud and forced jokes gushing forth from him like jellybeans from a broken quarter-candy machine.

Then he got cheeky, fresh, and a variety of other adjectives with which the 1950s, I imagine, left us. At the receiving end of his increasingly inappropriate comments was the sixteen-year-old waitress and daughter of Chez Linthip's owner--a tiny, shy and efficient Thai girl who speaks very good but heavily accented and high-pitched English and French. At first, she was simply included in the widening aura of tipsy joshing. Then Plastic Adonis put his hand on the waitress' leg for a second (according to Ém, who had a better view) and asked if she would accompany his group home if they were too drunk: "We have a convertible; we're rich." Finally, as the waitress reeled off the list of desserts, the bomb dropped.

"Can you repeat those, but without an accent this time?" That's when I twisted around in my chair and stared the guy down. Ém managed to convince me to focus on my rosé and Pad Mie rather than on the fist-sized hole on PA's schnoz waiting to be filled. And so here I am a week later, venting the last of my rage through a delightfully peaceful channel, but wondering to what extent, if any, assholes like PA thwart our chances as a species of evolving toward higher planes, new horizons.

If you read this, if your eyes are passing over this right now, even if we don't speak often, please post a comment with a memory of you and me. It can be anything you want -- good or bad. When you're finished, post this little paragraph on your blog and be surprised (or mortified) about what people remember about you.

Here's something I wrote this morning during a break from reading about the indirect radiactive forcing effects of pulses of tropospheric ozone precursors. That's not philosphy, and what may follows may not be good poetry, but people and lives change, right?

---------------------------

"Through time darkly"

There are moments that change lives
and lives that change moments, and we ride the
neutral escalator, unrepentant, to heaven
not knowing which is which.

But when a rainy morning forces
the universe out of the director's chair,
molds and hammers it into mirrors and windows
along the escalator steps,
can you see the moment and the life, the point and the line,
in each other's mesmerized stare?

Can you see the four boys, 17, in St-Henri,
dragging heavy toqued heads, bleary eyes
and treadmill legs through industrial streets
of dark wet cemeteries and earthy, wise red brick?
Morning wanderers among morning wanderers,
looking for a magic shop and a greasy breakfast,
each scattered brain more sure of being less lost
than the next?

Silence about the night before or the years since;
only the broken images in the cracked mirror:
of normalcy and memories, sleeplessness, computer screens
and coffee; calm and measured demeanors, youthful fear
of exciting and insipid chemicals.

Just these clear brown eyes and those muddy ones;
just two identical dots and a graceful
(and for which grateful) curve, stretching seven years;
the two shimmying, dancing, untouching.