For that matter -we- are chemical processes and nothing more.

I just realized that I"m very happy that holy week is over because of food. I came in early today and saw the Lenten special menu that keeps getting laid on my desk every week and realized that I'm glad this is all over. Lent has been a drag - there has been a sustained, weekly organizational drive to get everyone to get together to set up these runs down to one catlic church or another every Friday to pick up all the fish sandwiches. It's distracting and obnoxious- the social hours devoted to organizing lunch trips in the first place are a nuisance - but then this extra element of the fish-sandwich lunches has just been aggravating - I estimate 4 hours a week spent by 10 employees just dealing with fish sandwiches for lunch. And, you know, if I worked at a place where that was really a problem I wouldn't probably work there, but still, I'm tired of all this ongoing discussion and I'm actually sort of busy! And this is too distracting and for what? For What?

Fishes. I ain't eat fishes. I ain't eat nothing from the sea. Never, no-how. You eat dirt? You eat worms? You eat rocks? No? Well I don't eat fish, same way. It's not food. Plus, the fish is the bravest animal, plus I wouldn't ever eat a wild animal on most days. Plus the stink of fishes being cooked and eater makes my guts churn and tired, I get all queasy and this has been going on since, what? Beginning of march? Fish Sandwich Lunch has got me down. Fish-Friday's over now. Really, if they'd been spending this time organizing some kind of cow or pig or goat lunch - I'd be all the way down. But no it's fishes.

And the culmination of all of that is Easter - a holiday I don't even celebrate. You know why? Because of Eggs and Sunday. First off - if you don't get a day off work your holiday is of no account, I don't care about it one bit. I don't work Sunday anyhow and wouldn't if asked by anyone ever regardless of what work I had, but having some holiday break into my day off and try to corner me into unappealing activity - I'm all just Eff that. I ain't wake up early to go to church, hide eggs or look at bunnies, I don't care if they're the cutest bunnies or if a dude rises from the dead to pardon me from breaking his arbitrary rules. That's all nonsense of a high degree. Add to that that it's 2-3 days of Egg and Egg based foods? Fuck all that.

My guts swim inside me if I smell a fish cooking, but if I have to sniff on a cooked egg? That's usually enough to put me to gagging. Straight up I have undone supper more than once by the scent of eggs cooking. And you fucking people are eating these goddammed things! I can't eat em, I don't bake with 'em and I can't get flu shots. That's what's what with eggs - they are gross and sickening and people are shoving them down their gut-pipes along with all the creatures of the sea...

(This is part of why I don't travel in east Asia, despite my avidity for the history and cultures - I've seen too many bento boxes full of nasty un-food. Too much fried rice with mysterious egg-hunks and sea-bugs).

And now it's over and I think I'm happier now than I was.

4-21-2014

So this is just a mention of how it goes.

After work I had more work - go see the very old man, who I guess is not quite that old. 70's Wait, no, I had to set him up with a username and his birth-year was involved - 1930. He told me he was in the Air Force after high school and I guessed he was in Korea, and he admitted that he was. So 84. That's pretty old. My old Pop is 76 now, I can't think about him being in the condition of the very old man - who is in a wheelchair and must be pushed and wears his pajamas all monday. It's not shameful or anything, he's a very old man, but it's the exact situation that will shame and injure my old Pop.

I walked my handsome self to the nice retirement tower to help the man with his equipment, and he was pleased and talkative, he wanted to treat me to dinner in the retirement tower - a fancy place actually - and I agreed because I'm usually hungry. We're sitting and talking and I make nice with the mumbly waitress and the restaurant manager and flirt with the cooks (as is my way) and we get extra food because that is how shit goes for me because I'm smooth and cool with ladies. The very old man is a very light skinned black guy - lighter skinned in fact than my old Pop - and everyone assumes I'm his grandson - though I could be his son-son. I'm flattered about it and happy and all day people are thinking I'm ten years younger than I am, because I am, really. I explain that I'm merely his IT consultant, and a pair of very old ladies come to sit with us and talk and I am charming to them because old ladies are not shy of being charmed by fellas - which is a nice thing of old ladies. At another table old men are telling old ladies poems. Straight up reciting Browning to old ladies, and I talk for a long time about flowers and the orchestra and am invited back. Invited with a little urgency and a little sense of hope, not a wild fantastic wish, but a little twinge of wanting.

Of which I'm balefully aware, that wanting. I'm lately feeling under it. As if all my interactions have this element of obligation and want, some transaction in which I'm the good being traded. There are comings and goings and comings and goings and I'm asked over and again - in not so many words, what do you have for me?

So I'm tired, I walk up the hill, lovely and sprung. There's that faint halo on all the trees, of the lightest insubstantial green, a little bare wool of verdant fluff - and there is the petrichor scent that hangs over the low street and the long sunset lingering on reflecting pools - and I am glad at least that I get to walk past reflecting pools and count the fifty nine robins that cross my path, each plump or sleek and all daring and good. Worm-fatted and angling for their moment to father and mother their blue eggs. Dear old things, the eldest of the creatures that have a little chamber in me. I think, passing the cemetery how this is a day, where I could drop my backpack and run off from the wanting, leave my wires and cables and gadgetry and go into the forest because there are forests, little woods to run past and there you see the wild-grown daffodils - which thought and talk made the very old lady swoon a little, clasping her hands right over her chest. It was sweet to think of and then the licorice sweetness of going off into the woods where nothing is asked and no-one could need me. A selfish wish but I've been lately so unselfish, I'm feeling unwound and frayed from it.

I'm thinking this past the forest, past the construction - up to the apartment complex and there are the three young boys, very young - between 5 and 8 - I'd guess, having learned how to guess these things, maybe one of them faces school on the daily and you will know how they go to school because of the fervor with which they mash boards against the ground and shout and hammer the earth with loose materials from some forgotten construction. And one says to me - something. "Dance... Mister... Dance..."

"Yeah I like dancing, how about you?" And they leap up, all of them together to show me their breakdancing, heroic and modestly acrobatic and flawless - it's easy to carry your weight on a hand when your weight is 40 pounds. They overthrow themselves, doing more flips than they mean to, crashing down harmlessly and getting up again, they throw themselves against the broken sidewalk and it's a goddammed miracle. This little kids. I clap at them and clap and encourage and say that I'll try and remember to bring a cardboard box next time.

The man at the store is saying he wants to go back to Jordan, I just want to go home, my arabic is terrible still, he tells me so. I come home at last. It's a long day but the Sun's just setting finally, and I couldn't tell you the color of the sky and I don't feel like I'm needed too much or that much has been asked of me, and I feel for a minute as if, if I were asked, I would have something, actually, to give.