It has recently occurred to me that my lack of material possessions might be mistaken for spirituality. I wanted to assure you all that this is not the case; I’m just poor. Seriously folks, I have very little money. But rest assured, if I did have money, I would own all types of unnecessary shit that I would enjoy on a purely superficial level. High Def TV? Why not, in fact, I’ll have a plasma and an LCD. Oh, and one of those new ones, you know with the mirrors? Yeah, give me one of them too.

As far as my spirituality goes, I basically believe the universe exists so that I have a place to keep my stuff. Which, admittedly, there isn’t very much of. Honestly, it’s kind of a waste of space. Which is exactly why you should all buy me things.

I’m not greedy, I’m trying to restore order to the cosmos.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to check my E-mail… on my roommate’s computer.

That’s what my T-shirt says. “I love my girlfriend” in big white block letters on a bright red cotton-polyester canvas. What’s amusing about this is that I don’t actually have a girlfriend. I’m just wearing this shirt because I’ve run out of clean clothes to wear. I need to do laundry. I haven’t done my laundry, because I lack somebody in my life who cares enough to remind me to do it. I haven’t done my laundry because I don’t have a girlfriend.

This T-shirt was given to me by ex-girlfriend. She gave it to me in the beginning of our doomed relationship. She eventually broke up with me because she was tired of doing my laundry. I never asked her to do this, I’m progressive, She just got tired of having a boyfriend who smelled all the time. I smelled all the time on account of my always wearing dirty clothes.

Near the end of our relationship, I still wore the shirt, even though by this point the sentiment was no longer true. At this point the shirt should have said, “My girlfriend and I have have settled into a stale routine. Neither of us will do anything about this because we put our comfort before our happiness. I no longer love her, but am still thrown into a jealous rage when I see her with another man.” Although I don’t think a lot of people would have bought that T-shirt. When, near the end of our relationship, I used to wear this T-shirt, I noticed that women, attractive women, would often approach me and comment on the shirt. Women who I would gladly have dated, were showing an interest in me. Unfortunately, there was nothing I could do with these opportunities, because my fidelity to a woman for whom I felt nothing was the very trait that they found attractive in me. I, of course, can no longer use the T-shirt as a way to meet women, because that would necessitate me telling them all of this. And, while in written form this diatribe might appeal to their sense of humanity, if I were spoken to them upon first meeting me, I’m sure it would just plain scare the shit out of them.

The Ironic symbol of my cyclical, failed love life is a novelty T-shirt. How fucking American is that. The same T-shirt is no doubt being sold on the boardwalk in Ocean City, New Jersey. When I was thirteen, my initial interest in women came to head while I sat under this boardwalk, huffing butane, and dreaming of the bikini-ed women I had earlier seen on the beach. I have just realized that the suburban self doubt I felt back then still lives inside of me. The only difference is that my neurosis has now divided it into an unlimited series of sets and subsets. Suburban self doubt, with a line over it, representing infinity.

My friend Susan started getting dizzy spells. My friend Susan went to a doctor. The doctor, Dr. Bald, assigned my friend Susan a strict regiment of sleep and dieting. She was forbidden from partaking in booze or cigarettes. Now my friend Susan has a device, a smooth white plastic box. Not quite perfect the box has three distinct characteristics, an opening in one end, two buttons, and a speaker. Three times a day she is required to insert her finger into the box’s orifice, and press one of the buttons. Every Tuesday, at precisely 3:45 pm she goes to a payphone and dials a 900 hundred number. She holds the receiver to her ear for about ten seconds until she hears a beep. She then puts the speaker up to the handset and presses the other button. The device then sends the information it has collected over the past week to a mysterious laboratory to be processed.

I have decided that one day during the ten second interval a voice, identifying itself as Agent Smith, will appear on the other side of the line. Agent Smith will inform Susan that she has unwillingly been transmitting a new type of narcotic comprised entirely of sound waves to various traffickers across the nation. The anonymous government agency to which Smith is employed agrees to to give Susan amnesty if she will perform a certain task for them. She is to travel to Mozambique where she will work as a double agent, using her medical connection to the nefarious Dr. Bald to infiltrate the Renamo political party, whom the agency believes is responsible for the creation of the new drug. She accepts.

Her mission in Mozambique begins slowly. For the most part she sits in conspicuous cafes in the city of Beira, pronouncing Dr. Bald’s name in overt tones. The results are meager, which is to say non-existent. Feeling unaccomplished my friend Susan takes a walk. Along the Rue Conselheiro Ennes she passes an Arab with glazed over eyes. He is slouched in a phone booth, the phone receiver pinned to his shoulder by his limp head. The man wears a filthy fez hat and speaks in a constant incoherent blend of Portuguese and English. Jumping on the opportunity Susan shakes the man awake and begins to scream “Dr. Bald! Dr. Bald!” into his jowled face. When the man show no comprehension Susan takes him back to her boarding house and feeds him coffee until he sobers up. The process takes about two hours.

Upon coming to, the man shows an incredible lucidity, and grasp on the English language. He doesn’t know anything about Dr. Bald, but agrees to introduce Susan to his dealers. In an inconspicuous cafe, she meets the Hathaways. They are a demure English couple, basked in an existence of leisure. For pleasure they drink mint juleps, exchange witticisms, and engage in tantric sex with a number of the locals. She believes that they are also double agents, although whether they work for Renamo or Smith’s agency remains to be seen. They are impressed with Susan’s connection to Bald and befriend her. For the first time Susan imbibes sound waves. She is in no way surprised to find the high is a much stronger version of her initial dizzy spells.

The next few months of her life are spent in an hallucinatory dreamworld. The majority of her time is spent at the payphone on the Rue Conselheiro Ennes either getting high or assuring Smith that she is making progress, but can’t divulge anything at the moment, due to the delicate nature of her position in the Renamo underworld. Other than that she wanders the streets of Beira seeing things that nobody else sees. She repeatedly falls in love, settles into a sort of contentment, and watches her lover die a horrible death. She is being chased by a man in a white flannel suit. Several times her fear of this man will culminate in her hitting him with a car, just to see him again the next day, watching her movements from a set distance. She will begin to wear a white flannel suit. She will have a long conversation with a camel. She will believe that the camel is also a double agent, although whether it works for Renamo or Smith’s agency remains to be seen.

The entire story will end in the abandoned Grande Hotel Beira where the drug is made. There she will discover that Agent Smith, Dr. Bald, The Man in White, and Mrs. Hathaway are the same person. One will then kill the other, with the realization that they are actually killing themselves.

Or, it will end at a bar in Seattle where I am telling this story to Susan, and she is giving me a look which says, “What the hell are you talking about?”

So the other day I decided to go to the local coffee shop, so as to not talk to or make eye contact with the barrista that I’m secretly in love with. An infatuation that is, no doubt, silly, considering I know nothing about this woman, other than that she has excellent taste in footware. I know this because that is where my eyes tend to focus when I order hot drinks from her. But I digress.

So the other day I decided to go to the local coffee shop (a more concise if less revealing opening line). Now this coffee shop is a scant fifteen blocks from my house, in the closest commercial district to me, and usually makes for a pleasant walk. The route that I take happens to be along a busline, the 44, and on the day in question I noticed that the bus schedule corresponded almost perfectly with my walk. Indeed the bus would be arriving at the stop I was standing at in a couple of minutes. It was ideal. I would have just enough time to smoke a cigarette before the vessel would come and wisk me away to my destination.

I love riding the bus — it is a whirlwind of humanity. Entire stories are revealed within it’s oblong cabin, from the darting glances of people’s inability to meet each other, to the ramblings of men who are so lonely that they have given up completely on social barriers. My favorite passengers are the teenagers who are madly in love, sitting on each other’s laps, so sure that they understand the world. Of course I was going to take the bus.

I lit my cigarette and waited. I did the things people do when they’re waiting for a bus. I thought about the book I was reading, laughed an old joke that popped into my head, reminded myself to give Felini’s Satyricon another shot (I know I should like it, everybody I know likes it) and so on. This went on for a while. A long while. When I next looked at my watch I realized that fiteen minutes had passed, and I easily could have reached the coffee shop on foot. There is an interesting logic that occurs when one realizes that they could have walked to their destination in the time it takes for a bus to arrive. It goes something like this: “Well now I have to wait. I mean, the bus has been moving toward me this whole time, while my stopping-place has remained at a concrete distance from myself. If I start walking now it would be like starting over, when surely the bus will be here any minute.” And on this particular day, this was my thinking. So I lit a cigarette, and thought about the things people think about when waiting for a bus.

An hour has passed. I’ve smoked eleven cigarettes. Felini is the farthest thing from my mind. My entire being is filled with an intense irritation bordering on hatred for the driver of the 44, as well as an overwhelming sense of conviction. I am going to ride that goddamned bus. Granted, since I had left my destination, I could’ve walked to the coffee shop, not talked to the barrista (fuck concision), drank my tea, and walked home to dwell on my own inadequacies. But that didn’t matter, I was riding that goddamned bus. The circumstances meant nothing to me, as I paced back and forth chain smoking, my conciousness focused like a lazer on the westbound lane of Market Street where at any minute my bus would come down the hill. Ambling, as it were, with no regard what so ever to me or my time.

Finally, the bus arrived, I boarded, passed my card through the slot, gave the driver a courteous if quiet greeting, found a seat, and looked at the other passenger’s shoes.