There are days

There are days, my friend. Let me tell you, there are days.

There are days when you become so frustrated with drivers on the interstate and you finally understand "road rage", when you come face to face with the terrible wrath inside you and contemplate, however briefly, what it would be like to push the speedometer all the way to the right and swerve into a guardrail, causing a great conflagration and pain and suffering.

There are days when government bureaucracy so infuriates you that you swear by all that's holy that you have taken your last number, stood in your last line, written your last check, completed your last triplicate carbonless, fathomless, meaningless form and that the next drone who sends you somewhere else is going to pay with their own blood.

There are days when the debts outnumber the notes in your pocket and the distance from your hand to your mouth seems like a marathon, when you've lost a tiny rectangle of petrochemicals and magnetized oxide and it feels less like a missing chunk of plastic and more like a pound of flesh.

There are days when the paper is stacked high on your desk and the phone won't stop ringing and the e-mail keeps coming and the server keeps crashing and the lights go out and the soda machine's busted and you question your sanity while others question your talent and the answers to neither will present themselves.

And there are nights when you lock the door and you turn down the light and you draw a bath and you listen to a torchy ballad and you hear the voice on the phone that both comforts and kills you, and you think how interesting it might be, someday, if just once, somebody -- even just one somebody -- thought of you not as one thing to many people, but as everything to one person.

Yes, you have days and you have nights.

Yes, you.

Not me.

Nope. I've got it all together.

But there are days...

Where have you Ben?

This would have to happen just after I've pitched a 16-pack of Charmin into my cart, the four-by-four stack of plastic wrapped, double-roll "bathroom tissue" towering above the top of the basket. I duck around the corner into the next aisle but, soon enough, he's there too, the cutest guy in the store and he's headed my way.

It seems like I'm the grocery nearly every day recently, Schnucks mostly (motto: "Not just the friendliest stores in town, the only damn stores in town."), since my chaotic schedule leaves me with little idea when I'll be dining at home. I used to buy a whole week's provisions at once -- ah, those halcyon days of three months ago -- but now I'm doing the Mary Richards thing daily, tossing single-serving soups and Salad-in-a-Sack into my cart before hitting the self-serve checkouts.

This everyday marketing serves some appealing parts of my personality; I always get the freshest goods, I get a frequent dose of eye candy to satisfy my harmless bagboy fantasy fetish and, in these austere times, I never feel as though I'm dropping half my salary on food and household goods when I dribble it out a few dollars at a time.

The downside, though, is that it presents opportunities for embarrassment just like this more often. I'm being half-stalked through the store by a hottie when I'm buying discommodious (pardon the pun) personal items.

Why am I mortified to be discovered purchasing toilet paper? I don't know! Maybe it's just because we're societally encouraged to keep our bodily functions private. To never acknowledge that the loo even exists. Remember what a scandal it was to hear a commode flush on All in the Family? But we're all in the same boat, after all, and it's the little dinghy of that chipper sailor boy from the 1970s Tidy-Bowl commercials. Everyone, we are reminded even by children's literature, poops.

I guess I'm just a bit squeamish being reminded of it and even moreso when faced with the prospect of cruising a desirable fellow while toting along a bulk package that practically screams, "Yes, everyone poops! Especially me! Look! I must stock up for I defecate in astonishing volume!"

Yes, this is exactly the sort of thing that goes through my mind on a regular basis. And you wonder why happy hour accounts for the second largest chunk of my wages after groceries?

I should get over it, I know. I'm sure I'm the only person in the world so neurotic about keeping up appearances in the market. I'll never forget running into my friend Mike Lockheed at Walgreens in the early 90s. It was late on a Friday afternoon and, as we chatted about beer and boys and pleasant combinations thereof, I noted that he had packed his handbasket with at least a half dozen Fleet bottles, a 36-pack of condoms and a copy of Men's Fitness or somesuch.

"I've got a big weekend ahead," Mike quipped with a wink as we parted. I stood there for a moment in the aisle, wondering if I could ever be so casual a shopper and reflecting that the "Power Bottom / Bottom Power" t-shirt I'd seen Mike wearing the previous Saturday night at Twist was probably the most truthful advertising I was likely to see all month.

Anyway, back at Schnucks, I'm frantically trying to steer my basket to a vacant aisle, hoping I can park it and then saunter back with poised nonchalance to take a pass -- and perhaps make one -- at the lovely lad who seems still to be shadowing me. I've just rushed through the dairy section and ducked into the shampoo aisle when I run into him -- literally, smacking him in the butt with the front of my cart.

In an instant, I'm apologizing so quickly that the words hardly sound like English. He turns to face me and I notice that his eyes are wide and impossibly blue and, I'm certain of it, focused on the gigantic mound of Charmin bobbing from side to side in the basket, all thoughts of squeezing anything else I might have immediately leaving his mind.

When I stop blathering and begin to move off, he says, "Hey, don't I know you from somewhere?" It sounds so much like a line that I almost laugh but, when I consider him further, I realize he's right. It's been five or six years since I last saw him and he's shed some pounds, clearly hit the gym pretty hard, but this is without a doubt the same guy I spent many late nights fruitlessly flirting with at the late-night copy shop near my house.

We spend a few minutes catching up, my awkwardness almost entirely vanishing when I glance at his cart to spy a tube of Preparation H tucked among the fresh greens and pork steak. That we're both buying ass items is a bizarre comfort, and soon we're casually chatting, then flirting, and then, we're having lattes at a nearby coffee bar.

And later we're having something else guaranteed to raise the heart rate even faster than caffeine, the "your place or mine?" question settled when Ben -- I remember his name shortly after our collision and think to myself that if only one of us had been buying Ben-Gay, this would be the perfect punny story -- suggests following me home since he "lives in a bad neighborhood."

We said goodnight around midnight, made noises about getting together again soon, and prepared to part, only to discover that Ben's car had been stolen from in front of my house. In my "good neighborhood".

He took it in stride, better than I probably would have and, fortunately, his groceries were still in my fridge. After all, the car was insured but they weren't. I took him home, offered him a ride to work the next day, and slipped him my phone number as he got out of the car.

And then I went to Schnucks. I'd forgotten to get milk earlier.

What’s Ben going on?

"You've got the Bens," Jeffrey says, after hearing a weekend's worth of stories.

"I do!" I say. "I guess I didn't come up slowly enough."

"Or you went down too fast," he counters.

Trust me: That's never a problem.

But last weekend was strange. I mean, what are the odds? I hook up with two guys, both named Ben, on two consecutive days. One encounter ends awkwardly, as Ben the First departs to discover his car has been stolen from in front of my house.

The police officer who arrives to take the report? His last name is Benjamin.

The second evening begins bizarrely, as a fun flirtation turns into a conversation with a fellow who can only be described as "couth-free", but concludes with a coincidence that introduces Ben the Second.

"You're all about the Benjamins," Jeffrey says. And so I am.

Tomorrow: Where have you Ben for the last six years?
Next up: Ben, again.

Patterns

In the small hours of the morning, it makes sense to you. Everything is clear. Go down the path you've walked before, don't pay any mind to the signs and passersby, warning you to turn back.

The familiar road, a crooked path, and yet.

And yet.

You turn a corner and everything looks the same. There's no porch step or over-priced bottle of Coke, true, but for those, it could be 1996 and the air could be cool and the night could be quiet except for the sound of two hearts beating, two pairs of lungs whispering the same, intoxicating tattoo.

"Reach out," you hear in the wind. "Reach across that tiny distance, that small space that separates you and possibility, take hold and don't let go. There is no past, there is no future, there is only now and the infinite promise of the moment."

You are a fool. "When you know you can't have what you want, where's the profit in wishing?"

But what care you for profit when, yet again, you're falling in love with a poor man?

Going overboard

A friend of mine, a noted Mark Twain impersonator, tells a story attributed to the author that's always been a favorite of mine when justifying one vice or another.

Twain told of being called to the bedside of a dying friend. "Tilly," he said, taking the woman's hand, "if you listen to my advice and do just what I say, I can cure you."

The woman gave a feeble cough, sat up meekly and looked into his eyes. "What must I do, Mr. Twain?" she asked.

"Well, first," Twain said, "you've got to give up smoking cigars. You've got to stop drinking liquor to excess. You must stop carrying on until all hours of the morning, and you must cease carousing with young men of questionable morals."

"But Mr. Twain, I can't give up those things," Tilly protested. "I don't smoke. I don't drink liquor. I have been in bed by nine every night of my life, and I have never carried on with young men."

"Well, there it was," Twain would say, warming to his audience. "She was doomed. If she had cultivated just one or two of those habits, they might have saved her. She was like a sinking ship with no freight to throw overboard."

I certainly don't have the frontier eloquence of Missouri's favorite son, but I've made a few observations recently as I endeavor to "toss some freight overboard" and rearrange the hold.

1. If you tell your friends you are writing a book or remodeling your house, it becomes, for the duration of the project, the principal topic of conversation. "How is the book coming?" they'll ask every time they see you. "Finished the house yet?" After enough annoying inquiries, you'll be tempted to chuck the project altogether.
   
   It is a similarly bad idea to tell your friends you're planning to change your life.


2. Like a toaster oven or a hair dryer or a computer, it is far easier and more expeditious to make a new person than it is to fix an existing one. Or so I'm told anyway, having no intention of procreation and all the messiness attendant thereto.


3. If you get off on instant gratification, you had better get over that right now.


4. Young men of questionable morals are, frankly, a damned good reason for charting a new course and swabbing your decks. Just don't ask any questions you're not prepared to hear the answers to. Finding out that the lad you're flirting with was two years old when you were a high school senior can lead to crying jags, and that just gets in the way of the work.

Temporarily buoyed by some air pockets in the lower decks, I go bobbing along on a sea as still as the tomb.

The Christopher Atkins Diet

The Giant Queen: I've been meaning to ask you. You look really good lately. Have you lost weight?

Brad: A little bit. I'm on the Atkins diet.

The Giant Queen: Really?

Brad: Well, actually it's the Christopher Atkins diet. I can only eat food that was featured in the film The Blue Lagoon.