So I was on my lunch break, sitting at a table in the Chinese restaurant down the street from work. I was slightly anxious, eating my customary noodle soup and pretending to read a City Paper but in reality, I was just turning work-related god-knows-what in my head, as is usually the case.

A female coworker comes by my table, she says hi, I give a swift glance up from my paper and smile politely. She asks me if she can sit next to to me. Sensing my distractedness, she seems unsure of my reply. I motioned towards the chair. She sits. I fidget. We make small talk. “How was the holiday party?” “OK. How about you?” “Yeah, same here, good, thanks.” as my eyes move back and forth between her and the newspaper.

Sensing my polite yet curt responses, she gets visibly uncomfortable. Tapping her foot, eyes darting nervously around the room, she says “come onnnn …. where’s my food? …” Ah fuck.

And so — I thought to myself — a nice, attractive, possibly single woman is interested in having a conversation with you. Hello? McFly? Where are you? Internal brain coach walks out to the mound to hit the pitcher over the head with the resin bag.

Earth to Mars — wake up! Chill out! Drop the god-knows-what, whatever is consuming your brain, how important is it, really? I’m not even trying to be this way. Why am I being this way? More importantly, how often do I do this? Coach smacks player in the ass, walks away from the mound. Player exhales, resumes focus, tugs his cap, and starts his windup.

I lobbed a soft pitch, hoping she’d swing, asked her about what she ordered, and what’s her favorite dish from this place. She said she liked the Kung Pao. I itemized the merits of my soup — nothing fancy, but filling and economical. I mention how I like the fact that they fill up the bowl above the rim, and that when they bring it out, the chicken, pork, and shrimp rise well above the noodles so you have to work just to get to surface level.

She smiled. “so what’s it called?” “Um… [looking at menu] … Chicken, pork and shrimp noodle soup. Hehe.” “Very apt description.” “Yeah.” We both laughed a little. Our eyes locked in at that point, just slightly. I began to warm to her presence, finally.

As the conversation progressed, it became like a short animation I remember from a long time ago, where a couple sits at a table with a single word bubble hanging cloud-like above them, the man says something and a jigsaw puzzle piece flies into the bubble, the woman replies and spits out another piece, which connects with the first, he speaks again, a third piece joins the other two, and so on and so forth as the word bubble fills up with a mosaic of jigsaw tiles, and the couple draws ever closer to each other.

Back at the table, we moved across subjects with ease — meal preparation, dissidents, foreign militaries, immigrant culture, painting. By the end of it all, we just looked at each other. It was like Paul Benjamin in Smoke, staring deeply towards Auggie Wren after he finishes his Christmas story — eyes half open, vulnerable, slightly hypnotized, asking eagerly “so what happened next?”

At that point, the waitress came with her food. We both slowly snapped out of the haze, she grabbed her takeout bag — Kung Pao, yes? — and paid the cashier. We both made tentative plans for lunch some time next year. She walked out.

Feeling incredibly calm, I grabbed my soup bowl, swirling its contents, and brought it to my mouth to slurp the remaining broth. It tasted peppery, I’m not sure if it was usually that strong, or I had just become more sensitized. Either way it was delicious. Whatever work tension or anxiety I had was gone. Just me, my soup and fortune cookie, whose advice mirrored that of Auggie, admonishing Paul as he impatiently flipped the pages in the photo album: “You’ll never see anything if you don’t slow down.” So I took the advice. Walked back to the office, gradually finished out the work week in a relatively peaceful state. Relaxing, conversing, perhaps some imbibing :-) rounded out the days.

I made a mental note to myself — over the holidays, watch Smoke again and to do a jigsaw puzzle. As of this post, my brother and I have spent the holidays completing a thousand-piecer, with another to follow. And Smoke has been playing on a loop in the DVD player upstairs. Just as it should be during Xmas. And a New Years resolution in the works. Work on the dialogue. The rhythm, the cadence. The sentences, and the air between the sentences. Do more puzzles. And pay attention. It will be reciprocated.

A couple days ago at my folks’ place, after a spell in the basement watching football, I ascended the stairs into the living room to see Brave, the greyhound, lying on his dogbed licking a wound. On the carpet all around were small patches of his blood — my dad says to me nonchalantly, “yeah, he lost his nail” then reached down, like Grissom from the CSI episode which commanded his attention, into the wastebacket to let me examine the evidence, the long, brittle yellow claw with the bloody pulp end, which drew a cringe from me. My mom was sitting on the floor with a sponge and a bowl full of cold water. She said that was the best way to clean blood stains, so I offered to reprieve her from plasma detail. After helping her up, I dropped down on hands and knees, soaking the sponge in cold water and rubbing the first stain, then blotting with a paper towel. Repeated this over and over until every blemish in the carpet was gone. Ended up with a bowl filled with cold water, hair, and blood. An unappetizing mix.

Had off today, and it was a gorgeous day, so this afternoon I took a walk from my parents’ place down to the U. of Delaware campus, down the main thoroughfare of shops next to campus (Main St., natch), eventually ending up in a small diner. Plopped myself down in the booth with my magazine and sat down for a nice greasy-spoon lunch.

Behind me was some college girl ruminating on how many of her friends sell drugs and how loaded they are, and that if she sold drugs too that this might be a viable income source. Two booths back was another, louder woman, recounting her fiance’s slow death due to alcoholic cirrhosis, saying bitterly that she “didn’t pour it down his throat”. Such stimulating conversation, whoa …

Not being able to concentrate on my magazine (a potentially great article on Christopher Guest horribly botched by a self-obsessed interviewer) or on my turkey sandwich, and feeling like a voyeur into others’ crises, I decided to tune them out by staring at the pies rotating on the pastry carousel. Oddly enough, this worked — it’s amazing what a Pavlovian reaction to lemon meringue can divert one’s attention (??) — and so I began to think ahead …

To New Years Eve 2006/07 … and the IM conversation Kim and I had a couple nights ago, while I was surfing around the “Crazy Countdowns” portion of the AOL New Years’ guide, I came across the “pickle drop” in Dillsburg, PA (pop. 2000) where instead of a ball they drop a giant half-sour into a vat … and sort of suggested, since she and Edgy had planned to come out anyway, that we might partake in said festivities … and I must admit, I was pretty stoked to get an instant “OK” response ’cause secretly I had my mind made up.

Things snowballed from there — Cranky upped the ante by suggesting we incorporate characters from VeggieTales into the celebration (specifically “Larry the Cucumber“) then I remembered the giant dill pickle greeting card that, for some inexplicable reason, I had on hand (I bought it for someone and then never sent) and suggested we bring it along and see if the mayor would sign it (I bet he would!) and so now we’re just working out minor details (ahem) like airfare, hotels, etc. :-)

But it’s settled. 2007 is the “Year of the Cucumber,” in brine or otherwise. All praise be to Dillsburg. Back at the diner, I ordered two nice dills to complement my sandwich. And a piece of pie.

This was a dream I kept having the last few nights living in my apartment.

It was a typical night drive on interstate 395 back to D.C. It was sometime after 1:00AM, I was coming back from John’s place in Sterling, the roads were sparsely populated and I could enjoy the leisurely drive. The city is much more peaceful at night. With the right music coming out of the stereos (some M83, Boards of Canada, or my favorite as of late, Arcade Fire’s Funeral CD) juxtaposed with city lights and backlit monuments, it can produce a peculiar urban calming effect. A certain stretch on 395 is particularly memorable. Right after the Shirlington exit, I drive up a hill and curve to the right — on the left hand side is the Pentagon, next to that a newly-erected Air Force monument which looks vaguely like Wolverine’s claw, on the right-hand side is arguably the most vertically-built area in the region (Pentagon City) followed by an exit for route 1 towards Crystal City. Barring the occasional meth bust, there’s not much crystal in Crystal City — to my eyes at least, it consists mainly of high-rises — some apartments, some offices, hotels, etc. — a typical urban nightscape, lighted windows surrounded by the dark of the buildings, themselves surrounded by the luminescent glow of the city.

But this night was different. The intensity of the glow coming from the high-rises was more powerful than I’d seen before, an intense white light as opposed to a gauzy yellowish haze. Normally, I’d have paid no mind and driven straight through it all, but out of curiosity and since the music was right, I veered off onto the Rte. 1 exit and headed over to the supermarket complex in the middle of eveything to get a better view. I turned the engine off in my car and got out, but the song kept playing, as if it were coming from some celestial speaker system. But it played the same song, Arcade Fire’s “Tunnels,” in a loop, with the same beginning verses playing over and over again:

“And if … my parents are crying, then I’ll dig a tun-neeellll …. from my window to yours … yeaah, a tun-neeelll … from my window to yours.”

Looking up into the towers, I could see what looked like refracting laser beams. Closer look revealed a slew of white lines cutting perfectly horizontal across the sky from building to building. They resembled flatlines on a heart monitor, or a chalk line crawling across a blackboard.

Several people had gathered in front of the supermarket, staring and pointing. I grabbed a pair of binoculars to get a look. When I focused on the initial beads carving the line into the sky, I could see what looked like small, chidlike Dig-Dug figures glowing white, each one armed with a pickax and a shovel, literally digging out the white lines into thin air.

They would arrive at a window of a high-rise across the street, knock on the window and patiently wait, until, inevitably, some other glowing childlike figure would appear, eyes wide and smiling, and let them pass through the window into the room. Then the line would gradually disappear from the originating point forwards, an eraser following the chalk removing all traces of evidence.

Eventually the Arcade Fire song faded out and that Aimee Mann song from Magnolia started to play, that lonely foreshadowing piano. An elderly woman held her hand out into the air, sensing a shift, pulled out her umbrella, and I guess that when the first frog splattered down on the pavement in the parking lot I could just shrug, scratch my head and get under the awning. It happened in the movie, right? And since 99% of what happened in that movie fell within the realm of possibility and how much of a brain stretch would it be to accommodate the rest, then yeah, why not raining frogs?

And why not the lizards and raccoons and fish and well, to use the parlance of our time, cats and dogs? As for the larger beasts … why can’t an impala, all horns and legs flailing, land on its Chevy namesake, causing its own horn to blare in shock? Or a giraffe getting tied up in the criss-crossing white lines like some makeshift poachers’ net? It rained wildife all around me and I never flinched, right up until the water buffalo dropped onto the Matrix, and some asshole standing next to me commented on my insurance policy, to which I replied, “it’s my dream .. you fucker” and made damn well sure that the humpback whale landed square on his precious Escalade. I recall his hood ornament dangling helplessly after the storm let up, then myself trudging across a mess of carnage along the 14th St. bridge into D.C., finally making it into my own apartment complex.

Because I guess I need logical explanations for things even in my dreams, I turned on the T.V. and heard the newscasters *joking* about the events earlier in the evening, after filling in the details — the Smithsonian exhibit “Noah’s Ark” that was headed on cargo planes on a trans-Atlantic flight to London and the heavy load that forced the bottom out of all the aircrafts. The newscaster then laughed it off, I wasn’t listening ” … I guess they weren’t kidding when they [blah blah, stupid anecdote] … haw haw haw … now sports.” TV off. And me to bed.

An hour later there was an intense white knock at the window. I pulled back the curtain. My whole body went indescribably warm. I was beaming from ear to ear and stood back like an usher, motioning the figure into the room.

I blinked and in an instant everything went dark, and I was in my bed again alone, this time awake, then running towards the window, pulling back the curtain, and staring down to the Eye street below, the parked cars and the sleeping city. Nothing for me, to see.

So I spent my very first weekend up in Delaware, gradually settling into my folks’ place and catching up on much needed rest. Because we didn’t get everything into the truck last weekend, and because I had to be completely out by last Thursday, most of my weekday evenings after work were spent filling up the Matrix with odds and ends and shuttling them up two hours to Delaware, then returning the two hours back to D.C. in the morning. This made for a string of 14 hour days, uggghh …
Needless to say, much of this weekend was spent sleepwalking. When I did come to in the early afternoon, I headed downstairs. Condensing an apartment’s worth of stuff into a relatively small  house that already contains the contents of a larger house is tricky business — every item needs to be tucked away carefully, every boxload is a chore, every corner gets utilized. Much of the stuff resides in what I call “the war room” — an unfinished, dungeon-esque basement, complete with flickering lightbulbs, limestone walls, exposed pipes and wires, and a bulkhead and stairs for load/unload of material and human freight. My dad and I both have our desks down here. We’ve got the wi-fi and the DirecTV hookup. And we’re tucked in somewhere among the storage freezer, the washer/dryer and a ton of boxes, all filed with stuff of some sort. This week, I’m gonna let him chew on the rest of it (nice to have some help on the domestic front, grin), while I stay down in D.C., testing out my local housing option in earnest.