I just got my shirt and jacket back from the dry cleaners.  There’s more cat hair on them now then when I dropped them off.

I can just see the employees: “Oh my God, these clothes actually need to be cleaned.  We’ve been in business six years and we have no idea how to operate any of this equipment.”

“Oh no!  What do we do?”

(One of them pops a Mentos.)

“We’ll throw them into a room full of cats.  They’ll cover the clothes and make them look all the same.”

When I sent back the invitation for the wedding this weekend, I wish I had indicated that I couldn’t attend--but would like to send “1 hairball” in my place.

I’m glad it’s Friday, because if my brain was an image file, it would look like this:*

*This insanely dorky analogy has been brought to you by the Association for People Who Need to Stop Staring at Computer Screens All Day.

In his Monday speech aimed at reassuring a domestic audience that has grown uncomfortable over his handling of Iraq, President Bush vowed to transfer “full sovereignty” to an Iraqi provisional government on June 30th.  At the same time, he promised to maintain 138,000 U.S. troops in Iraq “under American command.” The dual commitments have left observers increasingly skeptical of the impending power transfer to Iraq; many believe that the U.S. will continue to remain in the country, for all intents and purposes, as an occupying force.

However, the administration has released new documents detailing the specifics of the power transfer, hoping to allay these concerns.  According to the documents, the transfer will give the new Iraq government significant roles, responsibilities, and privileges, including:

Having full authority over the TV remote.

Obtaining a 30-day grace period for peer-to-peer file sharing without being sued by the RIAA.

Complete control over the Iraq militia, although live firearms will be replaced with up-to-date “Lazer Tag” beam guns and chest plates.

The ability to put on the cheeriest, frilliest Maypole in the entire Middle East.

A special screening of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, attended by the stars--minus Emma Watson, because she’s disturbingly young-yet-grown-up and she makes some of the more radical clerics, such as Muqtada Al-Sadr, feel a little funny.

Choosing whether to ship oil to the United States in the standard gray or black barrels or have them painted with festive red, white, and blue stripes.

Having votes count twice in American Idol phone-in competitions.

The ability to kow-tow in full, official government regalia.

Assistance with marketing high-value consumer products to Iraqi citizens such as the baseball cap with the attached beer cans.

Complete discretion over where to bury all the bodies.

I considered giving up movies for an extended period--a fast, if you will--to see if I suffered any effects that suggested addiction.  I could take up reading poetry again; I haven’t finished my Wallace Stevens anthology. Then my friend who works for Hewlett-Packard asked me if I wanted to see a private screening of Shrek 2 for HP employees.  Now I know how Robert Downey Jr. feels.  “Hey, Robert, this is your buddy Charlie Sheen!  Congrats on getting through your narcotics rap with just probation and community service.  I’m going to stop by your place and give you a gift of a MOUNTAIN OF CRACK.”

“Private screening” is a bit of a misnomer when it’s a multi-theater complex and every single theater is showing the same movie to a full house. But at least when you hear people laughing in the next room, you know it’s at something funny and not, say, Scooby Doo 2.  And it was nice to see all the HP employees with their children in tow, all whispering prayers to Linux technology and Carla Fiorina.

It’s all for the best.  My fast would have only lasted until Spider-Man 2 anyway, and although Wallace Stevens is nice for the first few pages, it doesn’t take long before you just want to punch him in the face.

Other accomplishments: assisting with the creation of three pizzas, pinpointing a decent $9.00 bottle of wine (Rosemount), and taking a tour of a friend’s new house.  Notable failure: Attempting to start a conversation thread by asking, “Why is it that you can’t refer to ‘wheat’ in the singular?  You always have to say, ‘Pass me the wheat.’ What if you only want one?” As I sit here and type this, I’m still staggered that nobody in the room decided to run with this.

Each generation is mostly the same; it’s only in the superficial details, like dress or slang, that they change.  But as I get older, I occasionally glimpse real evidence of society shifting. 

I realized this last month when I was in Florida.  One night my colleague and I wandered into a street lined up and down with raucous bars and drunk teenagers, a certified Spring Break hotspot.  As we were trying to decide which bar to visit, a half naked girl stepped in front of us: “We only have a $5 cover charge and you get a free shot!” Which is a pretty persuasive argument, although the “free shot” was a watery green liquid that tasted like fluoride. I was convinced that the entire bar was a front for the American Dental Association: “We can’t do anything about the fact that kids of today are a bunch of immoral hedonists, but at least we can make sure they don’t get gingivitis.”

We went in and I wondered what nearby factory pumped out all these young, tanned, half-naked girls, as though they were a bunch of star-bellied Sneetches.  I figured Orlando must have patented the technology that enabled the process, because otherwise every city would be doing it.  I bet Pittsburgh is just dying for it. But there’s a downside: I went up to the bar and said “What beer do you have?” The bartender, who was, surprisingly, a young, half-naked girl, bounced her head from side to side and chirped “Bud Dry, Coors, Heineken, Miller!”

I should have known.  There were so many Bud Dry signs lighting up the place that I thought maybe it wasn’t a beverage here but rather a religion--a huge cult of worship where once a year everyone practiced “lent” and made the ultimate sacrifice by drinking a decent beer.

You can’t get a dark irish stout where there’s young half-naked girls, and you can’t get young half-naked girls where there’s dark irish stout. In a Florida spring break bar, the people are young and calorie conscious so the beer is cheap and light.  Ireland is dark, cold, and full of whizzing bullets, and so young half-naked girls tend to go somewhere else.

I didn’t actually mean to digress about beer, but I have and now we’re all stuck with it.  The point is, two girls climbed into a nearby cage and started making out.  A little later my colleague and I went into a smaller bar so we could hear ourselves think and have some whiskey.  Two girls came in, surveyed the room, and started making out.

I need to emphasize that this wasn’t a political act.  Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney wouldn’t have walked up to them and said “Well put, young ladies, well put.  And where do you stand on the environment?” It was really just about announcing themselves.  It was like putting on a short skirt and killer shoes, except with more saliva.

People from older generations tend to look upon these cultural shifts and feel compelled to offer advice and guidance.  It pains me to admit it, but I’m the exact same way.  I can’t be quiet about this.  I, too, want to opine to those who engage in casual girl-on-girl action with no more thought than my generation would give to putting on a coat or lacing up our shoes.  I want to offer insights from the vantage point of my advancing years.  I want to instruct these girls who have taken to impromptu makeout sessions in front of rooms full of strangers.

First: Try to wear the same shade lip gloss.  Because if one is wearing red and the other is wearing pink, you get this orange-y mishmash effect.  Watch out for that.

Second: Keep up the good work.

An association I work with asked for a photo of me yesterday to put on their web site.  It made me realize that I only have pictures of myself in T-shirts or wearing underpants on my head.  I don’t have anything professional and corporate.

So I asked my colleague to take some pictures of me.  One of them I posed for, and the other one shows me doing one of my frequent workplace activities.

But now I can’t decide which one to send.

Option #1

Option #2

1. I can be that guy.  No one likes to think they can be that guy, but I can be that guy.  The one who, after two glasses of scotch and a glass of wine, can look at a photo of a family and say “Now that’s a beautiful picture.  I like it when the husband is genuinely smiling and not looking at the camera like an animal trapped in a cage.”

2. Crunchy hippie chick types with pierced noses get greedy when they run yard sales.  I figured, fine, a buck for an Annie Dillard anthology.  She’s all, “Three dollars.” Hello?  I’m sorry.  Here I thought I was standing on someone’s front lawn with a bunch of chipped dishware and musty books, but apparently I accidentally walked into Barnes and frickin’ Noble. You know, where you buy books for new--and don’t take the chance that a previous owner pierced her nose over its pages and dripped fluids across the philosophical musings on nature and beauty.  (Although the pages seemed clean so I settled for two bucks.)

3. I’m not as addicted to movies as I thought.  I didn’t see any this weekend.  And only a few times was I pounded with the huge, bludgeoning realization that right now I could be watching Mean Girls and seeing Lindsay Lohan go all Heathers for a brand-new generation.  Really, I hardly ever felt that.

4. I spend too much time thinking about crap.  At one point I pondered why Disney bothered to name their latest attraction “Twilight Zone Tower of Terror.” Why not just “Tower of Terror”?  Is some kid going to beg to go to Disneyland because they respond to the brand awareness associated with a decades-old black and white anthology TV show?  Or is it merely descriptive--you drop down the Tower of Terror and land on Rod Serling’s polished skull?

Okay, in all honesty, I didn’t learn number 4 this weekend; I already knew it.  And maybe number 1 too.

I’m sitting here with a menu choosing my lunch for the department meeting, and I am confounded by the grammatical inclinations of small-town businesses.  Why does one part of the menu list

BURRITOS

while the other lists

TACO’S

?

It seems to me that burritos are just as likely to be gratuitously possessive as their less tubular counterparts.

I think it’s’ completely nut’s.

My friend invited me over to his house this weekend for barbecue ribs and beer.  He recently lost his wife to a 5-year struggle with cancer.  His web site tracks the number of days that it’s been since she passed away (April 1st).  I asked him about the counter.

“Oh, that’s just a javascript counter,” he said.  “I was going to have it track the days and the seconds too, but I figured that might be a bit too much.”

As we sat in the back yard, his attention was caught by hummingbirds congregating around a feeder.  “There’s a lot of them,” he said, sounding surprised.

He called to the people in the house to come see.  His 8-year old daughter was at a friend’s place, but the house buzzed with everyone else staying there: his wife’s mother, her sister, and the sister’s husband and son. 

My friend explained to me: “As we were putting Cheryl into the ground, a hummingbird came and hovered right over her casket.  It was so striking that it made people gasp. I found out later that the hummingbird is Cheryl’s ‘totem animal,’ according to Native American folklore.”

He said, “I’m about as card carrying an atheist as they come.  I think life is a random event, and I think the hummingbird was just a coincidence.  But I still find comfort in the symbolism. That’s why I put up the feeders.  I’ve seen one or two birds there, but this is the first time I’ve seen multiple hummingbirds.”

Everyone joined us on the deck.  His other daughter also came wobbling out, a two-year old blob of pink clothes.  She smiled at me shyly.

“See?” My friend said to his family, sweeping his arm towards the feeders.  “It’s the first time we’ve seen multiple hummingbirds.”

The sun felt good on my neck and face.  The barbecue puffed smoke.  The beer in my hand, which my friend had brewed himself, tasted faintly of apricot.

Boy, was I disappointed in the series finale of “Friends.” The commercials promised that I’d “find out, once and for all, what happens to Ross and Rachel.” To me, that means what ultimately happens to the characters--the moment in which they physically die.  Whether it’s a painful medical problem in their old age or simply being hit by a car, I had my speakers cranked up so I could hear their death rattles.

I didn’t want to live in the city because if you forget and leave something on the seat of your car, someone will smash the window and take it.  Driving around looking for parking leaves me feel hollow, like someone scooped out my organs in order to fry them in oil.  Money flies out of my hands; the crush of people exhausts me.

But I didn’t want to live where nothing happened, and at one point made a drastic career change to prevent it.  I knew that in isolated areas, it’s a significant event to congregate at a major franchise like Sizzler.  Days feel like acres.  The familiar, dreary surroundings burn into your brain like the after image on a television screen.  I wanted to be within ten minutes of a city, where you can get food that tastes so good that you’ll remember it months later, even if you forget who you were with and what you talked about.

I once knew a girl who rented a cheap apartment in an expensive area of the city, and she could only park her car in a driveway on certain hours of the week.  She loved it.  I still know a girl who married someone who grew up a mile away from her, and they both live near their small hometown.

I’m not like either of them; I live somewhere inbetween.  A half block from my building lets me stand on a tree-lined street that reaches up into the Oakland hills.  The other direction reveals a view of downtown Oakland, and beyond that, on a clear day, a hazy outline of downtown San Francisco.  I know that if I lived in the city, its buildings would seem to curl over my head like knuckles.  From this distance, they look like outstretched fingers.  I should laugh at myself for making life decisions based on a carefully tuned, somewhat deranged sense of urban ambivalence, but having actually achieved that delicate equilibrium, I’m at a loss to describe my deep feeling of comfort.

Saturday morning, while waiting until I had to be somewhere, I chanced upon a White Elephant sale held in north Oakland, near one of the senior citizen facilities.  It was the kind of place that if an elderly woman asks you “How do you like the White Elephant sale?” and you say “My issue is, I think that white elephants get a bum rap by being the de facto synonym for junk that no one wants.  For example, let’s say you had a white elephant, and there’s a bunch of other white elephants who want to kill you.  You could train your white elephant to infiltrate their ranks and act as a double agent on your behalf"--the woman is likely to look at you dazedly, touch your shoulder, and say “You’re not my grandson, are you?”

The surreal part, though, were the two security guards posted at the entrance.  Two bored asian teenagers wore bright orange vests and greeted people as they walked in and out. 

Don’t get me wrong: security guards can be good things.  If you’re shopping in a Safeway at dicey part of Oakland, you sometimes feel good about seeing two policemen keeping an eye on things even as they peer intently at the doughnut selection.

But at a White Elephant sale on a Saturday morning at a senior citizen’s facility, what the hell is going to happen?

“Oh my God.  Someone stole my chipped saucer collection and two rusty candle holders!”

“Look!  It’s Irma!  She’s got them and she’s halfway to the exit already!”

“Great scott!  She just might make it, too!  I don’t know what she did to retrofit her walker, but she’s moving like greased lightning.”