I watch my audience of two rolling around together until they just resembled a blur of fur; a blur of fur that seconds earlier sat attentive, in my living room, to a Yamaha acoustic guitar. Then the doorbell rings and as quick as it started, the fight was over. I didn’t feel so unimportant anymore. In fact, the feeling of being ignored by my dogs was overlapped by the memory of a phrase I had heard sung by Andrew McMahon with his band Something Corporate in the song Konstantine, “the present’s just a pleasant interruption to the past.” Is that all life is, a series of interruptions, a distractions that get us by? Think about it. If that were true, than he’s saying that problems that one has face through out one’s life may never be resolved, only forgotten, if not just for a brief moment. One by one we digress the last digression, hoping that engaging in the current will dissolve the pains that linger.
My co-worker is trying to quit smoking and it’s her eleventh day smoke-free, but still smokin'...get it? She's hot. “Great job Mary!” I encourage, as I watch her frantically dig in her purse for the patches that she has to help her out. Three more months go by, Mary throws the patches out like training wheels to a big girl. She pedals on taking in the fresh air like Lionel and Maggy on a summer drive. Sadly, I watch Mary wobble, realizing those training wheel are no longer there to support. She flips over the handlebars and face plants right into one of those public ashtrays by the side of a downtown building. True story.
I, personally, don’t smoke, but there are advantages that I see myself having if I did. Social opportunities. I don’t have any raw data to prove it, but I can probably say with confidence that a smoker will most likely interact with many more people than a non-smoker. While we healthy-lunged fresh-breathed loser are sitting in our cubicles typing away, our smoking co-workers are probably out there having an interesting conversation about the Large Hadron Collider, a physics experiment that collides opposing particles hoping to understand the deepest laws of nature. To paraphrase, scientists hope to find forces and particles that reigned during the first trillionth of a second of the Big Bang. Test runs deemed successful in 2008, which called for great celebration amongst many physicist around the world. After many strange mechanical failures though the machine explodes and was shut down. Thus creating this freakishly entertaining theory of how the Large Hadron Collider experiments was unnatural. Some labeled the work as “playing god,” an act that the human race was not meant to play out. In fact, the many “malfunctions” that have occurred to the collider has been unexplained. So “A pair of otherwise distinguished physicists have suggested that the hypothesized Higgs boson, which physicists hope to produce with the collider, might be so abhorrent to nature that its creation would ripple backward through time and stop the collider before it could make one, like a time traveler who goes back in time to kill his grandfather.” Apparently, I work at the geekiest company in the world.
So Mary, with her new interesting fact of the day, throws her cigarette butt out, goes to the bathroom to fix her hair, waits for the elevator to take her up two floors, bumps into Carol by the water cooler and chit chats for five minutes before returning to her desk next to mine with a blank expression on her face.
“What?” I probe.
“I had something crazy to tell you,” she explained. “But I got distracted and now I forget. How’s that headache of yours?”
“Fuck, don’t remind me.”
The doorbell rings again. My dogs go ballistic.
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