I had a nice though short visit with Jack today which enabled me to deploy not just one but all of the following quips in my beard-related arsenal:

“You look like the Wild Man of Borneo.”

“It’s like there’s a lawn on your face.”

“No, I would have noticed the horrible hair first but the horrible beard was demanding all my attention.”

“I think its mass is actually greater than the rest of your head.”

“How do you walk upright with that thing clinging to your chin?”

“You have a little something on your mouth.”

Then he gave me free CDs and the ethics of bribery dictated that I shut up.

Next semester I’m taking:

– Human Biology (Biology for Poets, Underachievers and Retards)

– Psychology: Representations of Gender (For people who couldn’t get into Human Sexuality)

– English 214 (English by and for people who don’t really like English)

I have class, once again, on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

People keep talking to me; I’m starting to wonder if some misguided yet well meaning friend has paid strangers to help me overcome my phobia regarding same. Much the same way that my college roommate’s boyfriend “helped” her overcome her fear of fire by holding her down on the bed and waving a lighter next to her face. If you can believe her that is but I believe everyone. Well anyway people keep talking to me and I cannot account for it. For example on BART, he said I’m stuck and I said I think this one is not a word and he said you’re right and I said I used to do a lot of crossword puzzles. And he said I’m going to PHill and I said oh you look like an Orinda type you look too expensive for PHill. (He had a very small phone.) He said you have beautiful eyes and I said thank you. (I do have beautiful eyes, it’s God’s truth.) He said will you give me your number or maybe your email address and I said oh, oh, I can’t. You can’t he said. Right I said well this is my stop and yours too I guess nice talking to you.

Then today here’s what happened. I was waiting on the corner and another man said smile it’s Friday. (It is.) I said it’s cold I hate the cold. He said I took the bus up we were on the same BART. I said oh uh huh. Well have a nice day he said hopefully. You too I said not having been born in a barn. That was about the size of it.

It’s weird how you can go out in the world and it’s like there’s all these people there expecting to be interacted with. I am beginning to get used to it I guess. Confessing to this phobia seems to have done a good part in conquering it. Unfortunately that’s not always the case, as witness the time I confessed my bug phobia to the Sicilian and he got mad and claimed he himself was afraid of nothing and did not understand it in me and refused to kill my roaches for me and made me cry. What was I thinking there I wonder, for all those months living with a bug loving communist.

Josh Pelham plays for the Lakers I think. Probably not the same Josh Pelham though. Because mine was only my height (though I am tall, like to wear shorts, hookhookdunkdunk and could play in the NBA). He was such a sweet little felon. He used to steal cologne and wear it for me. Every day he smelled like a different person.

Where are you now, Josh Pelham? Are you in jail? Are you an investment banker? Do you still wear flannel every day and steal Whitney Houston tapes from Tower? Once you gave me a valentine with a promise to rock my world, but you never did rock my world, Josh Pelham. You disappeared in a cloud of petty larceny and left my world still solid on its fulcrum, and I went off with someone else to learn how to kiss with tongue. You betrayed your promise to me long before I betrayed you with the Lad. You really had it coming, Josh Pelham. You should have followed through.

Various sinus elements – bad elements, the kind you don’t want to see in front of your neighborhood 7-11 – have been congregating under my wig for a few days now. Every morning I wake up and a few more have roared into town on their hawgs of compressed snot. They start drinking earlier, too, than is really decent, and by midmorning they’ve exhausted all the other available fluids and have begun to suck out my brain juices. It’s kind of the equivalent of street toughs getting high on paint fumes. All morning and afternoon I walk around with a dried up brain like a spinster but I don’t dare argue with these guys. What if they left the cranial cavity and started to trickle, menacing and mean, down towards the exits? You don’t want these guys in the bar but you sure as hell don’t want to let them loose on the world. One sneeze and there goes the neighborhood. I have to be careful. It’s a big responsibility.

Some days I feel like going up there with a nightstick and giving them whatfor; most days, though, I swallow hard and just let it go. Times are changing. The world is getting harder. How can you fight progress? In the evenings I close the curtains and hide out behind my eyes; I can leave my brain to the tough guys, I guess. I never used it much. Eventually the Advil cops’ll get in there and wave their weapons around a little, quiet things down for a few hours so we can all get some sleep.

I’m researching a paper about the effects of cattle ranching on rainforests in Brazil, and if my research leads me to one more article decrying the knee-jerk liberalism of writers who urged America to temper its grief with awareness of its sins INTHEWAKEOFSEPTETC I will go bananas. Bananas. Bananas.

“Uh, oh, here it comes: that danged moral equivalence again, reminding us that we’re not allowed to mourn this one great act of evil without remembering how much we are to blame for it with our past policies.”

Fuck you, namless hack from the redundant Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, with your evil rhetoric and your garish flag. Get out of my Google search.

My boss is a country kind of fellow. He comes in every day in cowboy boots and a Southwest patterned shirt and kind of has a Northern California Fort Bragg type drawl to his speech. One day he brought in a cassette tape of a honky-tonk song he’d written, played on what sounded like one of the smaller, cheaper kinds of Casio keyboards into a Fisher Price microphone. He hadn’t recorded the vocals, just the music, so we sat and listened to the organized BEAT-beat-beat-beat BRIDGE melody and he kind of mumbled the words under his breath. Something about Lola and a truck. It was a long song, the kind of length that gives you plenty of time to start undergoing some intense internal paranoia about what your expression is doing as you enthusiastically nod and every so often laugh in a studied way to endorse how delighted you are by this performance.

My boss also used to co-own racehorses, which I don’t know how he afforded it on a Master’s degree in Ancient Chinese Military Strategy* but that’s not really my business.** He used to bring his son to the race track on weekends and he’d have the kid stand at the stable door to distract the state vet with childish blandishments while my boss “gave the horses drugs and used machines on ’em. Technically you’re not supposed to do that, but it doesn’t really hurt the horses. It’s good for ’em.” His son is a vegan now. “It’s probably because of all his allergies,” my boss explained. “My son is real allergic to animals.”

Yup. That’s probably it.

*My boss loves two things: Chinese culture and the track. It’s like someone invented a peripheral character and gave him two opposing interests in an effort to make him appear three-dimensional. It leads to a lot of comments like this one: “I used to read the I Ching a lot and the I Ching says that a man who does not take heed of his own nature is a foolish man. And my nature’s at the track, so I’m leaving at 4:00 today and y’all should too.”

**I will just say, if there’s a Cowboy Mafia anywhere in the world then my boss is one of the henchmen standing by the door in secret meetings and cracking his knuckles and rushing the Indian hero one at a time with the other henchmen and giving credence to the virility of said hero by facelessly expiring.

My boss has a theory that the continental drift was actually caused by beavers. Apparently, beavers were much bigger in the Ice Age, more the size of grizzly bears than the cute rodents we know and love. (This is according to a website he’s found whose veracity – is that my word? – is anyone’s guess.) Obviously this gave them a bigger influence on their surrounding territories.

“Look how much damage they can do right now, at their present size,” he explained earnestly. “Now imagine if they were really HUGE animals.”

All of which led to the highlight of my day so far: sitting at my desk while behind me the old German woman who works in my office was idly chanting, “Giant beavers, giant beavers, giant beavers…