Plastic Dallas

With my cardio cut short that morning, I had an extra forty-five minutes of free time in my apartment before I had to be at the office, so for the first time in I don't know how long, I decided to take my coffee at home rather than go through the Starbucks drive-thru on the way to the office. I never use it, I though to myself. How much had the damned thing cost me, I couldn't remember, but it was professional grade, Italian designed, with twin, pump-fed, digitally temperature-controlled espresso jets (neither of which showed any sign of use, because, honestly, I didn't particularly care for espresso). I had even had it fed with a water line so there was no reservoir that needed filling. You could tell the thing was designed for Americans, though, because there on the side was an honest to goodness drip coffee maker built right in. I loaded the grinder bin with some whole-bean Arabica that I'd bought from some chick at some "Save the Rainforest" charity thing they put on in the lobby of my building. I remembered thinking about her, that privileged uptown girl who'd never worked a day in her life but fought nevertheless for the rights of bean pickers in Peru or where-the-fuck-ever, and how I'd played her. I had her giving me oral in the elevator on the way up to my apartment, her one hand clutched the back of my thigh, guiding me further in, her other hand holding steady a wheeled cart loaded with overpriced fair-trade coffee. Cost me a cool grand in the end, but I've spent more than that at the club trying to fuck a girl, most of whom didn't give head anywhere near as well.
I set the machine to grind and brew a half pot and then went to the bathroom to take a leak.
I know I'm not that age yet, but I can't help wondering if I'm going to the toilet to pee too frequently.
That morning, for thirty minutes, I sat on the balcony of my apartment, sipped my coffee and watched the sun rise. It broke far out over the town of Mesquite, and I could look straight down Main Street--between the high-rises--and watch it. There in the distance it stretched and bent over the horizon like a wet swich between two hands, rising up and swelling like the earth was pregnant with a fiery child. The deep violet was shattered by burring reds and ocher orange that streaked across the sky, setting the clouds ablaze in furious pink and green. Every color that could ever possible exist was out there. Nothing had been left out. Never a lack of light. It couldn't have been planned better. Like the sun was shining just for us, just for Dallas, my city, and the phlegmatic mood that had bugged my up to that point was replaced with a fullness of spirit that my morning hour of cardio never had a hope to touch.
When the sun was fully up, and it was time to leave, however, it dawned on me that--as if it should surprise anyone--the sun did that every day. This moment that I had just experienced, this opera of light was the most natural, quotidian of occurrences--no more rare or special than a bowel movement. Counting sunset, one could have even said that it happened twice a day, and the only reason I had thought it so special was that I was always somewhere else when it happened. I was always either in the gym or the office or some hotel bar with my colleagues cruising for strange. There existed such pure and natural beauty in the world that I had failed to see and acknowledge for so long because or my, and it was that realization that really made me feel crummy.

I sat at my desk, straightening paper clips and looking at the pile of papers like they were ancient and foreign artifacts. I didn't know what to do with them or even if there was anything that could be done with them. On the drive to the office, I told myself that, fat be dammed, I would skip more morning workouts so I could watch the sun rise more often. I couldn't just let all that natural beauty be wasted on eyes that refuse to see it. At least twice a week, I'd promised. I was the best I could do to fight back that crummy feeling that was building, pulsing inside, that flopping-fish heart thing I'd felt that morning, and it worked, temporarily, until found myself there, in my office, with the recycled air and fluorescents humming overhead like a choir of retard angles with sun-baked rubber bands for vocal chords. I straightened out another paper clip, took four of them together and put a bit of tape around one and then spread them apart at the other end and set them upright on my desk so that they stood up against each other like the frame of a tee-pee. Then I took a sheet one of the papers from my desk and rolled it into a cone, cut it to size and set it over the tiny structure. Maybe after lunch, I thought, I'll paint it up really nice. I could look up some design ideas in the archives--perhaps something from the Sioux Chief Manufacturing Company campaign we launched back in '89, when I was just getting on with the firm, before everything went and got so P.C.
The tee-pee didn't hold my interest for long. Soon, I looked back upon the papers on my desk and thought that perhaps they would look better if they were bound together. Then, at least, they'd be together whenever I figured out how to deal with them. I needed a binder clip. There were none in my drawer, so I walked to the supply room to get a one, only to forget what I was looking for when I got there. I walked around the supply room a couple times, scanning the many shelves of office supplies, but nothing looked familiar there, either. I could tell you the names of things. That's a box of staples. Ball point pens. A dry-erase marker. But I couldn't grasp why they were all there, nor why I would need any of it to design a logo for a chemical manufacturer. Defeated in my search, I returned to my office, and upon seeing the chaos of papers on my desk, I remembered that I had needed a binder clip. Again in the supply room, I grabbed a binder clip, another box of paper clips, some thumb tacks and a small cork-board. I stacked up the papers on my desk to find that it was too thick a collection of pages for the binder clip to get around, so I returned anew to the supply room for yet another binder clip, then separated the stack of papers in two, bound them separately and then tied the two clips together with a small bit of string I found in my desk drawer. In total, this took me nearly forty-five minutes.