I saw a billboard today that bothered me. Though I'd seen it a thousand times before, even knew the guy who headed the campaign responsible for it, today it seemed as though I was seeing it for the very first time or perhaps seeing it through a new set of eyes. It happened during my noon walk. I haven't been hungry lately when lunchtime rolls around at the office, and going out to lunch with my co-workers and listening to them blather on about contextualized direct-response marketing success rates has become physically painful. Because of this, I've taken to solitary walks around the neighborhood during my break. Today, I stepped out onto Pearl street from the south entrance of the building. All the offices in the neighborhood let out for lunch at about the same time each day, and all the office drones loaded into their imported cars and spilled out of parking garages onto the street, clogging them immediately. I walked past them along the empty sidewalk. They sit in their sealed cages, breathing processed air while blowing their exhaust in my face. It was a beautiful spring day, with the crippling heat of summer still months away and the winter's stinging kiss yesterday's memory. The sky was clear, a bright glowing turquoise, and overhead the sun beamed down warm rays that cut through the cool March breeze. I continued my walk until I came to Woodall Rogers Expressway, where Pear passed over the highway. I waited for the light and continued across, over the angry hum of the cars racing below. Their collective heat blasted skyward, creating a change in the direction and temperature of the breeze as I crossed over the highway. I was halfway across when I noticed the billboard, facing south against the northbound traffic. It was billboard for a cancer treatment center. It read, "We specialize in a unique form of cancer...Yours."

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.

Friday

I gasped and sat up violently, my body clammy and cold. My fingers and toes buzzed as though they'd been asleep. I felt like I couldn't breath, that there was something squeezing my chest, where my heart was flopping around like a fish out of water. Then the cold air hit me. Why had I left the terrace door open last night? That, I didn't know. The weather had been so finicky in the last month. Monday morning, I woke up stifled and sweating in the middle of the night and had to get up and open the door. I didn't remember leaving the door open last night, but if I did--I must have--then it was so I wouldn't again wake up in a sweat. But there I was, still sweating, only this time I was freezing as well.

I got out of bed and walked to the door to the balcony. I slid shut the large glass door and stared out over the skyline. For some reason, it didn't seem to shine the same this morning. The green outline of the Bank of America building was a little more hunter then emerald. As for Reunion Tower--as a kid I called it the Giant Tee-Off, since it looks like a golf ball on a tee--there were noticeably more lights missing than usual. Any other morning, the view of Downtown cheered me up--reminded me that I live in the big city--but this morning it seemed dreary, like a rusty fog had covered everything in sight, leaving me with an awful taste in my mouth, like an old penny.

My mind felt foggy, like there was some idea floating around in there just beyond my reach, like a voice in the distance or an image buried underwater that would rise up to the surface just enough that I could begin to make it out before diving back down again. Was I still dreaming? I've never remembered my dreams, not even as a child, so if I were indeed still dreaming, would I know?

At three o'clock, my alarm sounded. I thew on Hanro, Egyptian cotton bath robe, grabbed my gym bag and went out the door, down the hallway to the elevator and rode it up. At the twenty-ninth floor, the elevator stopped, the doors opened to reveal a young woman standing in the hallway. I'd seen this girl before, every Monday, Wednesday and Friday morning, like clockwork. She couldn't have been older then thirty. Light brown hair with subtle blond highlights, very tasteful, pulled back into a ponytail. She wore a pair of boxer shorts and a Southern Methodist Law tee-shirt. She glanced at me as she stepped onto the elevator. I nodded at her. "Good morning," I said. "Morning," she replied. She turned her back to me a the elevator doors slid silently shut.

Good Morning. It struck me as odd that after months of meeting each other like this--three times a week, the only two souls awake in the building--we had never once shared more than those two words. God knows, I tried. A good looking young woman like her. But my earliest attempts to break her ice were derailed when I saw that she wasn't my type. That is to say, she was a little too "headstrong." There was also something in her eyes that was at the same time difficult to describe and entirely deliberate. It had been like her eyes were lasers or even x-ray beams that cut through the facade of my being. I felt naked when she looked at me, like she saw, not only through my clothes, but the whole outer image of me. Like she could see inside me, count my rings and know my true age. She could see the tiny nick of a scar from my eye lift that the doctor assured me nobody would notice. Honestly, I was glad that we only shared those two simple words. On days when we missed each other, I liked it even more.

By three fifteen I had begun my hour of cardio. One hour every morning and my no-carb diet have kept me under ten percent body fat well into my later thirties. Tuesdays and Thursdays I hit the treadmill. Monday, Wednesday and Friday it's the stairmill. It was Friday, so I got on the stairmill. Sure, it looks a little gay, but the truth is it's a real ball buster. "It'll wup the shit out'a ya. You can't argue with the results" my trainer told me. On any other day I would have agreed with him, but today...

Fifteen minutes in and my heart is pumping along at its target pace. My breathing deepens, and the sweat begins to dampen the collar of my tee-shirt. I was tired, and I knew it. Not any more worn-out than I should have been, but that morning I just seemed to feel it more. I looked at my reflection in the wall-length mirror in the front of the empty cardio room. My god, I thought, I do look ridiculous. It wasn't just me, a grown, arguably middle-aged man on a stair machine, but the situation as a whole. The fact that I payed seventy-five bucks a month to use this gym, then rode an elevator up ten flights of stairs to climb fake stairs, just so I can watch CNN on the High-def plasma widescreen they got bolted to the wall or stop by the Jamba Juice that they had built here for my convenience.

I stared into my reflection, observing my body as it humped its way along the truncated escalator to nowhere, until I stopped climbing, and the machine dropped me to the floor. My heart just wasn't in it.

I tried to lift some weights, which went better. Then I bought a protein smoothie and went back downstairs to me apartment.

Plastic Dreams

Before last night, I dreamt in plastic. And it all seemed so real to me at the time. My loft apartment. My Mercedes. The desk in my office at the ad agency. They all seemed so concrete, so unquestionably necessary. Like oxygen or a spine, as if, were they to disappear suddenly, I'd be left bowled-over and wriggling on the floor like an earthworm washed onto the sidewalk.

I dreamt of a world that was disposable, where everything was shiny, spotless and new. State of the art. A world where something as simple as a television or a coffee maker became worthless the moment the newest model hit the shelves, or more likely, the VIP market. After all, why wait for it to become available to the "GP"--that's General Public in ad-speak--when you can buy it on the grey market for twice the price and get it months before anyone else.

I dreamt I was in a world where everything was replaceable at the touch of a button, and the solutions to all of life's problems was no further that a phone call and a credit card away. Where what they say is true, that money can't buy happiness, but the promise of perfection is for sale on every corner, in every window display and magazine rack. Every billboard and bus stop affiche proclaiming in one unanimous voice "We are young. We are beautiful. We are immortal. Join us."

Before last night, I dreamt in plastic. My loft apartment, plastic. My Mercedes, plastic. The desk in my office at the ad agency, where I've spent the last fifteen years designing plastic labels to slap onto plastic products and pack into plastic boxes. Everything plastic. All of it, plastic. Plastic. Plastic. Plas--

You get the picture.

Even my face, my once handsome face, rich in youth and vigour, now spackeled and pumped full of botox and filler--an eye lift here, a chemical peel there--all in an attempt to delay the inevitable. A new coat of paint on a house infested with termites. Brass polish on the Titanic. A chocolate coating on a turd.

Before last night, I dreamt in plastic.
This morning, I woke up.