When one of the people who usually sits near me did not show up for a couple of days I’d assumed he was fired. That’s how it goes here. Nice guy, mild-mannered, here one day, gone the next. Turns out he was not fired, just took a couple of well-deserved albeit unannounced days off.

I have had no luck making friends at this job. I’m not the most sociable person to begin with but the nature of things here just seems to make it impossible to forge bonds. We have team meetings but they are overwhelmingly dominated by the loudest people in the room. By loud I’m talking SCREAMERS. I seldom understand anything they are saying but they scream a manic, panicked timbre. I have never competed well against such individuals, neither professionally or interpersonally. As I told many an ex-girlfriend: If you want to win an argument with me just yell louder. You will never lose. You may be wrong but you will never be denied the satisfaction of winning the argument.

I don’t know what I need instead of this. I like to think I’ve gotten anything and everything I needed from this job. I’ve proven I can have a job job after 20 years on my own. I don’t ache or years to go back to working at home, alone, with no human contact save for what comes from camgirls and dating apps.

I rummage through my cloud storage. I find photos from 11 and 12 years ago, asking Why? Why did I take this picture? Did this make the world a better place? Did this improve me, or anyone, in any measurable way? The answer, typically, is no. The echo chamber of sadness over time wasted, talent squandered, but the weight of time always reigning most oppressive. There is no stopping it, no starting it, no speeding it up or slowing it.

Dropping off laundry today I turned to ask, as I was leaving, if I could pick it up tonight. She said yes. I got it in early enough. The nature of the exchange reminded me of a supposed spycam in a dressing room at a clothing store. A woman coaxes an unsuspecting male customer into the room and sucks his cock for a few minutes, until he comes. Real or not the surveillance spycam format is an exhilarating way to capture sex acts. None of the sex part of the video remindedd me of the exchange with the laundromat lady. It was the tone of voice we both used. From the spy video the dude i heard asking “Can I come back again?” The woman says “Yes.” They both spoke in whispers. The laundry woman and I spoke in those whispers. The same semi-secret exchange of information confirming that I would be back, back for my laundry, most likely no blowjob. I guess I could evaluate every circumstance I expect to encounter in a day and rate the likelihood that a sex act would be performed either on me or by me. Most circumstances would return a 0% likelihood.

Earlier and throughout the brief whispery encounter with the laundry woman I had the tune for “Ambiguously Gay Duo”, and old SNL sketch, stuck in my head. I have no idea where that came from, probably a similar sounding jingle on the radio. But it led me to assert, to no one listening, that my sexuality is 100% biguous. It sounds decisive. And BIG. That was another morning stream of thought. The word BIG was supposed to be my word of the year for… I don’t remember now, probably 2016. I used to have a circle of friends that made new years eve a ritual occurrence for predicting the next year in one word. I dont’ remember what the others’ words were, at least not off the top of my head. But my new word for the year is BIGUOUS.