mallorys_camera | Leonard Cohen Has a Day Job

Every work day around noon I lurch forth from the Bartleby Inc. cubicles and grab the elevator down to the first floor. The elevator talks! "Welcome to the DOD field support office," it says. "Display ID badge at all times."

The first floor is a long Kubric-esque corridor past a suite that used to be a morgue and various other rooms that were once holding tanks for disembodied organs and of course, there's the "Whoop! Whoop!" janitor. Sometimes the acoustic tiles have worked their way loose from the ceiling allowing glimpses of asbestos and shadows of rats who've gnawed halfway through coils of electric wires before expiring in a blaze of sparks.

You have to use your ID to get out of the building. Sometimes I fumble and it takes a minute or two.

Then it's a straight shoot to the Smoking Pagoda where at any given moment forty or so of America's Finest are grimly firing up their Bics in a patriotic effort to reduce the deficit by dying of lung cancer. That way the government won't have to pay out on their full military retirement pensions.

I light up too. Environments like this are great at demonstrating exactly how over-rated life is. Some people have to meditate for years to arrive at this revelation.

Then I pull out my cell phone and punch in the number for the store.

"It's your daily SOS from Bad Place Central," I tell Ben when he answers.

"And how is the Bad Place today?" he asks.

"Oh, Jesus," I say. "The conversation du jour is Diet Pepsi. They've been debating it for a full half an hour."

"What is there to debate about Diet Pepsi?" Ben wonders.

"Oh, you know. Whether it's better or worse than Diet Coke from the vantage point of three critical criteria: Taste. Access. And, of course, the subsequent rate of micturition. Did you know that a twelve-pack of Diet Pepsi is seven cents less at Smart & Final than it is at CostCo? Mister Rogers thought you didn't!"

Ben laughs. "Well, that adds up over a lifetime. Assuming you drink a twelve-pack a day and don't switch your brand loyalties. Darlin', this is basic hunter/gatherer conversation. Ten thousand years ago they would have been discussing the best places to dig up the biggest roots."

"You know, Ben," I say, "I just don't think I'm cut out for this hunter/gatherer stuff."

One day this week there was a package waiting for me when I got home. From Wal-Mart.

I sniffed it suspiciously.

Then I called Ben again. "What the hell is this?" I complained. "You know the only two distinctions I have in this life are that I've never set foot inside a Wal-Mart and I've never watched a single episode of Friends. Who's trying to undermine my street cred?"

Ben laughed. "It's from my mother. It's your birthday present."

That's right! I remember. I have a birthday coming up. At one point in my life, this would have been a cause for celebration. Now it's just an easily hacked password.

It was an MP3 player! Not an IPod which actually I didn't want. No, an MP3 player with a built-in radio. Smaller hard drive but that only means I get to load up each day's songs from my computer which is fun. Remember the rather sinister bit from James Barrie's novelization of his play Peter Pan where he describes Mrs. Darling going through the thoughts in her children's minds as though they were clothes in a drawer, putting out the ones she wanted them to wear the next day? The process of selecting music is sort of like that. Earplugs make for a hermetically sealed universe – the hunter/gatherers may have moved on to the relative merits of Burger King versus McDonald's but I am listening to the Austin Lounge Lizards sing "Leonard Cohen has a day job" and Pink Martini croon, "Je neux pais travelier…"

It makes all the difference.

And anyway, The Little Store is almost back up to December's revenue mark. I won't have to do the Bartleby side gig much longer.