The Dance of Destiny, the Loafing of Laze.
There’s a reading tonight on campus, but I’m feeling extremely hermitlike in here, inside what my roommate calls “Your Cave.” She always comes home, all the house lights turned off: the kitchen, the hallway, my bedroom, back, back, back until, there’s my office, all warm and dim and cozy. I specifically don’t want to interact with a bevy of people or sit up straight in a chilly auditorium wearing real clothes tonight. I just want to curl up inside by the blazing radiator in an afghan on the amazing antique rocker I found a few weeks ago. Chamomile tea, even, and nobody in sight for miles. Just this book. Hell, if I were outside on a park bench with this book and a handy streetlight, I'd take it.

So, I’m here.
Carmelita and I had this really yummy brand of frozen pizza for dinner, which is worlds better than the delivery alternative. I’ve never seen this, but Carmelita says that whenever we order from Papa John’s, we get the creepiest delivery boy ever. Last time he came, he warned Carmelita to be careful of jumping over the giant corners in our house, his stare hard and evil and empty.
“And he drove up, his car blaring with that song! That 'Whoa-whoa-whoaaaa' dance song?”

Logically, I thought: I have no earthly idea what you’re talking about, Carmelita. But then I heard myself singing back to her, “Baby don’t hurt me, don’t hurt me, no more…” We both laughed over the fact that we keep that song stored away inside ourselves without even knowing it. She says this: Something about that song, coupled with that delivery boy, equals creepy.
What is love?

I always just sort of linked that song in my mind with Rick Astley, who, a number of years earlier, sang that “Never Gonna Give You Up, Never Gonna Let You Down” dance song, which is basically, like, the same song. It also being true that Rick Astley and the “What is Love?” man possess basically the same voice. And what if they are blood kin, we wondered? What if all dance singer men are chosen from one family of men, like boy sopranos of English days of yore? Chosen for how their grumbly-weird voices sound, projected over a very specific beat.



Ecce Romani
I need to go running. No; better than that. I need to do community service; need to take a year of my life and devote it to relief in Somalia. I’m saying this not because I had pizza for supper tonight, five pounds of hors d'oeuvres at a party last night and haven’t gone running in a week. This isn’t about being skinny or fit; it’s about real virtue, or total lack thereof. It’s because of the other thing I ate last night, which a friend brought to said-party: a gourmet dark chocolate bar with bacon in it.
He told me about it and I said, “No. Gross. Gah.” But then I went and tried it and yes: It is the best, most evil thing I have ever put in my mouth. The incomprehensible, looming, loamy sweetness of the darkest chocolate and then, the crunchy, salty Perfect Foodness of bacon, all there in one really, really decadent bite. I would have felt less wrong, less tainted with Romulus Augustus-styled hedonism, had he fed me some damn foie gras on a Chicken McNugget. Just hand me a toga and a feather. Surely, we are the Romans.