Today’s soundtrack: so much depends on the weather
Today at 11:02pm: installing Venetian blinds


Dammit--I thought the gig was on Friday, but it’s on Thursday. This week I’m doing a reading at NYU and today I realized it’s a day earlier than I’d expected because I have the type of memory you have if you accidentally bang your head into things a lot.

My last two gigs haven’t been stellar, so I want this one to be good. I had a reading for some arts society about a month ago and tried out a new story, and it just didn’t go over. I figure this time around I’d better stick with the tried-and-true.

The event I’m reading at will have multiple speakers and performers. The Keynote Speaker, like my friend Michelle, is a political activist. Unlike Michelle she’s also a venerated eighty-year-old woman who’s been doing important things since before I was born. I don’t know much about political activism.

Well today I got an e-mail from the conference organizer:


We have contracted you for our Opening Event this Thursday 4/1/2004 as a performer. Unfortunately, due to [Keynote Speaker]'s health concerns, she has backed out from the event just recently.

Because of this recent turn of events, would it be possible for you to be our keynote speaker for the night???


Whoa. My head started shaking an emphatic “No,” then I put my hands up to steady it before I banged it into something.

First thought that came into my mind was “I’m not qualified.”

Then I realized I’m almost 33 and fuck it, I am sorta qualified. Though I’ll endeavor not to use words like “fuck it” or “sorta” during the speech. I’ll use words like “endeavor.”

The conference organizer called me with the details. The original keynote speech was supposed to be forty-five minutes, but since I’m not exactly The Man (or The Woman), they planned on reducing mine to ten minutes.

Ten minutes isn’t really a keynote, it’s more of a key-post-it. Ten minutes is like, a warm-up act at a comedy club.

Not that I’m complaining; ten minutes of saying something potentially helpful to college students seeking answers is better than any other ten minutes of my life. Other ten-minute episodes of my life include:

- Where is the other sock? I must find the other sock.
- This stain on the counter will come out if I keep scrubbing it.
- Why isn’t the train coming?
- Pizza, definitely pizza--wait, I had pizza last night--maybe a hamburger? A burrito? Mediterranean. Or maybe Japanese.
- There has to be a bathroom somewhere in here.
- If I sleep for just another ten minutes and skip breakfast, I can still be only fifteen minutes late to work, which isn’t bad.
- I know I came into this room for something, and I am not leaving until I remember what it was.
- Maybe if I just stand here like an idiot that beautiful girl will approach me and invite me to Tuscany.

So I’ve basically got a day-and-a-half to bang out a speech. I have to integrate it with the theme of the event, which I’m not really clear on. I wish the theme of the event was Major Cartoon Characters And What We Can We Learn From Them or something light and easy. I could do ten minutes on why I love dogs. I could do ten minutes on the best way to get to JFK during rush hour. I could do ten minutes on how repeated cranial impacting can affect your memory, but I’d probably forget the last half of the speech.

Well, I know what I’ll be doing for at least ten minutes tomorrow, and that’s staring at a blank screen in Microsoft Word while that lousy cursor blinks at me impatiently. I hate the blinking cursor, it won’t go away until you chase it with letters, and once you start chasing it you can’t stop, or it comes back again.

Okay here we go...I’m getting something...signal’s coming in:

“Chasing the Cursor,” by Rain Noe.

Christ. If I had just written that on a typewriter I’d pull the paper out, crumple it into a ball and throw it at the wastebasket.

I’d miss the wastebasket. Then I’d get out of my chair, bend over to retrieve the paper and my head would connect with the printer loud enough to make my roommate say “What was that?”