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happen? It was miraculous.
    “So?” I prompted softly.
    “So, since I’m new, I have new ideas, which will be different, since I am different,” he whimpered.
    “Is that where I fit in?” I had been wondering about my fit. Not knowing what Harrison wanted was one of life’s less voluptuous experiences. Panic ensued. I knew the odds were likely that I was about to do the wrong thing. But what would be right? What? What? My mind skidded on the icy freeway of fear. I was doomed, doomed, by my own lack of savoir faire .
    If I was a Buddhist, I could look at this fellow and think that only loving, only knowing matter. Because Buddhism is the occult pastime of our age, I could understand that few grasp the experiences I’ve lived and that this was my blessing. And vicey-versy. I could come to terms with the slow pace that invades the depth of my soul when I truly love, when I truly want to understand. But every time I try to be a Buddhist, I fail, simply by trying. I sit in rooms with people who have not yet achieved their goals. They say that the best way to achieve your goals is not to try. But their lives are not proof of that theory. It seems obvious, the contradiction. You have to try. I don’t mind washing water, but can’t I still want a glass to drink out of? Panic, panic, breathe, breathe. Accept that what others do to me is the punishment I deserve?
    Or, I could seize the momentito.
    Bond.
    He held up that week’s issue of The Brand New York . The cover advertisement was for Red Snapper Douche. What a great piece of graphic design, I thought, associating directly to Nadine, my own personal fish, my dearest delish, and her workplace struggles, occurring simultaneously with mine. How romantic.
    Politics had changed so, these last few months. Now that housing was under control, and small business seemed to thrive, there was a group turn to focus on our jobs as the next place to change the world. Let people rearrange their relationship to the machine. But now that the means of production is mental, there are no burly iron workers of yore. Labor is intimate, between us and our computers. Individually, we may each try to subvert, but, of course, individually in the long-term can’t change much. We each have that one computer that we stare at and grow to love/hate. The illusion is that it’s personal, that it loves us back. In the end, we produce smarter, edgier products, and the structure of employment remains intact. THE MEDIA HUB is the major unit of social enforcement; was it going to be the mommy we never had, or a prison of measured time? And what is the difference?
    In this dyasma, my sweetheart Nadine was employed by THE MEDIA HUB , as were eighty percent of citizens who had jobs, including me. She dreamed of being a painter while living chained to software. This contradiction between The Wish and The Real inspired her commitment of conscience towards the DeMarketing Movement, a spiritual state that had no material reality. It lived in the minds of workers as a hope, a virtual opposition. No one ever did anything but think about it, but somehow the thought was comforting. It was Tdzen. The knowledge that another life was possible— and may actually be happening simultaneously without our knowledge—but acting to achieve it was socially strange, and so we occasionally yearned while struggling to accept the necessity of amnesia. We read about our yearnings in the Daily Oprah Report . And then they caught on. Yet sometimes, in the dead of night, Nadine wakes up suddenly and realizes that marketing has taken over yet another corner of her soul. She whispers this to me, shudders, and makes me proud of her sharp, useless perceptions.
    But, here, sitting before Harrison Bond, hype was such a seductive crutch. And visions of his red snapper slapped onto my plate.
    Engage the snapper or refuse all fish. These were my choices.
    When Ralph Waldo Emerson went to visit Emily Dickenson’s brother next door, she stayed