A Ghost and A Storm

I am a ghost. I am a mirror. I am whatever you need me to be. Whatever you look for, that is what I am. Who I am. I am the furniture of a hundred people's homes, different in every iteration. I am a phantom, morphed into a new shape in every eye that beholds me. Look for me tomorrow, and you will find me transparent. Transformed. Melting through your things. Blown here and there by the winds of your fancy. I am whatever you need. And, when unneeded, you won't find me at all, will you?

I am natural phenomenon, like a storm or light breeze or lightning bolt. An event, moving things about. A fountain of molecules.  A thing that is happening as a result of a toppling of dominoes, cause and effect, stretching back to the dawn of time. A continuation of the explosion that started and continues and will someday stop. I began; there is no one to blame. Warm air from the gulf collided with a cold front sweeping over the mountains, generating an updraft, moving moisture, forming rain drops that are falling, falling, falling.

This is what began the event that is Me, and that is what will end Me. Death by Natural Causes.

On Forgetting

I forget things.

Faces. Names. Recipes. Locations. Dates. The date. Past events. What I was just doing. Entire events from only two days ago. What items are in what cabinets in my kitchen. What you said yesterday. What I said thirty seconds ago.

Events that happened five minutes ago are sent into the same overlapping jumble where my memories from 8 years ago reside. There’s a cloud in my head where events and impressions mix, creating stories that may or may not have happened, faces that may or may not exist, and places that aren’t quite arranged the way they are in reality. When I leave a task, expecting that my future self will come back to finish it in five minutes, it’s like pushing a raft out to sea, hoping it will float to a specific person on the other side. Sometimes it's infuriating. Sometimes it's scary.

This is part of who I am. It’s taken me a long time to balance accepting that while still not using it as an excuse to give up on improving my memory or a reason to hate myself for making so many mistakes. Maybe you're in the same boat in one way or another. There are methods for improving your memory (which maybe I'll write another post about later), but they don't work overnight, so in the meantime, here are some strategies I use to manage my forgetting. Maybe you'll find them helpful.

Methods for surviving with forgetfulness:

Leaving a physical reminder. Whenever you move away from a task-in-progress to do something else, leave a physical object in a place you will see it. For example, if you’re making pancakes and the doorbell rings, leave the spatula on the coffee table so you’ll see it when you set down the exciting package the post-person brought you and go flip the pancake before it burns.

Alarms. Pizza needs to cook for 15 minutes? Set an alarm. Plan to write for an hour and then go to the store? Set an alarm. Have an important job interview? Set four alarms. It might feel like coddling yourself, but often you'll find that the act of setting the alarm helps you remember, and you'll go back to that pizza seconds before the alarm goes off.

Signs. It’s stressful to look through every cabinet in your kitchen for the salt. It might feel childish to put little signs on your cabinet doors saying what’s inside, but if it works, do it. You’re home should be the least stressful place.

Apologies. Forgetting someone’s name is not polite. Leaving a task half-completed at work is inconsiderate. Most people assume that if you forget something, it’s because you didn’t care about it, or them. Use specific and detailed apologies that are more than just the word “sorry.” Make sure your facial expression shows that you’re not being sarcastic. It’s important that people don’t think you’re a jerk because you’ll also need…

A safety net of people who understand. Depending on others requires trust, and you’ll need a lot of it. You’ll need people you can trust to remind you of things, point out things you forgot, and fill in the gaps in your memories. For that last one, sometimes what they tell you will clash with what you remember; you’ll literally need to trust these people more than your own mind. Choose your friends carefully.

Self-forgiveness. Like I said earlier, it’s easy to feel useless when you burn your oatmeal literally every morning for two weeks. It’s easy to feel like you’re broken and incapable of functioning in society. Remember that all humans depend on other humans to survive. Remember that everyone makes their own kinds of mistakes and (hopefully) has coping mechanisms to compensate. Remember that modern society has insanely unrealistic expectations for functionality, so don’t use those expectations as the metric by which you judge yourself.

If you can remember that, forgetting won’t be so bad.

(To be Read to the Rhythm of Your Own Breathing)

We’re all dying
Every day is ten thousand
breaths
we can't take back in
Each moment another flake of dead skin
fallen
to the ground alone
Your organs can only stay together for so long
and you can’t
expect
that electricity in your head to keep firing forever
So I’m going to
take
another deep breath
cash in a few more fleeting seconds from
old bones
I’m not sure why we keep doing this to ourselves
but here we go again
Living

Judge People

“Don’t judge a book by it’s cover” is not advice I would give to anyone. But there is a lot of judgement-based advice that I would give. So I will. Right now. Prepare to be advised.

Do judge books by their cover. Judge people. Think about their appearance. Judge your surroundings. Think about everything you perceive. Don’t ignore things. Don’t assume you can’t come to valid conclusions. Don’t turn off your brain. People with their brains turned off are husks.

Judge. But remember, what happens next is essential. What do you do with the judgments you’ve made, the information you’ve gathered? (Of course, if the title you judge on their book cover is I'm Probably Gonna Murder Ya, yeah, better start running, but for the other cases...)

Don’t give up. Don’t give up on a person after only judging their initial outward appearance. Don’t assume you understand them completely from the beginning. That’s arrogance. That’s bad information gathering. That’s bad science. Widen your sample size. Keep looking. Keep judging. Let them show you a few dimensions of who they are. Judge those too.

So I guess the advice is, you can judge so long as you don't stop judging. Keep judging. Keep your mind open to each new dimension of the people and things that you encounter. Don't stop moving forward until either (1) you discover them to be harmful or so deplorable that they aren't worth your attention any longer, or (2) you don't, and you keep going, further up and further in, learning and expanding from what they offer you, on and on, judging each other.

To a Stranger and All Future Strangers

I have nothing to offer you

stranger walking ahead of me

Shuffle on in your intrepid garb

I am no longer so arrogant as to think
that we are somehow unequal

that I should have spoken to you
that you need me
more than I need you
A silent compulsion given up

The end of guilt, arrogance
responsibility for strangers

and the illusion of my own importance

I have nothing to offer you

so here we walk

sharing the same pavement

All I have is myself

A shape in your peripheral vision

A simple piece of scenery

An ant in your garden

Background in the humongous story

that you tell yourself

everyday

That is all I have to offer you

only what you've asked for

And for once I am

happy

to play my part

Humans and Their Ways: Know Where Your Towel Is

The following is an excerpt from a book called Of Humans and Their Ways, written by the observant and insightful Robot 3000-22. Both the book and its author and totally made up and don't actually exist outside of my head.
Carry on.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Chapter 14: Humans and Their Appearance

The following is a quote from a novel named The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Addams, a human:

"A towel...is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have. For some reason, if a strag (strag: nonhitchhiker) discovers that a hitchhiker has his towel with him, he will automatically assume that he is also in possession of a toothbrush, washcloth, soap, tin of biscuits, flask, compass, map, ball of string, gnat spray, wet-weather gear, space suit etc., etc. Furthermore, the strag will then happily lend the hitchhiker any of these or a dozen other items that the hitchhiker might accidentally have 'lost.'"

I'm going to expand on this understanding of towels to explore how humans interact using their appearance (what they look like to other humans). From extremely simple visual cues, like a towel, humans conclude a gigabyte's worth of information about the humans they observe.

EXAMPLES: Long hair on one's head or face takes a lot of time and effort to care for, so others might assume that Jane, who possesses the former, also possesses patience, self-awareness, or concern about their appearance. (Unless Jane's hair appears unkempt, in which case the reverse is more likely.) High-heels are not practical for walking long distances, so an observer might assume that Sally's black stilettos mean they possess the resources to get from place to place without much walking. Dave's fancy clothing could suggest a significant amount of expendable income. Casey's large muscles could suggest that they have the fortitude and focus to exercise regularly. In all these examples, the human's appearance generates an identity in the eyes of others.

But remember, the hitchhiker in Addams' quote does not actually possess any of the things that the nonhitchhiker assumes they have. The purpose of the towel is to manipulate, to provide the dishonest appearance of already possessing those things, for the benefit of the hitchhiker. And this is exactly what humans do. Most humans know about their appearance's power to generate assumptions, so they alter their appearance to generate a particular assumption in others that they desire. EXAMPLE: Sally might walk a long distance in sport's shoes and then switch to high heels at the destination to provide the appearance of having more resources than they have.

Unfortunately, others often notice this manipulation, and so they instead make their assumptions based on the human's failed manipulation. EXAMPLE: Leo wears ripped jeans in an attempt to generate the assumption in others that they are independent and therefore flippant about what others think of them (i.e. "too cool to care"). However, the others might perceive that Leo's ripped-jeans-wearing is intentional and instead conclude (accurately) that Leo actually cares a great deal about what others think of them. And so, a complex and silent interaction takes place whenever humans behold other humans.

One might conclude that the human species is hopeless because of all their focus on others' opinions rather than the mysteries of the universe outside their imaginary social world. They seem quite trapped in their battleground of social combat, vying their whole lives for control of their own identity in others' eyes.

However, as we've seen in other chapters, all human communication can be used for beneficial or destructive purposes, and appearance is no exception. I believe that, in healthy cases, more functional humans use appearance interaction to explore who they are, examine the disparity or agreement between their outer and inner selves, and make progress towards self-actualization. Also, they can use their appearance for practical purposes, like asserting a counter-cultural identity, surviving in a hostile environment, or providing a soothing demeanor to others. Therefore, I believe, if you want to thrive as a human, it's best to know where your towel is.

Kamikaze

Diving
A 6,000 foot suicide
Birth to death
at terminal velocity
Falling
from the start
to the end
the impact
Explosion
viscera thrown about in a perfect ring
Like a halo
about the grave
of the raindrop
on the sidewalk

Sitting on a Concrete Wall in Toronto Late at Night

If I sit still enough, I can feel the blood humming through my capillaries.

I'm learning to mind my locations, like a child does. Here is the place. Here are the objects. If I sit very still, I can imagine they are constants, like rivers or mountains, and so am I. Topographical features that change only imperceptibly.

As an adult, I have this sense of everything in the city being in flux; it's rearranged each time I see it. But late at night, it's easier to find the foundations and imagine the constants, the coral that remains when all the flitting fish have hidden from the night. When everything else washes away, here is what remains: dormant vehicles, buildings like canyon walls, engine smells, glowing signs calling to illiterate moths, concrete barriers, street lamps shining on empty pavement, lunatics, and an orchestra of unspecified machines all buzzing and vibrating in a song that plays all day long, but can only be heard at night. 

Death to the Commander

The commander lived in a rest home, and he never had a single visitor until the day he died, probably because he smelled like ash and spoke only of the joys of killing.

He was known by all the staff as "commander" because that is the only name he would answer to. The name on his file met with no reaction. There was nothing in his file to indicate which war, if any, he had fought in or which military, if any, he had belonged to. In conversation he spoke of the glories of battle without enough specifics to clarify one way or another. The other patients avoided him, as they would rather drink tea and play backgammon than listen to him explain, for the thousandth time, how much he missed the taste of blood. When his health took a turn for the worst, they breathed a sigh of relief now that he was bedridden.

One cold winter day, after the first frost but before the first snow, the commander received his first visitor at the rest home. The woman stood a head taller than even the tallest nurse, and she wore a simple white robe with a red border along the bottom hem that looked startlingly like a dark blood stain. She smelled like an electrical fire. Her face was like a burnt log. She strode down the pastel corridors of the rest home like a battleship in human form.

When she arrived at the commander's room, he started in his bed. "Who are you? I don't know you. Get out!" She marched to his bedside, leaned over him until her mouth was beside his ear, and spoke. No one heard the words but the commander. His squinted eyes widened, and he gazed upon her like a long-lost child. "Yes. Yes, please," he rasped, reaching out to her like a child himself. "I agree. Take it, just give me that taste once more!"

A half-breath later, she had thrown him into a wheelchair and was rocketing down the pristinely carpeted halls with him bouncing before her. The nurses who tried to bar her path were smothered beneath her vicious stare. One particularly strong-willed orderly grasped the woman's arm, but no matter how much he tugged, her trajectory was unaffected, and he ended up with rug-burns on his knees.

When they reached the locked front door, she kicked it open without hesitation and brought the wheelchair out across the parking lot. All the nurses and patients, entranced now by the woman and her power, filed out the wrecked door and stood shivering in the flower beds, watching silently whatever happened next.

Beyond the parking lot stood a grove of trees, and within it the woman stopped. From within her robe, the tall woman produced a saber a half meter long with a golden hilt. She lowered it into the commander's lap and took a step back, bowing as she did so. The commander considered the weapon, turning it over, letting the dull winter light glitter along its blade. He took a breath so long and so deep that he nearly doubled in size. Then, quivering, he leaned forward until he slid out of the wheelchair and put his weight on his own feet. The sword nearly slipped from his hands, but then he gripped the handle, and from that grip his whole body seemed to draw strength

His back and legs straightened. His arms spread wide. He threw his head back with all the vigor of a warrior facing his enemy. With a wild scream, he kicked back the wheelchair, which clattered backwards into the parking lot and tipped over, and he held the sword over his head, the point aimed at the sky. At that moment, the sun reached through the clouds and golden light poured down on him like water from a basin. Every nurse and patient felt their eyes water with awe and terror.

The commander hit the ground like a tangled classroom skeleton. The sword bounced away. "There is your taste, commander," said the woman. "Now, for mine." As the woman stood over him, his body cracked apart and crumbled into ash. Even as he wasted away, he reached out towards where the sword had fallen, but not even the ashes of his hand touched it as they fell to the earth.

The goddess of war waved her hand, and the ash that had once been the commander rose from the ground and was drawn into her open mouth. When the last of him was gone, the light from the sun again passed behind the clouds, and the woman was nowhere to be seen.

The nurses and patients shuffled back inside where it was warm, and never spoke again of goddess of war or the commander, and they were better off for it.

Morse Code

Everyone is lonely. People with close friends are lonely. People with intact nuclear families are lonely. Married people are lonely. Siamese twins are lonely. No amount of contact with humans can change this fundamental part of human existence. It is the presence of others that creates this lonesomeness. The fact is, we float suspended in an ocean of our own sensations and thoughts and history, reaching out to each other across the incomprehensible distances between us.

We treasure the fleeting, luminous moments when we feel like we've touched something, someone, anyone. The obstacles between us are empty space, holding us aloft, alone. We look across space and interpret blinking stars in Morse code, wondering if the messages are real or just random space dust passing in between.

Is there anyone out there?

What are these “other people” but imagined futures and a million versions of memories, with questions tacked to each one, imaginings about their experience. What are they feeling and thinking? What do they see from where they sit, on some far off plateau built of memories and impressions and beliefs unknown to me, untouchable by me? They are all fictional. Stories I tell myself. Perhaps they tell stories about me too.

But.

Perhaps the stories are what matter. Tell me the story of myself, and I will tell you yours. In Morse code, across vast distances, blinking stars. If we're describing what we see, and what we describe is each other, we must both See. We must both have telescopes. We must both exist. We must not be alone. This is an act, not a state-of-being.

So polish your telescopic lenses, friend, for the only momentary relief from the pervasive alone we all feel because of each other is each other.

Luke Skywalker: Like My Father Before Me

Everyone knows, at the end of the Star Wars original trilogy, the end of Return of the Jedi, Luke Skywalker defeats Darth Vader in a lightsaber duel. The Emperor, who’s just been watching this whole thing like a parent at their child’s baseball game, laughs and tells Luke to kill Vader and “take you father’s place at my side.” But instead Luke throws away his lightsaber and announces,

“Never. I'll never turn to the Dark Side. You have failed, Your Highness. I am a jedi, like my father before me.”

Isn’t that a strange thing to say? “Like my father before me.” This is Luke’s crowning moment, his great defiance, proof that he is too strong, at least too morally strong, to be pulled to the dark side. And he chooses to say, “Like my father before me?” His father is currently laying at his feet, minus one arm. Even before that, his father was a sith lord, half machine, and a total jerk who had turned to the dark side and been mean for literally decades. Yes, Vader was once a jedi, but he totally failed at it. So, Luke Skywalker, I ask you, seriously ol' buddy, why associate yourself with Vader in your moment of triumph?

Literally everyone has parents. And all parents, being human and fallible, screw up in lots of ways. And their children share their DNA and were (if the parents stuck around) influenced by their parents’ screw ups. So every child eventually asks themselves: am I my father’s/mother’s son/daughter, doomed to fall to the dark side like they did?

When Luke refers to his father, the jedi, he is referring to the aspects of his father that he, at that moment, has successfully embodied. He learned the pitfalls that destroyed Vader, and he now has faced those same pitfalls in himself and succeeded.

Literally everyone can do this. We cannot run from our own DNA, but we can all learn from our parents’ mistakes, succeed where they faltered, and become what they failed to be. Once we’ve achieved that, we can proudly declare our association with them, with the parts of them we have chosen, with their jedi selves. Even though they totally failed at being jedi, we can become what they were meant to be: a jedi, like my father before me.

What If

What if something terrible happens?

I have never been in a fight, not a real one anyway. But in my head I've met my end in a plethora of ways: sword fights, fist fights, bottle fights. Just like the eight thousand and one times I've been stabbed in the back while out for a walk (in my head). Just like the six hundred times I've been abducted by aliens or monstrous beings from other dimensions (in my head). I do this on a moment to moment basis. I wake up doing this. I fall asleep literally to a lullaby of this. This is the soundtrack of my life constantly playing, sometimes louder, sometimes softer, but always playing.

I brush my teeth imagining what it would be like if I were arrested for someone else's crime. I floss daydreaming about the apocalypse. I shave to the melody of “what if,” “what if,” “what if.” What if the subway derails while we're going over a bridge? What if my permit to live in Canada is revoked? What if my wife gets sick and we don't have the money to heal her? What if one of the friends I've shown my novel to betrays me and somehow steals the copyright to it, leaving me so depressed that I can never write again? What if robbers? What if cockroaches? What if disease? What if an accident? What if storms or hail or war? What if mind-reading paratrooper shapeshifter alien vampires?

There are people who prepare for unfortunate situations. They do this by recognizing likely scenarios, planning accordingly, and not thinking about the millions of extremely unlikely possibilities that there is no way to actually prevent except by locking yourself in your house (and even that won't prevent all of them). These people innately know a basic truth: no amount of mental questioning can ready you for the unpredictable, unlikely madness of what actually happens. Not even for vampires. When the apocalypse comes, it will be bizarre and unimaginable. When calamity strikes, it will always be a fresh wound. I've never, ever, readied myself for a real event using 'what if.' I’ve never realized a fatal flaw in a plan using 'what if.' I’ve never soothed myself regarding something scary using 'what if.' All that 'what if' does is multiply anxiety a thousand-fold in an infinite loop of mental creation. I create planets in my own mind, filled with nothing but anxiety. I’ve tossed aside basic physics to make room for more worry and fear amongst the limited neurons in my brain. And I know that this massive construction project is never going to be worth the effort.

But it’s habit now. Years of practice. Decades of teaching myself that literally anything can be a prompt for 'what if.' By the time life taught me that this habit was useless, I had already become an expert. So, what now? Is all this space in my brain permanently wasted? Maybe not. What if an expert in making bombs used his skills to defuse explosives? What if an expert in robbery used his knowledge to thief-proof people's houses? If those things can happen, maybe an expert in 'what if' can turn a method for creating anxiety into a tool for producing hope.

What if something good happens?

The Coming of An Accountant to the Great Plains of Merna

The great plains of Merna, though they were, as their name implied, great, and had held that title since before human language had been invented, had never in their long career seen the likes of Rayfield the accountant.

A thousand years before Rayfield was born, a herd of centaurs from Tafril came through the forests of Ern into the wide, rolling hills of the great plains of Merna. Their armor and spears glittered in the bright morning sun as they marched, crushing the grass and the dirt into a road of mud in their wake. Their captain, the largest centaur ever born, galloped in the lead, standing nearly four meters tall. They marched the length of the plains, shaking the earth as the went, and then continued onwards to some horrible war where they all died.

But still, nothing quite like Rayfield the accountant had ever come to the great plains of Merna.

A thousand years before the centaurs’ march, a meteorite plummeted through the atmosphere with a tail of fire crackling behind it, and by the time it touched the ground of the great plains of Merna, it had burned away until only a crumb remained. But it was a fiery crumb, and rain had not fallen on the plains for nearly a year, so the grass was easily lit. The fire burned away six square miles of dry yellow grass before it stopped.

In the fresh ash, strange new plants grew up, for the meteorite had brought more than fire down with it from the outer reaches. These new plants grew quickly, and their leaves glittered like diamonds. Their shining refractions of light drew flies and men alike amongst the fields of otherworldly plants. None ever returned.

The king of the nearby kingdom of Brendal lost seventy of his best knights and his only son to those fields. He wept a single tear for the knights, but for his son he mumbled two words to his most trusted sorcerer: "Burn them." The sorcerer, who had been beside the king since the day he was born and had never spoken a single word to any other man, knew what the king meant. He hurried away and locked himself in a secret room in the tallest tower of the castle. Heart-rending melodies floated from this tower for three days and nights. Then, an expendable scout was sent to check the great plains of Merna and the fields of glittering plants from which no man or fly had yet returned. But return the scout did, reporting that he had found nothing of the shining plants but ash on the bare soil. Normal grasses soon grew up again, and no one ever spoke of the glittering otherworldly plants, the seventy knights, or the king's son ever again.

An unfathomable number of beautiful, horrible, and somewhat-impossible things had happened in the great plains of Merna. And so many other, mundane things had happened as well. Nearly every eventually had taken place there at least twice. But nothing even slightly similar to the coming of Rayfield, the accountant, had ever happened.

To his credit, Rayfield was no ordinary accountant. He was the most skilled of his firm, and for that reason he, and he alone, had been entrusted by his jealous colleagues with the prestigious and usually deadly task of confronting Valentino the gangster about his back taxes. However, the blunt honest fact was this: nothing like Rayfield the accountant had every happened there because nothing as mundane as a shortish man in an overpriced suit had ever gotten lost enough to be able to arrive at the great plains of Merna.

Charming: Our First Evening in Cairo

In Canada, you need to be polite. In Egypt, you need to be charming.

My wife and I moved to Cairo in the heat of July, without a single friend in the country, any knowledge of the language, or the slightest idea where we were going to live. We had four boxes of possessions, acceptance letters to the American University in Cairo, and a reservation at a hostel downtown.

Our first evening staying in the hostel, we headed out to find food. Being unfamiliar with any local food and knowing that the next day would be hectic, we found a Macdonald's (yes, there are Macdonalds' in Egypt) and ordered a pile of hamburgers to last us several meals. Then my wife went back to the hostel with the food while I looked for a grocer which might have bread and jam for breakfast.

When I went back to the hostel, I passed through the front room, which, like all Egyptian businesses, was manned by one employee and two of his friends. When they saw me, they chuckled and patted each other on the back. I asked if there was something on my face, and they replied by saying that they were not expecting to ever see me again.

With this mysterious conversation still playing in my head, I went to our room and found my wife happily munching on a hamburger. "Why are the people in the front room laughing at me?" I asked.

"Oh," she smirked and raised her eyebrows glibly.  "When I came back, they asked me 'What happened to your husband? You left together, but only you came back.' So I said, 'I sold him.'"

"You sold me?"

"Yes, sold you. And they laughed and asked, 'What was the price?' And all I did was hold up the bag of Macdonald's."

"What did they say to that?"

"They said that I got a good price."

It was then that I realized that I had chosen the best traveling companion in the world. And that realization was proven right, over and over, as we found a flat, bought furniture, and arranged our new lives. There was no heart in the country that she could not charm or strike fear into. I optimistically believe that some of these powers have rubbed off on me, via her and the Egyptians I befriended, but honestly I will always be an apprentice in the subtle ways of the Egyptian wit.

How To Snatch Food From The Kitchen Without Getting Caught

Humans need to eat food. Sometimes, humans want to eat food even when they don’t need to. Sometimes, those humans share a kitchen with someone who doesn’t want that food to be eaten. The culprit could be your significant other, your parent, or a roommate, but their motivation for stopping you is always one of the following:
*They want to save the food for a special occasion.
*This particular food is actually an important ingredient for something they plan to cook.
*You specifically instructed them (in a moment of desperation or madness) to prevent you from eating the food, no matter how much you might beg or plead, since you lack the willpower to stop yourself.
*They want the food for themselves. (This is the most primal of the motivations, and, for that reason, the most likely, even if they claim one of the above.)

Regardless of which of these applies in your particular case, you need not feel guilty for snatching food. This is natural human behavior, survival of the most fit. If you are able to snatch food from the refrigerator without your competition catching you, that makes you the fittest. Food snatching is simply nature taking its course (pun intended).

Here are my tips for winning the title of fittest.

1)  Know your strengths and weaknesses. How much can you eat? How fast can you eat it?
2)  Know your competition’s habits and schedule. Any spy will tell you that this is the key to any espionage: know where your target is in space and time, and how long they are going to be there. How long are their showers? Could you consume an entire pie in that amount of time AND hide the evidence?
3)  Eat strategically. Your primary goal is to prevent your competition from ever realizing that you snatched anything at all, and the best way to do this is to nibble along the edges of anything too big to make disappear entirely. Instead of cutting a square piece from a half eaten cake, cut a long, thin piece from along the already cut edge. In some cases, one bite from every container in the refrigerator will draw less attention than five bites from one container.
4)  Minimize noise. Restrain the urge to scarf, gobble, or burp. Chew deliberately. Open doors slowly. Avoid noisy doors entirely. Maybe set a spoon aside somewhere, since opening the silverware drawer can be quite loud.
5)  Hide the evidence. Put the half-finished jello bowl in the back of the refrigerator. Rinse off the spoon. Bury any wrappers under the trash in the trash can.
6)  Move the food onto a smaller plate if you’ve eaten half of it. This makes the food item look just as big as it did before in proportion to the plate it rests on. This also works with zip-lock bags, Tupperware containers, and even cups.
7)  Pay attention to your breath. Smelling like peanut butter when there are five peanut butter cookies missing will blow your cover immediately, no matter what plate the cookies are on. Brush your teeth, or just keep out of smelling range of the competition.
8)  If caught, make outrageous lies. Crafty lies will make the competition suspicious. Ridiculous lies will distract them. Therefore, blame the family pet(s), the neighbor’s children, ghosts, trans-dimensional warping, spontaneous casserole combustion, etc.

A Halloween Story

Once upon an autumn, long ago, there was an especially wicked demon whose name no one remembers. They only remember him by the name of the holiday he helped create: Halloween.
Now on this particular autumn, Halloween had spent the whole harvest season in a small town, spoiling crops, pushing people into wells, and trying to convince half-drunken men to kill each other. Seeing these things happening so often and without proper explanations, the village priest teamed up with the village witch to capture the demon that was obviously running amok. Now, witches and priests don’t usually get along well, but it was possible in this case for two reasons: one, because this priest and witch were a brother and sister who had chosen wildly different career paths, and, two, because their mother was one of the people who had been pushed into a well.

Thus, they set a trap for the demon Halloween. They used branches from an ancient elm and a dozen or so crucifixes to build a cage that the demon could not escape from. It was bigger than a bread box and smaller than a golden retriever, but light enough to carry. Then the priest simply stood at the edge of a nearby cliff and said, “Golly, I would die if I fell from here!” Within moments, the demon came rushing from the town to push the priest off the cliff to his death. But the witch was quick, and she leapt out of the bushes with the cage and caught the demon inside it. She slammed the little door behind it and locked it with some enchanted twine. And thus, Halloween the demon was caught.

The brother and sister agreed to keep the caged demon in the church basement for half the year and in the witch’s basement the other half of the year. Each time they carried the cage between basements, the demon Halloween begged to be let out, calling upon Christian charity and the gods of the earth for mercy. Twice a year he begged, all the way to the church, then all the way to the witch’s house. And indeed, he did slowly prevail upon the kind hearts of the witch and priest, even though they never forgot what the demon had done to their poor mother, and the evil that he would surely do if he were released.

And so they hatched another clever scheme. By this point, the priest and witch were quite old, so the whole town listened to what they had to say. They told all the townspeople that on the day the priest moved the demon’s cage to the witch’s house, they should all dress up like hooligans, ne’er-do-wells, and demons. Disguised thusly, they should go throughout the whole town pretending to be vile and evil: breaking things, laughing at death, pretending to push people into wells, and blackmailing the other townspeople with threats of violence to get valuables (which were, of course, to be prepared in advance).

The townspeople thought this was odd, but they trusted the witch and the priest, so, on the day appointed for moving the demon’s cage, which happened to be October thirty-first, they did as instructed. When they demon begged to be set free, the priest promptly opened the cage door without another word. The demon leapt out and scurried away, laughing and planning to do mischief. But when he came upon the town, he found that things had changed in the decades of his absence.

Demons bigger and scarier than Halloween filled the streets alongside every form of villain imaginable. Vandalism, violence, blackmail, and pushing people in the wells! Evil on a scale that Halloween had never dreamed of. Grotesque faces all around, laughing at death and taking what did not belong to them. The joy that Halloween felt at first quickly transformed to dread. Everyone committed evil without prejudice. What horrible things might they do to him? He did not wish to be pushed into a well or robbed. The faces all around were terrifying and suggested acts of evil they could do to him that even he could not imagine!

And so he fled back to the only place he knew he would be safe from evil: surrounded by the branches of an ancient elm and a dozen or so crucifixes. He dashed back into the cage, which still sat at the waiting priest’s feet. “I’d like to stay here, if you please. Shut the door. It’s the only place in town safe from all that evil. I don’t envy you or the witch, out there, dealing with all those big demons  and dangerous townspeople. Let me out again when you’ve got things straightened out.”

And so the demon stayed in his cage forever, happy to be safe. Every few years, even after the witch and priest had died, the townspeople would dress up and pretend to be evil, and someone would bring out the demon in his cage so he could see that it was still too dangerous to come out. And the demon never discovered how he had been tricked, and the practice of frightening evil things with pretend evil things continued to this very day.

So next time you walk safely past a well without being pushed in, remember Halloween and the clever and kind people who inspired it.

A Purse Dream

There once was a thief who was extremely bad at thieving. Thus, he was extremely relieved when, on a dreary Thursday in March, he found a extremely unattended purse left on the bench at a bus-stop. It was your typical ugly handbag, stitched from so many colors that an observer could not recall any colors it wasn't.

"Stop!" cried a woman’s voice. The thief, who now had the purse in his lap and was in the process of finding his way into it, stood to escape."Don't do it!" cried the voice again. He spotted a woman some way down the road, standing and waving her arms as if flagging down an airplane. She was so short and so slight that she could almost be mistaken for a child. He turned to run, confident that he could outrun someone of her stature.

Suddenly something slammed into him with almost enough force to knock him down. He stumbled and found the same woman clinging to him, trying various grips and holds to encourage his body to the ground. He marveled, momentarily, at the speed with which she had covered the distance. He swung around and threw her off. She was fast but not strong. She landed on the sidewalk, and he dashed across the street, ignoring the traffic that honked at him.

He slid into an alley, dived through an open door into the empty back room of a small shop, and crouched in the shadows.  A moment later, he heard impossibly rapid footsteps approach, pass, and fade away just as quickly.

He sighed and slid down to sit in the comforting refuse of the abandoned room. He examined the purse at his leisure. It was just as ugly now as before, and he found that the reason he could not open it earlier was a lock holding the clasp together. He smashed this using a heavy piece of metal he found on the trash-strewn floor.

When he opened the purse, a hand reached out.

Screaming at an octave he had not known he could achieve, he dropped the purse. The hand felt the floor, as if it were merely someone reaching through a doorway instead of a disembodied hand flailing about on the ground. Then a head followed it out of the purse, which was attached to a chest, which was attached to another arm, some legs, and some feet.

A tiny man now stood up beside the purse, picking his teeth as if nothing out of the ordinary was happening. He wore simple robes and a tiny hat all of the same wide variety of colors as the purse. He examined his surroundings, the room, the door to the alley, and the thief standing slack-jawed in the corner. He lifted up the purse and shoved his head back into it. “It’s safe to come out everyone. We’ve been freed!” Cheers resonated from within the purse, loud enough to belong to at least three dozen people.

And sure enough, one by one, more tiny people scrambled and scratched their way through the purse’s opening and marched out of the room. The thief counted fifty, and then he gave up counting. They were all dressed the same, with the little hats and strangely colored clothing.

Once the flow coming out of the purse finally ceased, the first tiny man picked up the purse and marched up to the thief. “Thanks, pal.” He slapped the purse into the thief’s hands.

“What are you?” marveled the thief.

“Memories, buddy. We are all of her memories.” He bowed and left.

The thief threw the purse into a dumpster and ran home. He went back to school and then became a much better banker than he ever was a thief. One day, an extremely quick woman snatched his briefcase and escaped, but she found nothing inside but papers and a sandwich.

A Bedtime Story About Murder (part two)

"I met her in a construction site."
"Very romantic."
"And you would know?"
"I know lots about romantic!"
"Sure you do. Young people always think they know what romance is. I met her in the site because she was the contractor making a building for my boss.”
"What kind of building?"
"Uh... you know, I can't remember."
"You're not a good liar, Grandpa!"
"There never was a good liar in this whole world."
"I caught you fibbing, so tell me what kind of building."
"Ah. I think I remember now. It was casino."
"What's that?"
"Do you want me to tell the story, or do you want me to tell you what a casino is?"
"Hm..."
"She was exquisite in her hard hat and jeans. Commanding. Powerful. Dangerous. And she had these... ah well, she was very beautiful let's just say that shall we?"
"And then you loved each other. Yada yada yada."
"Yes. It didn't start as love, but it bloomed in time. But that was all the time we got. Within the year, she was dead."
"Dead? But why? Did you kill her?"
"In a way. It was my fault she died. You see, my boss liked me a lot, so he was going to give me a very important job in the business. But this guy I worked with, Vinny, he thought the job was owed to him."
"So he killed her?"
"So he poisoned my food. And by chance, she ate it before I did. She died in my arms."
"Wow. That's so sad!"
"Yes. I know."
"But it wasn't really your fault grandpa. You loved her. You didn't mean for her to die."
"That's true.”
"You didn't kill her, that Vinny guy did."
"Also true."
"So!”
"So what?"
"So this was the story of how YOU killed someone. But her dying wasn't you fault!"
"Oh, I see you are confused. No, she's not the one I killed. She's not the one I was referring to anyway."
"Then who was it?"
"Well, the next week, I cut the break lines of Vinny's sports car. He drove through a red light and got plastered across the side of a semi truck."
"Wow!"
"And that, dear child, is why you should always wear your seat-belt."
"That was a great story Grandpa. Tell me another!"
"No no, the story is over, and it's time for sleep."
"I'm not tired! Have you ever killed anyone else?"
"Lay down like a good girl."
"Okay, how about love! Have you ever loved anyone else? It's okay; you can start with 'once upon a time!' What about casinos? Tell me... or I'll cut your break line!"
"Goodnight, child."
"Nuts."

A Bedtime Story About Murder (told in two parts)

"Grandpa, have you ever killed anyone?"

"Hundreds of people!"

"No grandpa, I'm serious!"

"Now you stop worrying about such things and go to sleep. You've got your water right there and—”

"I'm not worried! I just want to know."

"Why would you want to know about that?"

"It's not to show off to my friends or something. I just want to know... to know."

"Little girls these days, asking about killings and murderings. What's the world coming to?"

"Please Grandpa?"

"Eh..."

"You're my grandpa! You have to do what I say!"

"Alright. I don't know why I'm doing this. You'd better not tell anyone else about it though."

"Why not?

"Or else I'll kill ya, that's what I'll do."

"So what's the story?"

"Excitable little sprout, aren’t ya? Just like your mother. Alright here we go."

"Was it with a gun? Did you shoot 'em?"

"Are you interrupting already?"

"Sorry."

"Once upon a time, a long time ago—"

"No Grandpa, don't start it that way."

"What's wrong with 'once upon a time?' It's a classic."

"Yeah, for stories! This is real life."

"Ah. Okay, as you wish. Now get comfortable and I'll start."

"Okay."

"Okay. Once upon a time—"

"Grandpa!"

"I'm sorry! I can't help it. A lifetime of storytelling is asserting itself!"

"Okay fine whatever. Just start the story."

"I thought you said it was real life, not a story?"

"Right. Start the real life story."

"Okay, once upon a time, a long time ago, I killed a man. But in order to understand why, we must go back in time a bit more to the day I met a woman."

"Did you kiss this lady?"

"As a matter of fact yes, how did you know?"

"Can we skip the love and go straight to—"

"No no. If you want to hear the story of how I killed a man, you have to suffer through the tale of how I kissed a woman."

"Fine. Whatever."

"Can I carry on now?"

"Yes. Carry on."

The Annoying Security Guard: A True Story from Cairo

(This story is my revenge on a specific security guard in Cairo who was really annoying and conceited.  Most security guards in Cairo were very nice to me.)

A long metal gate blocked access from the road to the bus station. The gate had been painted green nearly five years prior and was now colored green-brown hybrid that completely failed to draw the eye. For this reason, four and half vehicles had run into it in the last month. 

Beside this mangled gate there was a guard hut. It was simply a large metal cylinder stood upright with one side cut away. Inside there was barely enough room for one plastic lawn chair. On this chair there sat a security guard. He sniffed as he watched the cars drive and the pedestrians walk. When a car wanted to enter, he was meant to get up from his chair and drag the mangled gate open. When a person wanted to enter, he was meant to get up from his chair and check their ID as they walked by. 

On a normal day, he did neither of these tasks.

Today was a very normal day.

He leaned back in his chair, thrust his legs apart, and sniffed again. Maids in long dresses and simple hijabs meandered slowly past, avoiding his eyes. Women with pants and long hair sped by shouting into their mobile phones. Men in slacks and dress shirts marched through, nodding and muttering greetings. A delivery truck stopped at the gate and honked. The driver eventually gave up and opened it himself. 

Time passed. The security guard sniffed and checked his watch. His shift was nearly over. He let his arm fall limply back into his lap.

At nearly 3:45, a man approached that woke the security guard from his routine and, for the first time in hours, he was motivated him to stand up. The man could best be described as "long." He sported long legs, long hair, long arms, and even a long chin. His clothing attempted but completely failed to blend him in with the other passers-by. All these details were inconsequential however, because this man also had pasty white skin. 

The security guard lifted himself from the chair, and his legs seemed to remember their old purpose. He took a step forward and held out his palm to communicate that the man with white skin should stop. Once eye contact was made, he frowned to give an impression of seriousness, and also because it takes twice as many muscles to smile as to frown, and he did not want to strain himself.

“I.D.” was all the guard said. This was the first thing he had said in hours.

“What?” The white man said.

“I.D.”

“What I.D.?”

In order to clear up the confusion, the security guard thought it best to repeat himself in a clearer way, “I.D.”

“I live here.”

“What?” The guard’s ears had not quite woken up yet.

“I don’t know what you want from me, but I live here, I walk through this gate every day.”

The guard was only flummoxed for a moment. He knew how to handle this. Time to put his foot down. “You need an I.D.”

“I don’t have one. No one has ever asked me for one. And like fifteen people have walked through the gate without showing an I.D. since this conversation started.”

Ah, a tough guy huh. Well, the guard knew how to handle this kind of person: “You need an I.D.”

The white man stood there, looking at him, waiting for him to act. This pleased the guard; the complete dissipation of this citizen’s forward momentum, literally and figuratively, meant that the guard’s authority had been recognized. He stood for a moment, looking right to left and pursing his lips, just to be sure everything was at it should be. Then, with all the suave he could muster, he looked away and jerked his head towards the gate. The message was clear: I’ll let you off the hook this time, so go before I change my mind.

He returned to the guard hut and slowly lowered his weight into the lawn chair with the practiced focus of a man who has truly mastered the art if sitting. He leaned back and sniffed with comfort and superiority. Another job well done.