Today I’m wearing a khaki shirt and blue pants! How about that, bitches! I’ve pretty much flipped the script. I’m strutting around the office and everyone’s all: Who is that guy? What is his story, I wonder? His look is quite fresh!

Maybe these pants are black. Hang on. Yeah, yes, black. And the shirt is kind of an ecru plaid if you want to get right down to it. Actually, I don’t know what ecru is but I file it under “beige” because ecru makes me think of emu and emus are sort of dun(g)-colored, right? You can buy barbecued emu at this one place in Texas. Maybe other places, too, but especially Texas.

Several times I’ve gone out to lunch by myself, picked up a sandwich, and then eaten it in my car in a mall parking lot, round the back near a gigantic dumpster. I then noticed I was not the only one there, and others were doing the same thing, and I think they were all male. A bunch of men, alone in cars, in a parking lot, eating lunch. I can’t decide if that’s sweetly sad or bleakly sad and those are the only two options my mind can deal with. I keep wishing we all wore coats and hats and had an automat to frequent. We’d keep our heads down and our mouths shut.

At most of my jobs, I lunched alone. But I never used “lunch” as a verb before, nor shall I again. O TRULY I SWEAR IT, BY ODIN’S EYE. I’d skulk out and park it in some deli and lunch the shit out of my lunch while reading a magazine or the paper or something. I guess I did a lot of lunch-action at my desk, too, once the internet came along and I could eat while getting caught up on the latest Kottke parole hearing or Zeldman pronoun abuse.

I guess that’s where my burning need to be watching or reading something while I eat came from: these solo work lunches where I didn’t want to just be sitting there by myself and had to look busy and engrossed in something, usually a Delia’s catalog. Now even if I’m at home and eating a sandwich I have to throw something in the DVD player or dress up the cat in his sunflower costume and make him put on a show for me. But I’ve decided that’s sweetly sad, so it’s OK.

See how I brought back an earlier reference for the finale? Didn’t it feel like placing the last piece into the puzzle of your heart? I could so write gently funny syndicated columns that shut-ins cut out and send to their speed-addicted grandchildren who only look inside the envelope long enough to see if there’s a check inside. I can provide a service after all.