Compulsively Aimless

In the film Metropolitan , there’s an exchange that has always struck me as both funny and devastating. Tom Townsend, earnest and slightly wounded, asks his high school love interest, Serena Slocum about their correspondence: Tom: “You threw away all the letters I wrote you?” Serena: “I throw away nearly everything. I don’t want to go through the rest of my life with the mail I got when I was sixteen.” Tom: “I’m surprised. Someone goes through the trouble of writing a real letter—I save it. People don’t write many personal letters anymore.” Tom, the archivist; Serena, the minimalist; and the rest of us floating somewhere between keeping just enough paper to feel sentimental, but not enough to require zoning permits for storage. I thought of that scene while sitting beside the shredder in our basement office that sounded increasingly triumphant with each page it devoured. I had decided whether bravely or foolishly, to unclutter decades of correspondence in what I had proudly collected t...

  One Last Score It will be an inside job From the unmarked van. We'll synchronize watches  and our fast-talking ex-con wearing a stolen waiter’s uniform, will slip past the guard distracted by the spilled coffee while the trained monkey steals the keys. The loot is sure to be ours. No loose-cannon cop with a chip on his shoulder, or his desk-pounding police chief three days from retirement will have a last-minute revelation, to connect the dots from the hidden clue in plain sight. But I swear, if I go down, I’m taking you with me.   O, an Ocean of Nonsense Say it ain’t so, Geronimo— you don’t need to swap a feather from your weather-worn, war bonnet just to know what Columbus didn’t know. You never had to sail the ocean blue when oceans sailed others to you. Say it ain’t so, O-hi-o. Here you are  round on the edges, high in the middle  In your heart is Columbus without an ocean blue anywhere near you.  Say it ain’t so, old Pla-to— you stacked your question...