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I was at this party at university. I would normally have felt pretty intimidated bythe high social standing of the other guests. But I was a bit more at ease than usual.Mainly because my girlfriend was making out with this guy named Carl in the corner of the living room. And everyone liked Carl. That gave me a certain cachet that I used to my advantage throughout the evening.

I feel some similar sense of ease tonight.

Anacin is my favorite breakfast food. Can I make it yours?

I could be even more self-aggrandizing if I wanted to.

Something mythic like:

The Iliad, the lost years

Dan and I were prisoners of our feet in a padded cell on the most beautiful beach on the island of Corfu, a petrified boat looming off the shore.

We marked time by bread.The days were fresh, crusty, stale, hard and then fresh again (Well, sometimes there were two hard days before fresh came back).

I was aimlessly waiting either for the jagged gouge on my sole to heal, or for my only pair of shoes to reappear (imagine the walk up the hill to the bus stop, the 45 minute ride(standing up) to the only town on the island, and then wandering around the town looking for a shoe store, all with filthy bare feet and newspaper stuck to the bottom by dried blood to act as a bandage).

It was much easier to stay at the pink palace, lying on the beach, drinking Coca Cola and beer and watching a passing stream of the idle young rich. And tending after Dan, who had woken up one morning with two sprained ankles and no particular memory of it (a prestigious feat, to be sure).

The ketchup had begun to ferment at the end of August. By the middle of September we had to be careful when opening it as it would ooze up out of the bottle onto the table. It seemed to be an acquired taste, but I don’t think we were eating it to be noticed, we were already that.Nor for the alcohol, we were far from poor, and with beer a buck a quart and free ouzo each night from a stew pot if you were willing to have a few plates smashed over your head, we were always as drunk as we wanted to be.We were just used to the ketchup.

Even Doc George was giving us a cut off our room rates, and his dad would sneak us free goat sandwiches for lunch. We were a lost leader,I guess.

But it all ended with a whimper. Dan still wasn’t healed, but he had to get to anAmerican Express office, soJen drove him to the boat which would get him to the train.

My shoes reappeared one day beside the kitchen, bleach clean. The next day I went into town and bought the cheapest ticket I could find toNorthern Europe. It was on the Czechoslovakian airline. Ren and I (he on his way back to Finland where his first opera was about to open) satin the town square drinking fizzy yellow stuff, counting ugly white leather shoes. When we reached 50 we left for the airport.

 I wish I had a dream last night

that I was standing in a parking lot in Las Vegas, with the eight wonders of the world surrounding me in neon.Everything antiseptic dirt and dry heat. And then I see my niece Connie standing inside a wire fence, beside a pool at the Motel 6. And I just walkover and go through a convenient gate in the fence.And she notices me and runs over and gives me a hug. And Paul is there, before his prison tattoos. And then I notice I’m wearing no pants, but we’re at a pool anyways, and they both know I’m a goof so I don’t care. And we just hang around, eating home-made popsicles and doing cannonballs. And hours later a big green UFO zooms in with a sound of electric horror and sucks me up. And I awake to my alarm.

But, I never remember my dreams anymore.

I have this dream where I am watching Wheel of Fortune and my name appears as the answer to a puzzle. I begin to ponder: Either I am just tons more famous than I had realized, or there is somebody famous with my name and I haven’t heard of them before. It always seems a difficult quandary to chose between these two possibilities. And I always wake up before I have come to any conclusion.

This morning was the kind of the morning when I realized I couldn’t remember whether my brown paper bag contained a baguette or a sawed-off shotgun.

Well, that’s not true of course, but then, what are you expecting from me?

It is best to admit that I have more ideas than brains, especially now that I have, from the owners of the literary estate of Franz Kafka, purchased the copyright to all the stories, fragments and ideas that Kafka ever had that he never bothered to tell anyone about, nor ever write down.

I’m looking for a doctor willing to remove some of the small bones from my inner ear. A sense of balance seems inherently misleading.

I arrived at university at the age of 16, alone, with all my possessions somehow strapped to me. I had practiced on my parent’s driveway, the slow trod with various shoulder bags, a big wheeled suitcase teetering behind, steering my bicycle along beside me.

I had been on the campus once before, a trip I’d won in a high school mathematics contest, so I knew approximately the distance from where the airport shuttle would drop me off to where my residence building was. It seemed achievable, what more did one need from any plan at that age.

I’d like to think that, as you see me now standing here, so…. (whatever) that you would find some of the above difficult to believe.

But, I know better, really.

There is a new field called experimental economics. Classic economic theory is based on the assumption that financially we all act selfishly to maximize our own benefits. The new field studies in what ways that assumption is false. One of their most interesting experiments involving having two strangers play a game. The rules are explained to them both, but they never meet or directly interact. They have the chance to be given a total of 100 dollars. Player A must make a proposal of how to split that money. And player B has the option of accepting or rejecting A’s offer. If he accepts it, they get the money according to the proposal. If he rejects it, neither get anything. There is only one round. After B accepts or rejects the offer the game is over. Classic economic theory suggests that A will propose that he get $99 and B get $1. And B will accept, because $1 is better than nothing.

But their experiments showed that in fact, on average, A will propose a split of 55/45, with him getting the $55 of course. We all try to be mostly fair, only taking the extra $5 due us based on our own undeniable uniqueness.