IT WEARS YOU DOWN, MAN

Howard Robinson, the longtime president and CEO of Entrepôt (a company with offices in sixteen countries on four continents), not to mention a scholar (in his youth he had dedicated himself to the study of moral luck in Baldwin, and he still read the journals), a crackerjack athlete (college basketball first, a little tennis in his thirties, now learning golf and progressing more quickly than anyone imagined he might), a devoted husband (Tessa) and father (Brianna and Oliver, the former about to deliver him his first grandchild), a gifted musician (an electric guitar on which he fantasized that he was forging an alloy between Sonny Sharrock and B.B. King), a snappy dresser (tailored suits, puckish socks), and a beloved teacher (once a month, he led a seminar at the university he had attended, in fact in a building not too far from where he had cut down the net after leading the team to a tournament championship, and he was known for handing out business cards that contained not his name, but rather therapeutic commonplaces such as “If You Find Yourself Doing Nothing, Ask Yourself What Needs To Be Done”), woke up, took a look at the news, and sighed. 

©2021 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

EVENTS OF THIS AFTERNOON THAT FELT LIKE A METAPHOR

Seven people were in line to get into the place. One person left the line. Six people were in line. One of them said something that another one did not like. The argument rippled outward until there were two camps, two more people joining the side of the one who had spoken, two more joining the side of the one who had objected. The two teams of three set at each other with fists and open hands, elbows and fingernails and teeth, gouging and biting. Their aim was to hurt. Blood was spilled. Goodwill was squandered. At least one arm was broken. At least one eye was damaged to the point of blindness. When the place opened, the six of them were lying on the ground, bruised, dizzied, insensible. The seventh person, the one who had left, came back and passed right through the downed bodies into the place. “May I help you?” asked the person behind the desk. The seventh person began to point at things that would, in short order, be acquired.

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

YES AND

Anne Ampersand sits at the gate, waiting for her flight to board. It’s not her real name, of course—it’s no one’s real name—but it’s the name she’s used for the last ten years to write a grammar advice column that started small, in a local paper, as a lark, off to the side of the investigative journalism she thought she’d pursue with ethical vigor. The sidecar became, over time, the motorcycle itself (she winces at this unprepossessing metaphor) and now she is syndicated in more than 100 outlets, dispensing advice to the grammatically challenged that is accompanied, always, by generous heapings of humor and homespun wisdom. She is flying to Seattle to meet with her ex-husband, who is the father of a new baby. Why is she making the trip? She has no idea. She considers going back up the concourse, getting in her car, driving home, getting drunk on the expensive wine she can now buy whenever she wants.  But she won’t leave. She has pledged to face life head on, whatever its challenges. The method has brought her this far and she will remain loyal to it. Every crisis is an opportunity. Every potential diminishment is also a potential enlargement. She will stay right where she is, waiting for the boarding announcements, and then she’ll take her seat, come to terms with the fact that she’ll be recognized by a passenger or two, have a drink for each incident of recognition, fall asleep, dream that the baby is hers, and then wake groggily in Seattle and stumble out of the plane to smile for her ex-husband and his new wife, the mother of his child, her sister.

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

MULE

He had the bills rolled so tightly that they were an insistence. She had been briefed on the next steps, which involved taking them in hand, going down the hall past the room with the old woman sleeping, past the room with the dog with its nails painted red, past the room with the citric fragrance, past the room where no one ever went, and reaching the door at the end of the hall, where she would sprint out into the light, calling Randy’s name. 

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas

REGIONAL COORDINATOR BILL'S RECURRING INTERNAL MONOLOGUE

"I’ll let my beard grow and live in the hills. Or else shave and live in the valley. Or I can stay right here, three days’ stubble at all times thanks to that razor that Ella bought me last Christmas because she likes me ‘when I look like I care but don’t care at the same time,’ and I can keep going to the ‘office,’ whatever that means now, and keep assessing project specifications, and every once in a while hop in the car with Ella and Phineas and drive down to the lake house, proud we own it, irritated I pay more than I should to do so, faintly thinking of the single mom with a house across the way, or no, not faintly thinking, but occasionally and powerfully, on account of that fifteen minutes we spent drunk at a Fourth of July barbecue, which followed an hour of starting sober and getting drunk and casually talking, but feeling the casual talk heat up a bit, ramify, tangle, to the point where we simultaneously volunteered to go inside to get more ice for the cooler, and once we were in there we touched fingertips accidentally and then did it again purposefully, staring into each others’ eyes with the fullest intent. That was all that happened but wow trust me it was enough. ‘You’d look good with a beard living in the hills,’ she said. ‘I’d rather shave and head into the valley,’ I said. I was just joking, reversing my way out of the flirtation, but I made it worse, or better, depending on how you see it. Much worse or much better. That’s why I keep thinking those are my two options, because both of them involve some idea of her.  Oh I have to go. The host is starting the meeting."

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas