We went to the supermarket for the first time in a long time today. A real old-fashioned supermarket down the hill, not the cramped, overpriced one near us. We learned all over again how to navigate the cart around people, how to read the aisle signs, how to tear off the plastic produce bags. Lemons, Cheerios and toilet paper. We could get anything we wanted.

We scrambled onto the train, the weary parents with their little kid. I got on first with Jackie, listing against me the way kids do, and bobbing her head around. She careened dangerously close to the pole, the seat, surfaces surely contaminated with New York City filth.

“Don’t let her put her face on anything,” Sara called out across the car.

I sat down with Jackie and noticed a guy next to me, a young guy, writing something in a notebook. I read over his shoulder.

“Don’t let her put her face on anything,” he wrote.

I’ve had too many dreams about work lately. Not quite nightmares, just dreams where I’m doing what I do at work except there’s a layer or two of dreamy abstraction, like I do it by hand, not on the computer, and my pen turns into a telephone and I have to operate the telephone in order to place a mark on the paper.

TROOPS

A harassed-looking wizard was holding his small daughter tightly by the ankle

When did I have that dream about being in a bookstore, where there was no ceiling but just a wooden frame, above which there were more shelves with more books, and the place was lit by bare, incandescent bulbs, hanging on wires from out of the darkness? Was it more than one dream? In the dream we were looking for some book, a magical book of some kind. Who were we?

When I was a little kid I’d ride with my dad as he drove to used bookstores around Connecticut to satisfy his, what do you call it, addiction to collecting. His collecting addiction. When you search “collecting addiction” you come across something someone wrote called “How Collecting Opium Antiques Turned Me Into an Opium Addict,” which is funny, damn funny, right down to the letters all properly capitalized in the title—I don’t know that I’ve ever felt the proper use of title case to be funny and I do not know why I feel that it is now—of that thing, whatever it is, an essay or a memoir or just some desperate cry into the void. Anyway maybe it’s bibliophilia. Except he also had it with records and I don’t know what the word is for that.

We’d drive for a while on the back roads, through towns like Thompson, Manchester, Eastford, Scotland. Little fucking towns where there’s nothing going on church suppers and 4-H fairs, no one hanging out but scarecrows and jack-o-lanterns. Sometimes he’d let me grab the steering wheel. In the few seconds that I gripped it in my sweaty left hand I saw everything more clearly: the trees, the lawns, the houses, the cracked and crumbling tar where the road met the ditch.

We’d arrive at some dusty little bookstore and while he scanned the first few pages of dozens of books, hoping to find a first edition, I sat morosely, utterly oblivious of the book-bound universes around me. It’s not that I couldn’t read. I just didn’t want to.

TROOPS

The phrase was exactly right.

TROOPS

projecting his whole self into his object and

I felt a deep exhaustion, accumulated over the merciless days of the week.

At the Halloween parade some kid dressed like a soldier was shouting, “Free hugs! Free hugs!”

On the train on the way in this morning I read a phrase over someone’s shoulder and memorized it, at least for a minute. Something about someone pulling up in car, or pulling the car around the block. But it’s gone now.

The F was running on the G so a lot of us got out on Bergen, joining the commuters who were already waiting, two or three rows deep. When the next F came it was packed; only a few people got on.

As I stood waiting with Jackie I observed an interaction between a man and woman, both young, attractive, dark-haired. The man was on the train, evidently having just got on; the woman stood on the platform right in front of us. He was gesturing towards her with his arms open, like, What? What? He said something to her as the doors were closing. Something I couldn’t hear. I wondered whether they were a couple that had been accidentally separated. Two people in love, distraught at having to make it to the city without holding each other’s hands.

“That’s all you have to say?” she replied. “Motherfucker. Asshole.”

He smiled weirdly—a taunting, almost lecherous smile—and nodded aggressively toward her. A fuck you nod.

“Fucking asshole,” she said. Nodding back.

He continued his grimace and flashed her his middle finger, discreetly, low to his waist, as though to be careful no one else could see.

She shook her head. “Fuck you!’

He gave a little shrug as the train pulled away. Still holding his middle finger there. She turned away with a sigh and waited like the rest of us for the next one.

Was out in the hallway hearing fat, cold raindrops pelting the skylight and I wondered whether I felt happy or depressed about it, and decided I felt happy, because fuck it, I was inside and safe and cozy. Who’d be outside right now? Cops directing traffic. In the cold, wet dark. In the inclement weather. I thought about that word. Inclement, clemency. Pope Clement the Sixth. The same root in a word about the wind and the rain and a word about some killer tossing and turning on his cot, hoping to get a reprieve from the governor. And the pope who granted absolution to all the sinners who died in the Plague.

Jackie whispered nonsense words into my ears as we sat in the pizza place, in the sunny booth. I was on a conference call with work. Good thing there was nothing for me to say, as usual, and I had the phone on mute.

The last few nights, there’s been a period when I’ve emerged from the beginning of sleep, or from a reverie, and been wide awake, unhappy, restless. I’ve considered getting up and doing something with that time—writing, playing the guitar—but of course I haven’t, because all I wanted was to get back to sleep. It’s the terrible quandary of the insomniac. All that precious wakefulness, and you don’t want to use it.

TROOPS

A través de varias estapas de la vida,

Yesterday was a beautiful day, a bit chilly, with dark clouds moving in for the days of rain to come but the sun still shining through the city as it set. By five o’clock or so sky was gray but the buildings were bathed in that pink-and-orange glow.

I had no meetings but plenty of work. I ate my lunch the way I always do: at my desk, watching old car races on YouTube. Eating an unwieldy burrito quickly, like an animal. Shamefully. Not really tasting it, not really thinking about it, but thinking about not thinking, of course. Self-consciously unconscious.

Apparently at Google they have, what do you call it, mindful eating lunches. Where everyone gathers in the cafeteria and eats together slowly, savoring every forkful. Eyes closed. Humming through their noses as they chew. Grasping at their neighbors’ hands and falling off their chairs, enrapt. Rubbing butter and ketchup on each other’s faces and breasts, pulling off shirts, bras; unbuckling belts; kicking off shoes. Finally coupling and uncoupling, men and women, men together, women together. After half an hour of this a bell is chimed and lunch is over; time to get back to work; there are user experiences to optimize; there’s data to mine and analyze. This is what I suppose happens, anyway. Mindful eating in the Google cafeteria.

I thought about the woman who came in to freelance on Friday and Monday. Her peculiar quiet manner, as though she didn’t quite understand me, or were struggling with the English language. She was maddeningly inept—she didn’t know how to navigate her computer, didn’t seem to grasp the steps to do her job. She took notes in loopy script on the back of a big printout I was showing her and had not intended to give her, and that doesn’t matter; but she was drawing arrows and lines all over it to keep track of where she was and I could see besides she was writing some things wrong. She didn’t seem young, she didn’t seem old. She drifted in and out of the office without a word to anyone. We had no work for her, really, so we couldn’t tell if she was any good. I doubt we’ll ask her back. She gave us no reason to. But the episode made me feel bad somehow. Who was this blurry person? What did she want, or need?

TROOPS

The Fathers counted saints and martyrs of old among their number,

Governor’s Island is occupied by well-behaved children who take turns ringing the big bell, wait quietly in line for ice cream, follow each other up and down the treehouse and play mini golf with imaginary balls after all the real ones are lost. It’s like some goddamn anti-Lord of the Flies.

We went on a pretty Saturday in September. I was faintly nauseous all weekend, I remember. Like you get when you read for too long in a car. But it was beautiful.

TROOPS

They saw seals, sea lions, a whale.

The Enterprise - 48

It is with great shame that I recount not only that I wanted her in the first place but that after it was all over I wanted her back. In that pitiful state of sex-withdrawal (it wasn’t love-withdrawal; it wasn’t heartbreak—there had been no love) I did what a thousand million men and boys have done before me and what God knows how many more will do again: I asked her out. To talk. To explain. To fuck—I hoped. Fantasized. But come to think of it, I wasn’t even dying to fuck her anymore. What was it I was addicted to all this time? Fucking her? No. Fucking me. I’d gotten used to using her to fuck myself. It was me I was heartbroken for. Me, me, me.

We met on the Ides of March. We walked along Madison Avenue, staring at things in the window we didn’t even want. I believe she allowed me to hold her hand. Mercifully, I never saw her again after that. Except that one time on the train. There’s always that one time on the train. Like it or not, we’re all going to meet again someday.

TROOPS

between his legs. It was cold in Yellowstone Park

TROOPS

Of course overlaying all of these impact investments is the returns.

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on a rock or a log,

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, and later fell in with the anti-Vikings.

TROOPS

because an actor's inspiration for a part is personal.

9/14/14

When I start writing, in Google Drive, the first thing I need to know is the date. I create a doc and that infernal little window pops up—it used to be that, by default, the title would be the first who knows how many characters of the text itself; the title would be the text and the text would be the title, and you needn't lift a finger—now I have to name it something so I name it for the date, in standard all-American format, like on the spine of a cassette of a Grateful Dead concert: 2/14/68, 5/8/77, 10/10/82. So 9/14/14.

Like the date might mean something. Like what I'm writing is historic, or enmeshed in history. Like it's got anything to do with it, really.

And sometimes, by the time I've thought hard enough to remember the date, I've forgotten what I was going to write about.

Overheard in Manhattan, a woman of about forty on her phone:

"... clips of her. You should just watch."

Here we are again at the beginning of things: school, work, the football season. Every year I think I'll take note of it, pause before it passes by. Every year I don't. Except for now.

Peering out from our balcony onto the Promenade des Anglais I saw the usual nighttime parade of pseudo-rich younger couples trying to make the scene or something, of vagrants and mediocre musicians, of tourists like us. There were two little fucking fountains erupting from somewhere on the sidewalk, or maybe from the island in the middle of the street. I couldn’t tell whether they were meant to be functional—to water the palms and those shrubs with the pointy leaves—or decorative. Or maybe it was the water main. No one seemed to notice or care, anyway.

We are staying in a vacation apartment on the water in Nice. It is clean, modern. Unlivable.

Behind the kitchen faucet there stands a bottle of dish detergent whose brand name is the Soviet space station that fell to earth.

I found the passenger list from the QE2, when my family came back from France, not quite a year after I was born. It fell out of the back of some old photo album, a not-quite relevant one—of my father growing up—the way these kinds of documents often do. It was blue, and plain, with a stylish little drawing of the ship at the bottom. There was no preface, no preamble; no ads nor filler about the grand history of Cunard Lines. No nothing—just the list. And it was absurdly long. Like the list of minor donors in the back of a program at Carnegie Hall. But worse. Hundreds upon hundreds of names, blanketing the alphabet; every common name you could think of and a good number of weird ones, too. Speaking of which, there in the expected place were we: my father, my mother, my sister with fourteen in parentheses, my brother with ten, and me without a number. I realized later that the date on the cover of the booklet, August 22nd, 1969, was exactly forty-five years ago today.

Ten hours of deep, dark jetlag sleep. I dreamt about work; the project manager on my team was sleeping on mattresses on the floor in the office. There was a bit of copy she wanted me to edit on a manuscript. I tried not to sound insane as I asked her about it. There must have been lots of other dreams, probably dreams inside of dreams, but I can’t remember them now.

TROOPS

One thing that shapes almost all of these concepts: They're practical.

Some awful, frustrating reality kept intruding upon my dreams. Something to do with the sheet and the blanket, with being too cold or too hot, but maybe none of those things really because nothing seemed to make it better. Even as I was deep in a dream—about band rehearsal in a music store with packages of every kind of guitar string arrayed on the wall but always out of reach, I think—I felt the discomfort.

TROOPS

I think that before you decide that you're in love with a guy from Russia,

TROOPS

Katie just melts. I've never seen her melt before—

TROOPS

now officially "too hot," pulled off his

TROOPS

and in her panic to hold it together she leaped from the edge into soundlessness

TROOPS

"Mmm. Timid people can surprise you."

"Well she did."

TROOPS

were actually put to thee then by the

As I sat here typing my password into my computer to begin the day I wondered, Did I have a dream about typing my password into my computer to begin the day?

Stung

Suddenly the bee was there, on my ring finger. It wouldn’t go away, which was strange; it just sat there, brushing my skin with its wings and hair. It’s just a poor bee, I thought—I shouldn’t kill it. Should I? I tried to shake it off and sure enough the sting came, hot and angry. Red wine spilled out of my plastic cup in big drops but still the bee kept stinging. It felt like a reproach. Like I deserved it.

We moved our picnic things away from the nest and I imagined them watching approvingly. Don’t worry, bees. We won’t bother you no more. But soon after I poured another cup of wine one landed on my hand, my other hand—again, the hand that held the wine. I was resigned this time. I just have to let it do this, I thought. And it did. My fingers swelled; my hands felt poisoned, heavy. But no bees bothered us again.

At the party in New Hyde Park, out on Long Island, I was hoping the flight path of the planes taking off from JFK—or landing, who can ever really tell?—would be right above the house, as it was last year, but it wasn’t; the planes were off to the side a ways, disappearing behind the giant gray water tower and reappearing after a strangely long time for something so big that’s moving through the sky.

Jackie played on the well-tended lawn, sometimes by herself, sometimes trying to keep up with big kids. It was cloudy but it never did seem like it was going to rain. The sun came out later, blinding us on our ride home. On the Kosciuszko Bridge you could barely stand to see the Skyline.

TROOPS

of God, our own highest voice, becomes crowded out in the process

TROOPS

She looked back at me and the fear was naked in her face.

TROOPS

a sickly, frail fellow, who despite his fundamental defect,

As I wandered from the kitchen back to my cubicle with my coffee I overheard someone telling someone this: “I don’t like the way he seems to coast through life. I find that… problematic.”

The Dictionary Defines Hundred as Ten Times Ten

There’s an old dictionary propped on a stand on a table near my desk, opened to H—humblebee to Hunnish. I glanced at a random definition on the page: hundred. It is defined as a cardinal number, ten times ten.

4th Avenue Scene

A few years ago I was gassing up the car on 4th Avenue in Brooklyn, soon after we moved to Park Slope. A car was pulling up to the intersection in an ordinary, leisurely way when another came up fast behind it, pulled around and stopped just in front with a screech. Immediately its driver began a furious harangue:

“You fucking cocksucker! You motherfucker! You fuck with me? You fuck with me? I’m about to fuck with you, motherfucker!” he shouted, his head and torso straining out the window. “I’m going to fuck you up you little fucking pussy, you fucking maricón!”

He punctuated his insults by spasmodically slapping the outside of his door and banging on the horn.

“I fucking kill you! Fucking little bitch! Look at you now bitch! Look at you now!” Honk! Honk! “I should climb out of my fucking car and kill you, cocksucker!” Slap! “Bitch!” Honk! Slap! “You cut me off?! You cut me off?! I cut you off, bitch, how you like that?! How you like that?!” He indicated the front of his car with a jab of his outstretched hand, like: Look. I cut you off. “You don’t fucking cut me off, bitch! I fucking cut you off! Faggot!”

Through it all the driver of the other car, a meek young man in glasses, sat impassively, staring at his abuser.

“You wanna fuck with me, you little piece of shit?! You wanna fuck with me? I fuck with you!” Honk! Honk! “Little fucking bitch. You happy now? Bitch.” Honk! Slap! “You fucking happy now?”

Here there was the briefest pause.

“You fuck with me again I kill you.”

And then the angry driver took off in a U-turn, tires squealing, and drove back up the avenue. The light had turned green and red and green and red again by now, so the other driver had to wait. And wait. Alone.

Something fell from the windowsill into the tub, one of Jackie’s toys or something. Probably the wind picked up.

A minute later there was an awful crack outside the living room. I went to the window. It looked like a normal summer evening—pedestrians, joggers and cyclists, all oblivious, lost in thought. Yet the wind was moving strangely, in little eddies. You could see it in the way the leaves rustled and the trash blew. I looked to my left and found that a tree had split about halfway up and fallen over parked cars and into the avenue. Passersby turned to calmly photograph the scene. Cars honked as they navigated around the branches. Finally the police arrived, then some kind of city truck. We settled back onto the couch as the chainsaws started up.

TROOPS

Or what I imagined someone might wear to a party.

TROOPS

"If Kenten is involved in something that sleazy and high-risk, why would he initiate a meeting and attract attention?"

Robert Moses Beach

We set up on a little patch above the surf, in front of a young, attractive family, a couple and their little girl. They looked European, Italian maybe. They spoke English to each other but you could swear you heard an accent. Tedious dance music played from their little black-and-red boom box. Several times, the man lifted it, shook it, blew on it. She sunbathed. Sometimes she’d lift her head to watch her daughter with a frown. Sometimes he’d rush up and scold the girl for not playing nice with Jackie, though Jackie didn’t care. The woman sat up to eat potato chips, deliberately placing one at a time on her tongue. She had eyebrows like Kate Winslet. Her husband picked up the boom box and blew.

A gust tore their parasol from its base and rammed it into an elderly couple in beach chairs behind them. Profuse apologies, expressions of concern. The man retrieved it, tried to reinstall it in the wind, thought better of it and folded it up.

When it was time to leave he took the little girl into the water and submerged her, holding her by the waist. She wailed as he carried her back up the beach. They shrouded her in towels and set her down. Before long she was quiet, relaxed, possibly asleep. The man picked up the boom box and shook, and blew. Finally they gathered up their things, the woman took the wrapped-up girl into her arms, and they walked off to the parking lot.

TROOPS

They were all hooked into dispatch

TROOPS

on the front step as we pulled into the driveway.

TROOPS

"I'm sorry," he said again

TROOPS

The city would usually request a third page because the twenty reminders that

TROOPS

we're safeguarded, existing policies that bore down unfairly

TROOPS

Although the unicorns feared the crawlers,

TROOPS

"The only member of his whole family who survived the war,"

We went to hang out in Central Park, a class reunion of sorts for Sara’s high school. It was a radiant, beautiful goddamned day. A little girl there had a sheet of paper with boxes numbered one to a hundred. Jackie counted them to thirty. Nearby, a fat man and a skinny man kicked a soccer ball back and forth, the skinny man much more skilled. A pale woman sunbathed in a bikini and a leg cast. A portly couple sat picnicking, she reading aloud from a hardcover novel as he picked off a grape. We laid out our blue sheet. A couple times, I lay back on it and closed my eyes. For about a minute. Bliss seeping into me.

While Sara talked to her friends Jackie wanted to go play on a big, flat rock, on the other side of the wire-fenced path. Just to be on the rock instead of the grass, I suppose. She said she wanted to climb the rock, but there was nothing to climb. It just rose very slightly higher than the ground, like many other rocks in this contrived landscape. She must like the change in the surface, the fact it feels different underfoot. She’d just learned the word texture.

There were weird round metal disks embedded into the rock, about three inches in diameter. Some bewildering numbers were stamped on them, and also these words: project marker. Jackie lost interest in the rock and went to pick leaves off a tree. After a while I put her on my shoulder and headed back.

TROOPS

standard macho-money guise.

TROOPS

a reality just as important as "real life."

TROOPS

and showed no sign of weariness

I like the storms that occur at the end of the afternoon, this time of year; that make commuters loiter on subway landings, waiting for a break.

Did I dream about China last night?

A lot of technology that we think is about communicating more, or communicating better, is really about communicating less. The telephone took the place of calling in person; phone conversations are shorter. Emails are short, often terse, versions of letters. Our texts and tweets are shorter still. And now that we maintain contact with the rest of the world via the “like” button, our communications are entirely wordless.

What’s the next step?

We walked through the Coney Island station, Jackie on my shoulders. Above the bustle and the dirt. It was crowded on the sidewalk, too. With big people. Big kids. Big couples holding hands.

A lady with a haunted look panhandled listlessly outside Nathan’s. She might have been pregnant. Or her belly was horribly distended, like a Biafran child’s.

I peered at the go-kart track and wondered if Jackie was old enough to ride with me. Probably not. The sun shone so bright, you could barely see.

We got to the Boardwalk and everything seemed alright. People were having fun. But there was something funny in the air.

I spotted a large man, a biker type, with sunglasses and a goatee. He was clutching some kind of children’s plastic toy—an airplane, or a car, or a water gun maybe. It was made of that bright, brittle, translucent plastic. That material that can only be a toy. I believe it was pink.

Suddenly he threw it to the floor and crushed it under his heel. All the while looking straight ahead, tight-faced, seething. His woman ran up to him and swatted him on the shoulder, like he was a misbehaving boy.

“How could you do that?” she cried. “How could you do that?”

TROOPS

Then catch myself. It's messing with my mind too much.

TROOPS

by furious nomads, protect its approaches

TROOPS

such as Texas Petrochemical, which provides its neighbor Goodyear with butadiene

TROOPS

who has appeared mostly in supporting roles

TROOPS

Let every lesson be of an elevating and ennobling character.

First Pages of Novels That Won't Be Written - 1

I bunked with Tim from Davenport, Iowa, who brushed his teeth compulsively. He’d do it right after waking up, before meditations, after meditations, before prostrations, after prostrations, before and after meals. The bristles of his brush were tangled and curled, rust-hued by the blood that seeped from his lacerated gums. Tim had a haunted look. A lot of us did. But he did worse. Something bad must have happened to him along the line. He didn’t say what. I didn’t ask. We weren’t supposed to talk about that stuff, anyway. We talked about our practice. We talked about our meditation. We talked about Richard. We peered at each other, trying to discern a sign of doubt. We tried to keep each other in line.

“Ijn’t he magnifishent?” Tim asked me through a pink froth of blood and toothpaste one morning, spitting little flecks of fluoridated foam in my direction.

“Yes. He’s magnificent,” I replied, dutifully. But not just dutifully. He was magnificent.

Tim spat into the basin, sipped from his tumbler, gargled, and spat again.

“I mean, the teachings just yesterday. I mean, wow.”

“Right?”

“I started to have that feeling I used to get when I still got high, except it was, you know—”

“Yeah, I know—”

“Pure. It was pure, like a beam of light, you know.” Tim made funny, wincing faces. From the pain, I guessed.

“I know.”

Most times the women were separated from the men. This was to protect us and to nurture us, to further us along our paths, and who could disagree? Would you disagree? Except during Pairing Time. Pairing Time was when Richard matched members of each sex according to his own beautiful, crazy logic, and we were sent away to fornicate. Then just as soon as we began to fall in love, or in hate, or whatever happens, he’d pair us with someone new. If there were leftover ones he’d pair them with each other—two men, two women, forced to engage each other sexually, to confront themselves, their darkest fears, or perhaps desires. It didn’t matter. This was all a means to an end and we knew it.

In early spring of my second year I began to hear the wails and moans of women

TROOPS

That said, a going-to-jail note was different

A young man ranted in some rapid-fire mumbo-jumbo on the train. No one even glanced in his direction, as far as I could see. I imagined myself intervening if he really freaked out. But of course he didn’t. They never do.

The walk down Seventh Street, with the trees and the street shaded by the rows of brownstones, and the approach to the brighter, open space of Eighth Avenue, reminds me of some place I’ve seen in dreams, or in an old book of fairy tales, or both.

TROOPS

I uncovered it, and a gentle breeze quickly fanned it into

TROOPS

But orders were orders

TROOPS

John smiled within his helmet.

TROOPS

His mention of "the invisible government" was, I believe,

The day grew difficult. The tax assessment from 2010. The death of the security guard. Still, the sky was an unbroken blue. Blue like ice cream, Jackie said.

Last Monday night we got up in the middle of the night to watch the eclipse. It was that strange nothing time when the lights are off and the dishwasher runs and no one’s on the street.

I felt afraid when I lifted the hatch. What if the darkening moon was up there waiting for me? All I wore was my bathrobe and my slippers.

It was cool and misty. The sky was mostly covered in high clouds. You could see Manhattan. You could see planes landing in New Jersey. The Statue of Liberty and her torch. But no moon. We gazed at the sky for a while. We knew we wouldn’t see the moon but we felt like we should spend a little time up there. The dew settled on every surface and still felt scared.

Finally we decided to go down and back to bed. I was happy that we tried.

TROOPS

EXACTLY the name on the identification documents.

TROOPS

Mrs. Bingham said, "I wouldn't know."

TROOPS

Rand put a hand on my shoulder.

There's Lots I Don't Know

I gaze at the triangular conference call thing on the table. No one’s on the line. Or is someone on the line? Maybe someone’s on the line but they’re on mute. Or someone’s on the line and they’re silent. Or no one’s on the line. The team is seated around the table as the account supervisor holds forth, reviewing the project work plan.

I see it says 12 volts DC just above where the power cord is plugged in. It really says “12VDC” but I’m pretty sure that means 12 volts DC. Direct current. As opposed to alternating current. But I’m not completely sure. I’m not completely sure about the V and I’m not completely sure about the DC. I’m only sure about the 12.

The power adapter. What does that mean, adapter? Adapt to what?

I don’t even know what the fuck a volt is. Volts. Voltage. I know there’s such a thing as a nine-volt battery. Why is that the only battery we know by its voltage? The others are A, B, C, D, whatever. No. Not A. Double-A. Triple-A. Like baseball. Like minor-league baseball. For some reason, the system for identifying certain batteries that are suitable for smoke detectors and remote controls and other small appliances is the same system that is used to designate the lower rungs of professional baseball.

What the fuck is the voltage of a double-A battery? If it’s nine, I’m throwing up my hands.

Maybe every battery has to be nine volts but only one of them gets to be called that. I don’t know. How the fuck would I know?

The lights dim and flicker in our apartment when you turn the toaster on. You Google something like that, it says you might not be getting enough voltage. How could something like that be happening? Where the fuck did the missing volts go?

There’s electricity coursing through our bodies all the time. I’m pretty sure I read about that somewhere, or saw it on TV. We are electric beings. We touch things and some of our electricity goes there. Someone touches us. Their electricity flows into us. Electrons flying up and down the lengths of our arms at almost the speed of light. I’m pretty sure electrons travel close to the speed of light. But I may be completely wrong.

What the fuck is a watt? That’s something else to do with electricity. You talk about volts, you talk about watts. But fuck if I know.