The jet at rest on the tarmac with the light blinking on its belly. The steady pulse, dull-bright-dull, seems like code from benevolent higher beings. But it’s really just some dumb thing we made, the same shit that makes the lights work on your dryer and alarm clock.

The weird bottoming out right after the plane takes off, like everyone on board subconsciously doesn’t want to fly.

I stared a long time at the dollar off coupon for mouthwash that came in the little plastic pouch she gave me, with the soft-bristled toothbrush and the travel size paste. One dollar. I imagined walking into a CVS or Walgreens, clutching it in my sweaty palm, bringing the bottle of turquoise fluid up front, presenting it to the cashier. Terms and conditions apply. The charm of olden days, when Mom would clip them out of the Sunday paper and you could only watch what’s on TV.

The hygienist was new, a little overzealous, manic. She’d giggle after saying something: You’re not flossing properly around this implant. Giggle. I recommend the Philips Sonicare. Giggle. I grew up in Greenpoint. That’s where I grew up. Giggle. She gave me advice, too much advice. Floss in the morning, don’t just floss at night. Get three cleanings a year. Not two. She was like, fuck it. More, more, more.

Then I threw it away.

At Aetna in Middletown, Connecticut, they had cake for everyone’s birthday and every day was someone’s birthday. A bigass building in a maze of parking lots and looping drives off Interstate 91. Thousands of employees. Of course it was someone’s birthday. There was a fucking cake shop right outside the cafeteria for the express purpose of selling cakes to people in order to celebrate their coworkers’ birthdays. The manager would go down there, maybe an executive assistant. Order up a chocolate or vanilla cake and pick a color frosting. Personalize it please. Then at some point the work team would gather in one of the very many conference rooms and declare surprise to the birthday boy or girl, here’s your fucking cake, look at this beautiful cake. I can’t believe you got me a cake! Then we’d each get a slice on a wobbly Dixie plate and plastic-fork the mealy sponge and too-sweet vanilla creme into our unhungry gullets, everyone, everyone on the work team, even temps like me. Every single fucking day. Cake. Like it or not. You could not refuse the cake. To say no would be an affront to the celebrated one of course, but even worse to everybody else, all who dutifully choked down a wedge of angel food at ten fifteen in the morning on a Tuesday. It’d be a bigger violation of the place itself, not just this corporation that benevolently made this space within which we may toil and magically deposited funds into our banks on a semimonthly basis but the society, the structure, the institution, America in the fullness of reality and dreams. We were the army of  the nauseated, the reluctantly obese. On the verge of ecstasy and diabetes.