Today I discovered that, among other things, I will never be a salesman. The boxes of confectionery I’m supposed to sell are sitting on the kitchen table, elongated pentagonal cupolas of brown (more black than yellow) polyethylene plastic. Yesterday a boy sold ten in half an hour, and I debated between throttling him or hugging him: which one would be more effective as a charisma absorption method?

I like asking questions, and I like the kind of listening we get when we’re in a waiting room together, or an origami exhibit, or a bridge overlooking a river. Most of the time people listen like they’re waiting for you to finish so they can say their bit, or like you’re both in an elevator, anticipating respective floors.  Maybe that’s why people don’t seem to have good conversations anymore.

It’s a little like when you hit your head in a public place, hard, and what you need is to scream with pain and indignation, but you have to force yourself to stare up at the ugly tiled ceiling and stop crying. People are watching, you know, and you can’t possibly cry with them there, you absolutely can’t possibly. It’d be nice to be able to have a good long cry whenever I hurt myself. It’d be nice for people to say whatever they wanted, like we were in a waiting room or an origami exhibit or a bride overlooking a river. I’d like to listen properly.

Um, was this originally going to be about being a sales agent and selling chocolate-covered things to pay for my tenth grade graduation trip? I think so. Well.

Careening back to my original purpose: the chocolate clusters in their pentagonal cupolas and I agree that I’ll never become a salesperson. If I cannot find these dairy orphans gastrointestinal tracts soon they’ll have to be sacrificed to the wholly unsanctified innards of the Great Alexander (conquerer of the world Pokemon). I apologize for the grave, grave indignity, chocolate clusters.

I don’t talk to my school friends about what really interests me. They don’t give a rat’s ass care about the stream-of-consciousness technique James Joyce used to articulate Molly Bloom’s thoughts in the last chapter of Ulysses, and they are not afraid to tell me so. Nature versus nurture, eugenics, Modernist literature: these topics are shot down with a heavy hand and a voice like an open guitar chord. I didn’t dress up as a slutty nurse this Halloween. I didn’t feel a need to go out and party and drink booze and sleep on the street. I like my bed, okay? Feeding on supermarket alcohol and dancing on folding tables and puking in my neighbor’s hydrangeas does not make me happy. I do not do things that do not make me happy.

The point: I don’t usually talk about what I would like to talk about, so I write about it. And even if I write like I talk, without proper punctuation and with an excessive amount of paltry adjectives, it feels nice to say something to any kind of human receiver, even if they maybe think I’m a little bizarre. That is okay. It is kind of teenage verbal diarrhea, what I am doing here, but I’d like to think that there is a someone and that someone’s screen somewhere and for once that someone would very much like to listen to what I have to say.