Things fall together

Two years ago, the tape deck in my car suddenly stopped recognizing the tape adapter I was using to play music from my iPod in my car. It refused to eject the tape, because it seemed to believe that there was no tape, even though there was most certainly was. Instead of TAPE appearing on the LCD screen, my car stereo complacently displayed the radio station, as if waiting for me to try my best to jam a second goddamn tape into the slot. In the time that it was stuck, I half-heartedly shopped around for new car stereos. On several occasions I went into forceful rages of desperation, where I would futilely yank on the tape adapter's cord, or stick my fingers into the tape deck, trying to jiggle things around or pull the tape out; none of these strategies ever worked.

One morning, about six months after the tape had first entered into the depths of my tape deck never to return, I sat in my car, waiting for the engine to warm, and sighed resignedly as I looked at my pitiful and hopelessly jammed stereo. But something felt different that day.

Confidently, I pressed the eject button and held it down, and as if nothing had ever gone wrong, the tape came out with the reassuring sound of gears turning from within my car stereo. Perhaps stupidly, after some deliberation, I pushed it back in, just to see if it would be recognized and I could once again listen to my iPod in my car. It worked. I pressed eject. It came out again.

Time, it would seem, had fixed my car stereo.

And time, it would seem, finally got around to fixing my iPod today. Starting last December, my iPod became unrecognizable to any computer to which it was attached. It would charge fine, it would play all the music that was on it, but I was never able to update it with new songs. It took it to the Mac store, I followed every bit of advice available on online forums, but to no avail.

Just now, though, I plugged it into its dock, just to charge it up for tomorrow, and instead of the usual lack of response I used to get upon doing so, iTunes started updating my iPod! It's fixed! At least for today...

I think there must be a Third Law of Thermodynamics: given enough time, negative entropy can be favorable. If you're lucky. And lazy or cheap enough to leave things in a state of disrepair.

A clockwork lemon

It kind of reminded him of a Rubik's Cube, and he smiled to himself, knowing how dorky that sounded, but continued to flesh out the analogy anyway. There might be two orange squares together, but if everything around them is the wrong color, you have to change the puzzle, inevitably separating the two, and when you've got a whole side of orange together again, who's to say those two same squares will end up adjacent. There is no guarantee.

It was strange, but he found solace in it—love as a Rubik's Cube—and smiled again as he stood up and flushed, then went to shower in the near-empty locker room; all undergraduates and most other graduate students had already left for winter break.

The isolation of a temporarily abandoned university didn't really help the encroaching loneliness he thought he sensed, and he feared it would ruin the contentment, or at least lack of disdain—had these become the same to him?—he had lately been feeling toward his single life. But the truth—and he felt everybody must be fleeing their own stark realities brought by the year's end (at least he hoped uncharitably that he was not the only one)—the truth remained that things felt stagnant while progress whirled around him. Every motion he made belonged to a monotonous deja vu upon and despite which his friends and acquaintances built their successes at work, in love, at play.

He walked from the gym back to his lab through the profane cold. You knew Chicago temperatures had hit bottom if you breathed through your nose, wiggled your upper lip, and could feel the crunch of ice crystals clinging to your nosehairs. At times like this, it was surprising that every exhalation did not produce a flurry of snowflakes, and suddenly he imagined himself skiing on his own breath—careening down a hill, rhythmically blowing fresh powder from his lungs that kept his skis from scraping the rocks he saw only feet in front of him until he sped faster and faster, his snowblowing body failing in a fit of frozen suffocating coughs as he tumbled uncontrollably down the bare mountainside.

As he reached for the handle, the door to his building was flung open from the other side, missing his face but startling him from his thoughts, and through mumbled apologies, he walked into warmth. In the lab, more daydreaming. He thought mundanely, predictably of his crush, meditating on some hypothetical point in time after they had expressed their mutual affections, already ensconced in the comfort of a stable relationship (was there really such a thing anyway?), but stopped when he realized his experiment required his attention; he gave it, undivided. Later, as he sat analyzing the data in his office, he felt ready to break glassware. Another fucked up result I can't use, he sulked softly.

Elbow on desk and head against hand, he sorted through an inbox full of spam, and as he deleted he noticed an invitation he had glanced at then forgot about. Tom's birthday at Big Chicks, 8:30 Friday night. Today was Friday. The bar was close to his apartment; he could walk there, wouldn't have to park, wouldn't have to drive home after--important since he needed a drink, probably several. He shut down his computer, made the remarkably easy decision not to take any work home, put on scarf, coat, hat, gloves, and sufficiently winterized, walked out to his car.

On his way home, as he passed the lake, he let his eyes dart lingeringly away from the road, toward the expanse of black frigid water he couldn't see, as if the world ended at the dimly lit shore, where iceberg-like formations had grown out of the shallow water since the cold began in earnest. The transformative power of the cold amazed him, and he thought of how different the beach looked in summertime and how much he missed sailing. He appreciated every minute he had spent in a dinghy—the self-imposed solitude, the simplicity of the rigging, the surprising speed when the sails were trimmed just right. In a Laser, one had a solid sense of control; tiller in one hand, mainsheet in the other, the boat's heel tamed by your body's placement. Any movement, and the boat responded, every change a direct consequence of the skipper's actions. But even that wasn't true. One 25-knot gust and Nature had you capsized, gasping through waves, reaching up for the centerboard to set things right; she knew who was boss.

He got lucky and parked in a freshly vacated space across the street from his 3-flat. Inside, he set down his keys and glanced at his watch. 8:42. He'd be a bit late. Munching on whatever he found in the fridge, he called Scott to make sure he and Jacob were going too; he was feeling sociable, but not toward strangers. Unlike others he knew, neither of the two made complete deference to "us," something he viewed in most couples with half-jealous disgust, perhaps to equalize what they had with the only thing he felt he had in plentitude: the independence that seemed inseparable from being alone.

An hour later he pulled his door shut, and after several brisk steps in the direction of the bar, showed the bouncer his ID as he removed his hat and shoved his gloves into their respective pockets, thrusting himself into the warm cigarette-smoke air, humid with melted snow and evaporated liquor. Big Chicks was a small gay bar, with an older crowd, few lesbians despite the name, none of the pretense of its Boystown counterparts, walls hung with artistic renditions of fat women and naked men and adorned with hungry pairs of eyes. He strained to find his friends beyond his glasses, which had fogged up. If he wiped them with his fingers they would smudge, so he waited in a self-conscious haze until the moisture slowly left in search of colder, drier surfaces. Clarity restored, he found everyone in the back, near the pool table, a few feet past an incredibly attractive boy that he knew he would be staring at distractedly in the near future.

He hugged the birthday boy first, found Scott and Jacob, got a beer. Intermittent eyes toward the hot stranger, betraying some kind of desperate yearning. More beer. It was hopeless, to perceive anything but appearance, to project anything but appearance in such loud, dimly lit, volatile, nicotinic circumstances. All words became a pick-up. All conversation a progression toward an isolated moment of physical release, after which slowly, the lines would fill up again. But still he looked.

Jacob told him about a client at work, he had really wanted to kick her ass. The boy looked back. Nodded. There was something behind the nonchalant mouth, the casual eyes. Something disaffected, a fear, a pause, possibly imagined. Last beer. Fighting the music, Scott shouted that they were going soon. It was late; he'd go too.

In the morning, he saw that mouth, those eyes again, lying next to him, lit from behind by the orange sunrise from the window beyond his bed. He wanted to kiss them; with affection, not lust. But he blinked them away, went back to sleep as he made a partially woken point to spread himself over both halves of the mattress.

From a recent message to a near-stranger on MySpace

"In many ways, my greatest dream is that I make it through my life intact, having experienced a full lifetime (however short or long that may be), having felt fulfilled at least for the majority of it. Our world, our circumstances, it is all so hard to grasp, so unmanageable and yet to live is so trivial to accomplish at the same time. I guess sometimes the world seems small and simple, my life totally mine, my fate in my hands; but the feeling of insignificance comes so easily, as if we have no control at all, so that the best we can do is just to wield what of our lives we can, and float along for the rest."