Journal of a Sabbatical

July 25, 2000

do clams grieve?

Today's Reading: Cape Cod by Henry D. Thoreau

Today's Starting Pitcher: Ramón Martinez

The toilet overflowed this morning. A surreal beginning to a surreal day.

There's a printer in the same building as Perfecto's Caffe. They say they'll have my newsletter ready by noontime. Perfecto's being convenient, I get breakfast there: an egg on a foccacia bagel and an Italian roast coffee (black). I'm normally a plain bagel sort of person. All these weird flavors confuse me. But today I'm trying to shake out of my rut. Foccacia bagel is a bizarre idea but tastes good.

I sip my coffee slowly as I watch the TV overhead. It has no sound. Text of what the head on the screen is saying scrawls slowly across the screen. Whatever voice recognition thing they use to generate this makes some entertaining mistakes, which someone then corrects. The talking head of Alan Greenspan addressing Congress says something about "thunderbirds", which turns out to be something like two thirds".

Headlines superimposed over the chest of Alan Greenspan flash on and off above the constantly scrolling stock ticker at the bottom of the screen.

"President to return to White House, make statement." Presidents return to the White House all the time. They make statements all the time. Why is this superimposed on Alan Greenspan's chest? Coffee takes effect and I suddenly realize this means the Middle East peace talks must have fallen apart.

"Concorde crashes outside Paris." The face of Tom Brokaw appears, pre-empting Alan Greenspan to intone bad news about what the text generator thinks is cold corn. This is serious. They report a hotel in flames. Yikes. A woman at another table watches this news even more attentively than I do. I say something about how awful it is. She says both her parents were killed in a plane crash. I have no answer for that.

In the background, the woman who made my coffee is talking to somebody about how she went clamming this weekend. She says she asked her friend if they had relationships. She wanted to know if she was tearing them away from their families and their families would miss them. Her friend told her "they have no social life, they don't have eyes!" Do clams grieve? Do you need eyes to have a social life? I never thought that much about the social relationships of clams before.

The TV screen shows Alan Greenspan again, with more details about the Concorde crash flashing above the stock ticker, which has not wavered for even a second while Greenpsan was preempted.

Has a clam Buddha nature? Mu!

Has Alan Greenspan Buddha nature? Mu!

I half expect aggrieved clams to take over the TV station announcing that they do so have social lives. Do not. Do so. Do not. Do so. Is there something weird in this coffee?