I attended a sad brunch with my contemporaries. It was only recently that I even acknowledged having contemporaries. I'd recused myself from temporal trappings. But time caught up with me, it sped by me as I panted, it bobbed in the distance in front of me, it left me behind. Flesh, I noted, had migrated from one sector of myself to another, had vacated other areas and simply vanished, or had seemingly plummeted from a great height and corrugated. Surprising parts of me suddenly abutted, without grace. Whereas before I had been seamless I now consisted of pulsing red problem zones on a dismal diagram of physical complaint. I concluded that it was time to quit cavorting and get to know my contemporaries, the men with big metal watches, the men with hairy wrists, the men. The women with so much on their plates, the women for whom everything is exasperating, the women. We pushed tables together so as to pool our cultivated disappointments into one starched white ocean of woe. My contemporaries are keeping it together, barely, whereas I have not yet assembled anything. At brunch with my contemporaries I was up front about my setbacks. My fear, my fleeing problem, my flinching problem. I never got beyond the f's. I told them over the steam table, "Charles Durning and Ned Beatty were always going for the same roles and I am Bob Balaban." They asked me what I meant by that and I had no answer. If neither I nor my contemporaries understand me then who will? I've done some preliminary thinking about that question and I have something of a tentative answer, just off the top of my head really, more or less thinking out loud, and the answer is nobody. As my contemporaries got into their Jettas and drove away I yelled after them. You can't knock a guy for trying! I am the last bastion of something or other!