I had to go to the bank to close an account and open a new one, similar but different. There were good reasons for this, which I could keep straight so long as I hummed them to myself en route in a sort of perspiring mnemonic panic, to the tune of "Red River Valley." I don't enjoy speaking to strangers on matters of business, anything involving sober and exacting adult transactions in which sudden giggling or swearing or the careless launching of rogue spittle bullets toward the face of one's interrogator would be inappropriate. They should let you smoke in banks, of all places, in fact it should be compulsory. I thought I knew what I wanted to do and why, the reasons behind my banking decisions, but of course the smiling and thoroughly pleasant woman who helped me completely destroyed my composure by raising minor issues that changed everything. Thus I was given further options and had to think clearly and systematically in real time while under pitiless observation and fluorescent lights which appeared to strobe in time to my pulsing eardrums.

This was really all too much, this grownup stuff, which meant that when I left I had to go across the street to Powell's to buy some books. I was looking for Luis Bunuel's memoir, My Last Sigh. Speaking of sighing, there was a sexy boy there whose New And Noteworthies I very much wanted to browse at my leisure, perhaps eliciting from him a promise to thumb me later while nearly but not actually breaking my spine, but the fever abated and my ardor deflated when I glimpsed him on his knees in front of the Spirituality Remainders. I ended up getting this novel by Jonathan Raymond, The Half-Life, and when I got home I found in the newly-arrived mail a postcard announcing its publication.