Okay, I’ll admit it: most of what I know is made up; a complete fabrication as a defensive measure against the alarming banality of truth. As such, the line between the two worlds–between truth and fabrication–is sometimes indistinct. The defining factor seems to be the number of unicorns involved in a given thought. Of course there is no profit in revealing this fact to my adversaries.

So it is that, in order to avoid looking like an idiot, I will keep the topic of conversation within known boundaries by whatever means necessary. It’s easy enough to steer the typical conversation, which may exhibit, at best, a bovine bearing. But on occasion there will be the folk with an agenda, and when they start throwing down the “lepton emission” or “freemason conspiracy” jive, then, my friend, then it’s time for the fisticuffs. Usually all it takes to get things back on track is a, “Wait, what is it you were saying before about fabric softeners?” Any opportunity for exposition will find people willing to cede control of the conversation. They know in their solipsistic hearts that they cannot die suddenly in the middle of making their point. A former mercenary knows different.

In any case, the small library of information to which I have access is more than adequate to meet the needs of superficial discourse. If I do find my actual knowledge lacking then I can rely on such devices as oratory momentum, recombinant repetition, or simple blank nods of agreement to create the illusion of broader understanding, similar to the way a cat bristles so as to appear larger to foes.

There are exceptions.

When Leopold mentions one thing, it’s only so that he can follow it up with something even more obscure. In that way, the initial topic is nothing more than a conversational lure. This tactic is effective because the initial premise is often couched as nothing more than an unassuming observation, like whether or not cheese would compliment leftover tater tots. But then I’m suddenly embroiled in a baroque debate on the reliance of latter day patriarchies on rhetorical esoterica, and nothing short of a cardiac event will offer escape from that one intact. For example.

To make matters worse, there will always be a point, somewhere within his gnarled mesh of logic, where Leopold will let blare the trumpets of self-aggrandizement. This is not a thread well-woven into the fabric of his diatribe. To the contrary, the only reason he gets away with his ego posedown is because it comes at you from another dimension entirely. “It’s like the points Professor Lawrence Kohlberg made about moral reasoning,” he’ll say. “Oh, and did I mention I knew Kohlberg? He and I had similar conversations, and I probably influenced his teachings.” It’s a stampede of elk trampling your office cubicle.

Like a caveman you can only grunt, “I eat boogers.”

While Leopold harangues me from his workstation pulpit with his theories concerning the pitfalls of moral absolutism, I’m realizing that I’ve developed a rather complex point system just to cope. Clearly, Leopold must lose points for his debate techniques. Pouncing on people only to further his conversational dominance gains only demerits. On the other hand, for his overall inclination toward logical fastidiousness, and for being earnest, he earns points. I’m nothing if not fair.

Coworker Trevor gets points for being one of the funniest people I’ve come across. I don’t have to be particularly knowledgeable when I talk with him, but I have to dial up the humor. And not my native flavor of humor, but his variety: super-dry businessman, with a dadaist twist. And at least one foreign accent. It’s the only currency he accepts. But then Trevor suffers demerits for being a conspicuous ear wax smeller. He makes some attempt to conceal his sinister proclivity, but in such an inelegant, obvious way that the only thing keeping people from staring outright is pity for his obliviousness. He once broke character just to whisper to me, “Does your ear wax smell like apples?” Such intimacy I do not desire. I responded by picking up my telephone and holding an animated conversation with someone who wasn’t there until Trevor went away.

Trevor’s point scale is not nearly as granular as Talia’s, whose overall score fluctuates faster than it takes to say the word, “actually,” which she does, constantly. Sometimes more than once in a single sentence. On the positive side, the extra syllables afford me time to think when the subject of the conversation threatens to reach my comprehensive event horizon. Still, though it’s to my advantage, I must count her repeated acts of blind iteration against her. It’s just sloppy.

Throughout my day points are ticked off like arcade bells. Clive sits at a weird angle, and Bertrand is a mouth-breather. Drusilla whistles off-key at her desk while she’s working, and Deirdre speaks in a high-pitched monotone that resembles a modem handshake sequence. I must concede that life among these creatures is made possible only by my comprehensive rating and categorization system. Also by the fact that unicorns replenish my life force.

Plus, they’re just good eatin.

Officer… Lindstrom. Her badge catches the sun, and I’m blinking the spot from my eyes when she looks up at me from her small pad of lined paper. “And when did you first see the car?” Her notes are a disconcerting scribble. Do I really talk like that?

Perhaps I could read what she’s writing if I spoke more elegantly. Then again, maybe I shouldn’t fight it. “Ghkklllrrrrgghhh, thrbblll ffkkkggggg.”

“I’m sorry, what was that?”

“I said it was around three in the morning,” I say. I look beyond the front porch to where the mystery car sat idling last night. Gone now. “Just before three, maybe.”

She stops writing. “How much before?” she asks. A stickler. Just then she’s hit with a yawn, and it’s one of those yawns that involve every muscle in the face and neck. And while she is helpless I peer into her mouth, positioning my head to get the best view.

By the time her eyes return from the recesses of her skull the illusion is already shattered–officer Lindstrom is nothing but meat. She can play servant of the peace all she wants, but she is no more than a beast in uniform. This thought inevitably leads me back to myself, and I become uncomfortable as I think about organic components strung together, vital processes pushing out hair and sebum, eating and evacuating…. I’ve stopped breathing again, and nearly fall over for lack of oxygen.

I don’t like to think of myself in that context. It’s not that I fancy myself more than the sum of my parts; I hold no such illusion. I prefer to think of myself–my person–as being made up of a single uniform material, like luncheon meat. The actions and motivations of officer Lindstrom here are determined by chemical, by instinct, by genetic imperative. I, on the other hand, am pure thought riding around within a tangible carapace. Rather like a corndog, I suppose.

From the dawn of thought I’ve been fascinated by systems. Not just physical bodies, but by environments, workplaces, and living quarters. Each one is a unique sculpture of will, a shrine to a given process. In a public place my attention is often held rapt by the momentary glimpses of the office beyond an employee door. A whiteboard smeared with the blue of changing shift schedules. Worn clipboards pinching sheaves of inventory sheets. Or V-shaped notches in teeth after years of gnawing… what?

In the midst of this activity that I cannot possibly fathom, my fantasy involves recklessly insinuating myself into some procedural chain, undaunted by my complete ignorance. “Gimme that,” I would say to the stultified worker drone. “Let me show you how a professional does it.” And I grab the shoe horn, or the blast shields, or the stainless steel calipers, or the strap-on baby mask, or the novelty vomit, or the environment-safe glitter, or the sock puppets with blue button-eyes, or the machine that goes ping, or your mother, and I just start doing whatever the job requires as if it were second nature to me. What one man can do another man can do, isn’t that how it goes? At least until the authorities do their thing.

But now, aren’t people the most inscrutable systems of all? Acting and responding, picking stuff up and putting it down, idling their cars outside my house in the middle of the night, and writing my every word on a leaf of notebook paper, albeit not very clearly. “Never mind,” I say.

The creature who is officer Lindstrom looks up at me again. “What never mind?”

I shake my head. “I made the whole thing up.”

Her arms fall by her sides, pen and pad forgotten. “Sir, look…. Would you mind explaining why you made the report this morning?”

“Because,” I say, and shrug. That’s really all there is to it.

I used to pretend that my pencil was a rocket. As my Grade 3 teacher broke the world into morsels digestible to eight year olds, I was launching golden missiles into space. I would squint with one eye open and, holding my Ticonderoga by the metal band around the eraser, move it steadily upward into my field of vision. Then, once the lead tip (or “nose cone”) had ascended out of view, I would deftly switch hands, grabbing the tip in my other hand while releasing the engine in time to see it sweep seamlessly by. Persistence of vision provided the illusion of unassisted flight across a constellation of adolescent heads. This business was hardly subtle, and on more than one occasion I was spotted by the teacher, my attention compromised, and made to participate in undesirable activities.

Daydreaming wasn’t the problem. Daydreaming is never the problem. The problem before the child with fantastic proclivities is figuring out a way to attend to matters of mind without gaining the attention of the authorities, as participation represents a spiritual forfeiture, and, to a lesser degree, an endorsement of dogma.

Several years passage found me an asocial tyke not yet at home in my own skin. A recent growth spurt had seen my legs replaced by mysteriously articulated stilts over which I had yet to gain mastery. But, though I was as awkward as a moist fawn, nothing could keep me from my running. I ran constantly, whether circuiting the school playground or dashing to the teacher’s desk to hand in my paper at the conclusion of a pop quiz. I had but two gears, fidgeting or sprinting. And if my energy seemed boundless then I can only attribute it to one thing: the power cartridges in my shoes. In the heel of each treble-striped Adidas was an invisible cylinder, shallow and wide. These provided me with a capacity for physical activity that few could match, and which fewer still could even tolerate. I would extract spent cartridges from my soles at least once a week, and this behavior became so ingrained that it continued–albeit with slightly diminished frequency–right up until my graduation from High School.

My tendency to running abated sometime during Grade 8, once I became aware of the disapproving glances of the girls. The girls had existed prior to my awareness of them, to be sure, but never in any substantial way. I’d seen them, if at all, as representatives from some obscure and transient sect, no more than shadows really. But something had changed over the Summer, and now, as I became more aware of them, they became painfully aware of me, as in Lovecraft’s tales of spectral beasties from beyond. And oh how the girls judged me, and tormented me by their mere existence. And so I had no choice but to withdraw, again.

As a teenager, during my final years of innocence, I spent most of my time pretending that I was a hollow giant, and that people–tiny to me–watched my every movement from my observatory eyes. I became hyper-conscious of my physical structure, and went about my business in a plodding, calculated fashion, supplying sound effects if I felt particularly alone. Sometimes I would pick up something nearby–a die, a salt shaker, a floppy disk–in order to satisfy the curiosity of my inner audience. A whine of hydraulics brought my arm toward my eye windows, and the little people would lean forward in their theatre seats, straining to examine each new artifact in as much detail as possible. As reserved as I had become though, there were still occasional difficulties. Using the lavatory became a challenge, for instance. I couldn’t risk seeing myself after all. And I remember one day when my stepfather caught me peering down at a sock that dangled from my fingertips. When I noticed him he just shook his head and went silently into the other room. I wondered how long he’d been watching me, and what his inner audience was saying about me.

Now, more than a decade removed from that age, I find that some things do not change. I haven’t used pencils in decades, the soles of my shoes are too thin for cartridges, and the theatre seats behind my eyes are empty. But presently I’m pretending that I’m an adult, and I do adult things such as buying my own hats, and working in an office during the day. And though none of this makes the least bit of sense to me, though I am certainly a fraud, I’ve garnered nothing but approval–praise even–for so successfully mocking the trappings of adulthood. This pretend life of mine is not as interesting as my more youthful pursuits, not by any measure, but fewer people are apt to question it.

I’ve come to understand that, in most cases, there is just one thing that is supposed to hold our attention. It’s usually the most obvious thing, and far more clever folk refer to it as “the thing right in front of you,” or “the task at hand.” Yet it could be anything. Whether we’re clipping off body parts and storing them in freezer bags, or filling our tax forms with bizarre scribbled figures, we know where our focus is supposed to be.

Even so, it’s difficult for me to lose myself in the moment. A given situation may be worthy of my attention, but time and time again I find myself distracted by the meta situation. The vaguest notion is likely to set my mind to recondite contemplation, and I soon lose track of things completely, like an autistic child distracted by a shiny button. A good example is my stepfather’s watch. When I was a child I had a stepfather who sported one of those auto-winding watches. I was fascinated how it whirred when he moved his wrist, which was usually when he was gesticulating at me during one of his tirades. A tirade is something you’re meant to pay attention to, otherwise why bother? But my mind was on that little mechanism with its flywheels and gears and… I didn’t actually know what was happening inside the watch, but by the time I emerged from thought it was already too late, and that watch was a hornet around my ears.

I go into each new situation with the best of intentions, determined to behold, consume, appreciate, without falling prey to the seductive analytical noise that whispers from somewhere close by. Sometimes I think I may even succeed. For instance, I recently managed to enjoy several sets at a local tennis event. It was during a slow weekend, and I had no pressing matters to attend to, so by all accounts I should have been able to surrender my attention to the little yellow ball. But that’s just it: the entire audience had already surrendered to the ball. Once the syncopated swivel of their sprinkler-like heads became apparent to me, any hope I might have had of being engaged in the rest of the match was lost.

The attendees were oblivious, and to a person, hopeless. I fancied I could hear their vertebrae grating against each other like granite blocks, and feared that their synchronized movement would generate eddies of air that, cumulatively, might soon suck down the roof of the stadium. At the same time I became very conscious of my own head movement, and the thought of joining mindless consensus gentium was out of the question. In fact I didn’t turn my head for the rest of the weekend, and spent the remainder of my leisure as if my spine had been fused.

Though my life of seclusion offers some respite from distraction, I still find myself occupied over things I shouldn’t notice at all. Very recently I’ve been hearing newscasters breathing. To be sure, any given news program consists primarily of actual news, recited by a photogenic crew, fleet of tongue, and authoritative. But the sheer volume of words involved in such presentations requires a precision of breath control matched only by the hurried inhalations of synchronized swimmers.

Unfortunately, once I’ve become attuned to the scantily camouflaged snort of an anchor’s inhalations, it’s all I can hear for the rest of the show. The rest of the monologue becomes a vague chatter, which is punctuated by a continuous chain of thunderous billows. I understand that the news staff must continue to feed oxygen to their respective brains, but must they allow the atmosphere to whistle through their teeth like a turbo prop?

Am I thinking about something, or thinking about thinking about it? The question occurs to me with increasing frequency, and I fear there may be no end to it. I wonder how self-referential this sentence will be, and if I’ll know when I’ve made my point. I’ve become an outsider in my own head. I’m just pretending, merely going through the motions even now. And if it’s true what they say, that in the end you are who you pretend to be, then maybe in the end I’ll be no one at all.