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Gambit | Apr 15 2002

Yesterday I woke up and realized I don’t have anything to say. For some time now I’ve been feeling tired of myself and my problems. I had this plan to make a quiz for April 15th called Which Tax Form Are You? Various friends contributed questions, some quite funny. An example (this one I wrote):

If you had to lose one sense, which would it be?
  1. Sense of decency
  2. Sense of proportion
  3. Sense of humor
  4. Sense of possibility

That’s pretty good, right? Anyway, I like it. Of course you may wonder what this has to do with tax forms. Well, not a damn thing, which was going to be part of the charm. Yesterday, however, I bailed; I just couldn’t muster enough “charm” energy.

It makes me wonder if I should take a break from writing, just stop thinking for a while.

After working out this morning, I stopped at the local produce store to pick up bananas and orange juice. While the cashier was ringing up my order, I looked up and saw myself in the surveillance monitor above the register.

I don’t look like myself from that angle. Or I suppose I do look like myself, but it’s not the me I’m used to seeing, the one who faces me in the bathroom mirror, the one I sneak looks at in car windows and such. And then there’s the weird effect of turning your head one way and having the guy in the monitor turn his head a different way, although the same amount.

The interesting thing is that I was shoplifting. I hadn’t realized it. In the monitor it was plain. With my left hand I reached under the counter and grabbed a candy bar, apparently at random, and slipped it into my left jacket pocket. I watched myself do this three times. It was clever too, because my body blocked the cashier from seeing. Plus I looked up the whole time (at the monitor!), this being a classic magician’s gambit to draw attention away from the action.