Boxes - Part II

After we had gorged ourselves fully on beef and cheese and eggs and onions and wonderfully non-whole wheat buns we mentally unbuttoned our jeans a notch and surreptitiously pushed our chairs a couple of scant inches back from the table and reclined a little more fully.

"So are we going to talk about anything, or do you just want to make up people's back stories while we sit here and the remains of your hamburger start to congeal," Sam offers.

"Congeal. That's a word that I haven't heard in a while. It's one of those words that sound like the actual action it implies. Onomatopoeia," I state and then say "I would like another beer".

"Seriously? It's a Tuesday afternoon and you're supposed to be at work," he replies.

"Oh shit! I knew I had forgotten something! Let's go to that pub up the street though; the lighting in here is washing me out."

"Yeah. It's the lighting," Sam responds, draining his beer and following me out into the unnecessarily bright sunshine.

I am equipped and throw on some sunglasses and a grimace as we head up the relatively busy thoroughfare. It's a Tuesday afternoon for fuck's sake: don't these people work? I realize also that I didn't wash my hands at Vera's and my fingers smell like hamburgers which grosses me out because every time I tuck my hair behind my ears or touch my clothing I feel like I am covering myself in eau de boeuf.

We tuck into a booth at the sparsely populated pub that smells a lot more of spilt and stale beer than it tends to on a Friday or Saturday night and the waitress is rather upbeat and friendly compared to the beleaguered and sometimes slightly surly service I've come to know and love during my frequent weekend forays to this particular locale.

I order a glass of Sauvignon Blanc and he orders another pale ale and we sit across from each other for a few moments.

Sam's interesting. He's super smart and rational and logical. He does smart, rational, logical things. I sometimes wonder if this is the case because he isn't sex driven. Most things that people do in life seem to somehow boil down to the beast with two backs. It's why we dress the way we do, it's why we want to be perceived as attractive and successful to potential mates, it's why construction workers catcall women that walk by and it's why women like to figure out how much money a man has before the relationship gets too far: sexuality as a commodity.

Certainly I am not casting dispersions on people that succumb to any of the aforementioned behaviour because it's behaviour that has been with us since the advent of time. I just think that sex, or the underpinnings of sex, can cause people to act in ways which, if we looked at singularly, would seem irrational.

My point being that sometimes Sam reminds me of Paul Giamatti in "Cold Souls".  Yeah. I'm just going to let that reference hang. I've been kind. This ain't no "The Elegance of the Hedgehog".  Pedantic says what now?

I know Sam loves me and I love him.  But I know that if I need to confess something and have someone be totally honest with their assessment of my actions: Sam is the one that I go to.  And I know that if I have some bonehead idea rattling around in that pea brain of mine, that I can bring it to Sam and he will brilliantly and adeptly point out the flaws in my theory.  He does not suffer fools lightly.  Not because he is mean, but because it isn’t in his nature.

“You’re like the clients that I occasionally get that have this big picture idea of how they want the program to look and function and they hand me the reigns and I work on it and show them what I’ve got and they say ‘This is nothing at all like what I wanted’ and they seem angry that somehow I couldn’t read their mind,” Sam explains.

“I like my allusions more thinly veiled, thanks,” I also explain.

“Is it bad?  Is it something I don’t want to hear?” he asks.

“No, it’s not bad.  Maybe it’s just that in the brilliantly bright and sunshiny daylight things seem a little less shitty,” I respond.

He looks at me, expectantly.

I hesitate.

“Boxes.”

“Boxes?”

“Yeah.  I just... I got a bit fixated on boxes yesterday,” I admit.

“What kind of boxes are we talking about here?  Literal ones?  Compartmentalization?  Are you moving?  You’ve got to give me a bit more than that.”

“Okay,” I relent.  “But just don’t jump all over me until I get it all out on the table.”

“Yeah, because I’m prone to jumping the gun and making rash decisions,” he smiles, but not really.

“You know, it’s your cutting sense of sarcasm that is preventing you routinely from getting laid,” I offer.

“Boxes,” Sam reiterates.

“Yes.  Okay.  So I was driving home from work on Monday and I’m in the fast lane and this piece of crap Toyota or Honda or something pulls in front me – out of the slow lane – rather abruptly and they didn’t signal or anything. I mean, the guy just pulled right into my lane without giving me any advance warning.

So, obviously, initially I was kind of pissed off.  It’s like there’s no common courtesy anymore.  The rat race scenario.  We’re these stupid humans in this stupid maze and we’re given the illusion of freedom, but it’s not really there.”

“Do tell,” Sam discourages.