I have better things to do.

Although the curators did, in fact, exhibit printed matter, they interrupted the opening festivities by announcing a “special poetry reading.”

Feh!

I was trapped, pinned against a table groaning under the weight of dozens of bottles of wine, listening to the wretched poetry of Spotted Youth and Old Losers.

Double feh!

I stood there, listening to horrible poetry and gulping free wine like it was free wine, trying to decide when to walk away from the open bar.

I left abruptly when I decided that my imbibing had shifted the critical balance: I was groaning more from the weight of miserable poetry than the table was sagging from the much lighter load of empty bottles of wine.

Bad poetry: quadruple feh!

We stirred boiling pasta and drank wine, not necessarily in that order. After a bottle or so, the other guests started arriving. For some reason, half of them showed up with completely useless flowers, e.g., the kind one can’t eat, smoke, or ferment.

Annalee graciously thanked each guest for their bouquet, then put the flowers in a hot oven. The baking flowers filled the flat with a horrible smell of incinerated pesticides, fertilizers, preservatives, and other chemicals used in floral agriculture. Even three bulbs of sautéed garlic couldn’t overpower the smell of incinerated flowers.

When I asked Annalee why she was burning flowers in her oven, she said she liked the concept of charred organic matter but couldn’t imagine burning animal flesh.

“And besides,” she added, “Have you seen what flowers do to a place? With pollen everywhere, insects, and rotting leaves, I think keeping plants in an apartment is as sick as keeping a dog indoors.”

Who could possibly disagree? Everyone enjoyed a delightful evening.

The private spectacle, commissioned for an international meeting of museum administraitors in Berkeley, California, involved burning a kilogram and a half of marijuana and blowing the smoke into the prestigious audience, then subjecting the befuddled spectators to righteous sonic and physical abuse.

Perhaps one day, if I apply myself, I too will be able to concoct a bombastic display of testosterone-fueled self-indulgence.

The conclusions of the Teutonic inquiry are completely obvious and self-evident. I learned long ago to keep by brain untethered, and to follow my mind wherever it chose to forage. And anyway, people don’t get enough sleep because they work too much; that’s just wrong wrong.

She used an insulting and accusatory tone of voice, so I didn’t bother to introduce her to any of the myriad paths that lead to an enlightened and rewarding state of sloth. Instead, I intentionally mislead her.

“To your untrained eye, it might look like I’m doing nothing,” I explained. “But I’m actually I’m really extraordinarily busy on a molecular level.”

“Really?” Kimberly asked.

“You don’t know the half of it,” I replied charitably.