Keys

I was con­tact­ed the oth­er day by a woman who want­ed me to come by in the morn­ing for a “no-strings attached sex­u­al encounter.” I get many of these emails on a reg­u­lar basis. So many women want to sleep with me that I have set up a sys­tem that looks for cer­tain words in the con­tent of the mes­sage and puts them into a hier­ar­chy of fold­ers. Most of them end up in the trash. Attach­ments are auto­mat­i­cal­ly stripped from the emails, scanned for virus­es and placed in their own fold­er. Emails con­tain­ing links end up in the trash, but all emails from red­heads are flagged pri­or­i­ty and sent to a spe­cial account that imme­di­ate­ly sends a text mes­sage to my cell phone. With all the safe­guards I have in place, it is rare for one of these emails to end up in my inbox.

That same day I briefly lost my keys. This was not a good thing. I looked in all the places I usu­al­ly lose my keys, the pock­ets of coats, in my pants, under the couch, in the kitchen sink. I did­n’t check the car because I can’t get in my apart­ment with­out my keys, and I was in my apart­ment. After I looked in the usu­al lost places I began to get para­noid. I tried think­ing of all the places I would go if I were keys; the doors and locks I would open, vaults, diaries, emp­ty build­ings and clos­ets. The keys weren’t there either, so I checked my coat and pants and couch and sink again. They weren’t there still. Where were they? In my car. There are only two things that can dri­ve me to dis­trac­tion, a woman request­ing a “no-strings attached sex­u­al encounter” and los­ing my keys. Is this real­ly hap­pen­ing? The answer is always no.