it’s a pleasant day in purgatory.

the morning finds me at the starbucks café inside of the qfc at university village. a corporation within a corporation. i am rather unsure of what i--the consumer within the consumer--am doing there, but there i sit. sipping my coffee. gazing at the eery blankness of my calendar lends me a moment of empty content--but something catches my ear and i look up at the tv screen to see cnn headline news. the volume is up more than is strictly necessary, which is to say, at all. and i have this moment of non-recognition where it is not clear why the station exists; like, in my quasi-existential frame of mind, in this moment, i am honestly unable to pin down how anyone could go about creating an all-day news network without considering that news needs to be made all the day long or the anchors will have nothing to say. but even before it has fully expressed itself this quandary is being laid to rest, for

deborah, the commentator-announcer woman, suddenly has her screen split so as to share space with betty, the in-house exercise-expert woman, who is sitting at what looks to be the far end of the same desk (and already i am grinning for the marvelous redundancy of a split-screen shot of two people sitting next to each other). betty distinguishes herself by having her neckless business top be a decisive pink instead of deborah’s wilted mauve. she provides an almost lilting commentary for the segment on urban exercise-—something to do with the integration of brightly-colored inflatable balls, which allow your cardio-intensive exercises to be performed without your having to stand. but betty is just getting limber. looking excited now-—looking like she is ready to barrage us with helpful tips-—betty does just that, and we are off. 180 seconds from now, we will have picked up a wide variety of useful tips about walking. the first of which is: “concentrate. don’t lose focus. for most of you, this will mean not talking on your cell phone.” mmm, yes. nice. keep going, betster. and she does-—from the consternated frowny look on her face (to convey non-cellular concentration) she is on to arms: “use your arms to really get you going. don’t be willy-nilly about it,” she says as her wrists flop aimlessly about, like she’s doing an impression of the gay man she met. “really work those arms in front of you-—make a fist with your hands and punch them forward: just like hitting a nail with a hammer! hitting. punching!” she shows us how to do it, but because of the high desk she sits behind her closed fists are effectively moving straight up and down, with a sharp, piston-like economy. her arms are still pumping as her head swivels to her right, “back to you, deborah.”

a long and narrow sigh escapes my lips like i’m exhaling a stream of imaginary smoke. i do this, sometimes. usually it means that i have encountered a welcome defrocking of some misplaced seriousness or pretense. that light has been shed on some absurdity and, as a result, i feel better about my own coniferous station, my persistent cog-in-wheeldom. why is this so? why is my daily sense of myself tied so plainly to things which have nothing to with me? i don’t know. but i don’t know that i care to know; on this day, at least, betty and deborah have done a fine job of reminding that the confines of this shit i’m in are not quite so narrow and stinky as they often seem. refills, after all, are just 50 cents.