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Feel free to take all weekend to read this Yesterday morning was spent daydreaming, as evidenced by the previous entry. Today I have moved on to other daydreams but reserve the right to remain as silly and awkward as I deem necessary regarding, you know, my secret crush. But no more about that. Immediately after writing the previous entry I made the tragic mistake of looking at job postings in Seattle on craigslist. It caused me a great amount of Sturm und Drang und Angst and I had to go walk around campus trying to stop freaking out and trying to figure out why I was freaking out. Thinking about moving back to Seattle causes me anxiety, so you might say I just shouldn't do it, but that doesn't address the underlying issue at all: why do I start to freak out? Why? It's not just that my old friend the boy and his vapid Amazonian girlfriend are there, it's not just that. I moved to Seattle with all my corny hopes and dreams and it ended up being what it ended up being, which was really super fun and amazing and I loved it etc. But why the anxiety now? Why? Anyway. To help me calm down I wrote another entry for the exciting writing contest. I'd intended to write something without any deaths but it turned out to be impossible. I can't write nice things. Story follows (please note the inexplicable indefensible ending, which I'm leaving in there for my biographer to deal with at a later date); but first I must update you on the ghost activity in my house: There was that phantom smell of stinky bagel wafting about my kitchen, remember? I started thinking that maybe someone had died in my kitchen by choking on a stinky bagel and was forced to spend eternity as a halitosic ghost in my kitchen. Instead I finally found the culprit: a clove of garlic! This is not to say that there isn't ghost activity in my house, but any ghosts that are there don't have stinky breath. I'm going to San Francisco for the weekend; they arrested a king of spam in Seattle and I've only gotten like four spams all day; and that's all I have to say right now. ----- They were days of warm sun and cool air - perfect, one might say - and every afternoon I left my little office for the street below, to wander in the market or sit at a table outside some little cafe. Some days I would venture across the river to the campus of the university, with its vast expanse of green lawn, unpopulated by students who had left for the summer. The work on my manuscript had been progressing but I'd recently hit a sort of brick wall. Having been left alone in the office for the month - my supervisor decided to take an extended vacation when it became clear that his supervisors would not return until the end of the summer - gave me freedom and quiet solitude. Hours would pass without my uttering a word. I met and befriended a gentleman named Smee who encouraged me to quit my job and join his detective agency, which I did. I packed a suitcase, and, with my manuscript and typewriter in hand, set off for Europe immediately. Our first case concerned a man dealing in stolen, looted, and otherwise purloined antiquities. My job was to seduce the man, drug him, and then hand him over to our brute squad. It went off without a hitch. But I began to suspect something was amiss when, during the final stages of our second case, the man I'd captured began to beg and plead with me for his life. He hadn't done it, he said, and Smee was just trying to get back at him for sleeping with his wife. Whose wife? I wondered, because Smee had told me he was gay. Nothing added up. I began my own investigation of Smee but could find nothing. My futile queries, however, stirred up some dust and alerted Smee to my doings. We met for coffee one afternoon. "Perhaps," he said slowly, taking a careful sip of his hot coffee, "you should take care your smeller don't end up where your ears ought to be." "Point taken," I said. I smiled. I looked out into the street. Cars were passing, sirens blaring, children running with dogs, bicycles falling over, old women being mugged. "Tell me, Smee," I said, "there's one thing I can't figure out." "What's that, precious?" "Why hire me?" He laughed and pulled a cigarette from his coat pocket. "May I have a light?" he asked, reaching for my green lighter on the table. I reached it first. "I don't smoke," I said. I pointed the lighter at him and pulled the trigger. A tiny bullet erupted from it, killing Smee silently and instantly. A waitress came to the table to ask how our coffees were. "Mine's fine," I said, "but his was too hot and now he's dead." "Oh dear," she said. "I will notify the gendarmes." "Thank you," I said. I caught a flight back home that evening and went to the office the next morning. My letter of resignation was still in my supervisor's inbox. I took it and burned it in the wastepaper basket. I miss you more than you know.
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