The Cost of Loneliness

The price one pays to obtain it

Market value

Cost / benefit ratio

Gross Domestic Paralysis (GDP)

Auction: what am I bid

The cost of solitude

The price one pays to jettison it

Gelatinous Diabolical Penis (GDP) 

The price or cost of oneliness

Sex drugs rock 'n' roll

What my bid

Mortgage the past present future

On loan

Currency exchange (dollars to do-nots)

Sex rugs rock 'n' stroll

Giant Dwarf Projection (GDP)

If these walls could talk

Lace curtains

Do you want to know a secret

Silos

The walls have ears

GDP

Rental (dis)agreement

Room for hire

Nowhere man woman child

The cost of living

Adjusted for inflation (or deflation)

Economies of scale

One is the (l)oneliest number

Enough

Is

A feast

on notice

You're on notice. Give notice. Take notice. Give or take. Notice this: Brits loathed notice as a verb. It was seen as an Americanism. Ben Franklin went to France. When he came back to America, he noticed that notice as a verb was notably a new thing. For gamers, a pending loser is on notice. If someone puts you on notice, doesn't that notably add stress to you? It's like they're waiting for you to crash and smolder. Performers are on notice, in a different way. They want to be noticed. Sometimes, though, the spotlight seems too bright, way too hot. (Not-ice, get it?) Being on that kind of notice can freeze one in their tracks. Caught in the flicker of the strobe light. Paralyzed. You're on notice, son, girl, spouse. How servile one feels. Everyone, anyone, working for The Man is on notice from Day 1. (Do people now work for The Woman? The Person? The Military-Industrial Complex Android?) 

Politicians, you're on notice. As if they care. As if we care.

On notice? We notice what we want to notice, see what we want to see, hear what we want to hear, believe what we want to believe.  

And we call this freedom.

soft touch

Each box of pens sported a dime-sized label declaring SOFT TOUCH. Anyone seeking the ying-yang symmetry of a HARD TOUCH label would be disappointed. Besides, who wants a hard-touch writing instrument? Presumably someone who desires a forced halting, an imposed reflection, speed bumps or humps or whatever they call them in your neck of the woods. A writer who wishes to be arrested goes for the hard touch. It need not be rough or clumsy. Think of it like a vehicle's electronic stability control (ESC) system that employs computer-controlled braking to foster safe driving. They used to call this a governor. Sometimes a writer craves that meditative slowdown. 

For post-post-modernists who shun handheld writing instruments, a keyboard's settings can accomplish much the same thing. Or pour mucilaginous maple syrup over the keys, but don't expect to use that keyboard the next morning, or ever, without a side of waffles.

A soft touch. That's when you want to glide, sail away, slide down the snow-covered hill with abandon. Let it ride. Don't stop for no one or nothing. No edits, rewrites, fixes, catches, second thoughts. Smooth as silk. Enjoy it while you can. Merrily, merrily, merrily, life is but a stream.

They say: She's a soft touch, an easy mark. He's a soft touch, a softee, a marshmallow. Dupes. Targets. Victims. Gullible and gulpable jellyfish.

And yet: Soft touch mother to newborn, father to failing father, skin to skin, kin to kin. Romancing the stone, like water like time. Soft touch melting madness. Soft touch secret texture, facile tactile, silent language. Touch tone static-free, soft spark whisper flame.

May I borrow that pen?

The New and *Imporved FSA

One of the perks (perquisites being the original word) of this new job is the Vice and Virtue Flexible Spending Account, also known as a VVFSA or, popularly, a Sinning and Sainting FSA. We all get one. No other employer in the country (maybe the world) offers a VVFSA. They’re still working out some of the kinks of this innovation. As best as I can tell, this is how it works:

• Each employee starts with 1,000 Metaphysical Points (MPs) in their account.

• As with a stock exchange, the account value rises or falls in accordance with supply and demand. In this case, punishment and reward or good or bad are central to the algorithim.

• In any given calendar year, one’s account grows or diminishes in value as a result of the employee's contributed positive or negative impacts as determined by Human Resources (HR). (As of this writing, the impacts are confined both to the workspace and the hours of employment. However, remote work during the Coronavirus Pandemic has blurred these lines, and discussions are under way to amend the plan’s parameters.)

• Each employee is given a personal customized, confidential list of Positive Impacts (PIs) and Negative Impacts (NIs) at the end of each calendar year as an MP scoring sheet for the forthcoming year.

• The so-called cafeteria plan component of the Vice and Virtue FSA enables adherents to select in advance which impacts to be assigned a weighted value or which impacts to delete altogether in considering the MP annual total.

• The FSA essentially enables individuals to be reimbursed for virtues and charged for nonreimbursable vices as defined by HR.

• The “use it or lose it” feature of the VVFSA means that all 1,000 Metaphysical Points must be either spent during the calendar year or lost in perpetuity. The MPs can’t be rolled over into the next year.

• At year’s end, if an individual’s MP total is in arrears (e.g., in a state of moral depravity, beneath contempt, heinously solipsistic, Trumpian, egregiously GOP, sociopathically successful inter alia), HR will schedule an exit conference in the Tomas de Torquemada Conference Room in the sub-basement.