I like Friday the 13th. And the moon looks pretty full out there tonight, too. Kind of makes you want to pick up an axe and start swinging, doesn't it? But that could be all the free candy talkin.'

As I walked into work this morning, it was the usual blur, all the way up from the parking garage basement. Each day, I try to take a different stairwell for different reasons. One has about eleven mini-flights of stairs and bores me. Another is always slippery and smells like elephant piss. But the last one that is marked off with barricade tape, that is my favorite stairwell of all. This stairwell is the least draining is them all; it has a hole, like a black window into a wall for no reason, and sometimes I leave a soda can in it just to see how long it will stay there til either someone throws it away or knocks it off into the blackness behind the wall. I'll never know the truth; I'll never stick my head in that hole to see.

This stairwell has long flights of stairs instead of short, flight-over-flight ones, and for some reason, I like that better. It's almost like trudging up a slight incline, and you never really know how far you've come until you look back down on it.

Same as always, I walk through the rows of BMWs, Lexus and brand new SUVs; everyday the urge to key them as I walk by makes me laugh to myself. Maybe it's the sound. Maybe it's that they probably don't even care as much about their expensive metal accoutrements as much as I care about my trusty soldier. You can't help but wonder who drives these cars, but the contents scattered across the backseats tell most of the story. Number one, the fact that they actually leave stuff visible in the backseat for easy pickins is enough to tell you how sheltered they might be. Racquetball bags tell you how old their habits are; yoga mats tell you how pressured they feel to be trendy.

Everyday, Monday though Friday, it's the same walk into the building, across the skywalk like a gerbil in a Habitrail, in through the double-glass doors that remind me of mirrors in a FunHouse. They make me look squat, every day. I don't care how decent I look, for some reason, they try to blow my day around 8:45 or 9. Some days I just don't even look, because really, they are unreal manifestations, some harbinger, I think. A sign that when I walk through those doors, I will face two, altered selves who are never quite me on that day, or the next day, or the day after that. But for now, I just keep on walking. And lots of times, I just look down. And I keep thinking about how peaceful Saturdays are, and I do that fifty-two times a year.

Next stop, the elevator, or My first real encounter with a stranger for the day. And I either stand there alone and I'm happier, or I wait uncomfortably with someone in silence. If only two elevators are working, then after about forty-three seconds, we begin the Dance of Waiting in Impatience, shifting weight back and forth between our feet until it comes. It's like an Elevator Raindance, and usually the elevator shows up soon after. If not then someone has to make a comment; it's usually not me though, unless I feel like being obvious.

Today, when I got to the elevators, a woman was already waiting there. And even though she heard me walk up behind her, she never turned around. And since i had nothing else to do while I waited, I noticed that this woman's butt was, well quite honestly, biggish. She was going in the right direction by wearing a skirt, but she fell short by wearing a white skirt with a large ruffle ending below her knees. Her legs were unusually thin and mahoghany colored, and her shoes were small wooden heels exactly matching the color of her legs. She stood there perfectly still. And as the elevator bell dinged, and as she began to move for the elevator, I realized that she looked exactly like a bedside table I had next to my bed as a child, and it had now come to life and was now walking across the marble floors to the elevator, with the peck-peck-pecking sound that I'm sure a walking bedside table would make. Dead sure. And it was fascinating, and that made me happy.

And then I remembered that I hadn't written things like these lately due to a workplace interfering with my true reflections.