2004-05-27 - 3:15 a.m.

I went to get a wood cube thingie at Target so I could organize my closet but they didn't have exactly what I wanted anymore �cause it took me too long to come to the realization that I wanted it I guess and the guy there said they would never have it again, and it wasn't listed on their website, so I went to several other sites and to several stores even though I wanted just what I had originally wanted, and I couldn't find anything so I went back to Target for a different reason and it was there somehow so I paid fifty bucks for it and carried the fifty pound fucker three blocks to the bus stop and waited twenty minutes for the bus and got it home and left home and went to work.

I waited 'till Sunday to put it together and I was looking forward to it and I had it halfway done and I noticed that it looked like it had been returned because the bag with the screws looked taped up, and halfway through assembly I realized that it must have been returned because one of the little dowels that is supposed to hold it together must have snapped off when the previous owner attempted to put it together, so that person must have returned it because he or she broke it.

I don't have a car which that person clearly did so I had to spend an hour and a half either on the phone with Target, walking to Target, being in Target, or walking home from Target, explaining, walking, explaining again, and then walking again, just for a five cent dowel--and the really nice guy there had to break open a new one at the store's expense just for a five cent dowel.

It really made me upset--not angry upset, just upset. If the person restocking had spent three seconds looking at it, three paid seconds, not three seconds of that person's life, he or she would have easily realized that there was half a broken dowel sticking out of one of the boards, and an hour and a half of my life would have been mine to waste.

So many things go smoothly for us. Maybe 99.99999 percent of things go smoothly for us--the normal things we don't notice--I'm not talking about should I switch careers? or will she say yes if I ask her out? type things, or train heists. I'm talking about I get on the bus and it takes me home or I order a sandwich and then I eat that sandwich or I turn on the TV and I watch it type things.

But I get things like the I bought what turned out to be a returned item and it didn't have all the right pieces (it's happened more than once even though I check for signs of return, and once when I was a kid and it was a birthday present, and I didn�t get random toys between birthdays and Christmases, and they didn't have the same thing at the store to replace it, and I'm still mad about that). I get things like the book I'm really enjoying just repeated the second chapter where the last one should be. Apparently I just got a the used video game I bought freezes up and I can't progress any further, and that's on the heels of I just beat the used video game I bought only to realize that I'm supposed to play it again and it'll be twenty times cooler but they didn't give me disc three. Earlier this month I went with the Roommate on a long, long walk and ended up in Allston where I visited Mr. Music to support my local musician and bought a $25 pack of acoustic bass strings which turned out to be too short for whatever reason so now I have no bass and it�s been a month �cause I never get to Allston so now I�m out the $25 I spent and the $25 I�ll have to spend.

I could go on and on and on and on. Seriously. Stuff like this happens all the time. People comment on the frequency with which it happens to me.

Just right now, which is why I'm kinda bummed, I put in my Guided By Voices DVD from the box set the Roommate got me for Christmas--I was saving the DVD for when I needed a little cheering up, and the only thing in the world I wanted to do was to watch that move right then--and it doesn't work. All the CDs from the box set work. The DVD player (on the puter) works. I went online to see if people were complaining about it not working and not only did I find nothing, I found nothing but glowing testimonials about how awesome the DVD is.

I mean, I'm bummed. Whatever. But what really sucks is the time. There's a half hour of my life spent slowly getting bumbder and bumbder, and the most optimistic spin I can put on it is that I didn't spend an hour trying to get it to work before drawing the line.

I know that people perceive weird events happening to them as being weird because they�re people and not omniscient--that in the course of one day, that�s 24 hours each for six billion people being born or living or dying, or maybe 15,000,000,000,000 total hours a day--a few really weird things are going to happen to a person or two in the span of one day.

But I think I get more than my share in an odd and uncanny way. And I�m not saying I don�t have good luck with weird things too--I don�t know why for either but the bad is harder to guess for obvious reasons. (And I know I'm being unreasonable with my whining, but if nobody ever whined, our language would probably have no more than eleven words.) Maybe I just make too many parallels, or I sympathize with myself too much. Maybe it all dates back to when I saw that loaf of bread in a tree in West Roxbury.