Writing about the voicemail I got this morning reminded me of something that happened several weeks ago. Just before I quit smoking, I was standing in front of Bentall One having a puff, when a scruffy but hot girl in her mid-twenties approached me and asked for a cigarette and directions to the U.S. consulate. She was American, and had lost her passport and needed to file papers to get another one (and to make the loss official so that she'd have something to show the border guards when her name starts coming up on watchlists).
We're chatting amiably about passports, border crossing, and the sort of international law problems to which individuals are prey, when she looks me dead in the eye and tells me that 9-11 was the work of the Bush Administration creating a pretext for various invasions in the Middle East that would secure routes for oil pipelines.
Up to that point, I'd been silently cheering on the inside, thinking that this woman was actually fate signalling me that not all is shit, romance-wise. As I stood there listening to her, though, it became a silent debate about whether or not consistent sex was worth several hours a week of nodding at conspiracy theories. "Yes, sweetie, I know that the stickers on the backs of road-signs are codes for the location of concentration camps and RFID implanting. But honestly, I've got a killer headache tonight, and a meeting first thing tomorrow..."
When I looked up, she was in full rant mode, with both hands help up, framing the air between our heads, vibrating like the raw malignance could be sounded into my head through pure waves of extra-logical insight. She hadn't raised her voice; she was simply focused like a chin-sited hairy mole. As exciting as it would be to role-play NSA hit man vs. intrepid investigative reporter every time we went to bed, I begged off, wishing her good luck with her passport.
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