I am a pathological loser. Possessions seem to literally reject me as a host. Take this morning: I couldn't find money for coffee. "I have your wallet; I'll bring it to the office," an email said. On Saturday the email said "I have your hoodie." The Saturday before it was I who had his hoodie. In moments it seems sweet and rom-commy, the fuckbuddyhood of the traveling American Apparel sweatshirt, but for all the rest that has simply vanished to never again reveal itself: my phone in the cab on Saturday night, my debit card the weekend before, the debit card that had been re-ordered two weekends before that. CDs: I have purchased "Revolver" at least twelve times and "The Best of the Velvet Underground" and "Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain" probably ten. Twenty-something passports, the certified copy of my birth certificate, my original birth certificate, two iBooks, 10 BlackBerrys of varying generations and tons of other crap I don't remember because I was drunk. Over time I have come to feel absolute indifference towards things, which seemed philosophically cool because it's Zen, but this morning it finally dawned on me that I could maybe use a refresher in some of the philosophical arguments in favor of the concept of "free will."
Because today it struck me, reading about Barack Obama and the Jews and the homeland thing, that it is probably somewhere in my own flawed human makeup to desire a home. Sure, I've done okay paying rent on twenty-two separate apartments over the past ten years, but I had come to see a sort of home in the route through through Soho to the bank branch that probably just called my lost cell phone to tell me my new debit card had arrived like the walk up the hill to the Hong Kong consulate where they'd fast-track replacement passports like the run down Broadway to the American Express Travel Office, and a sense of comfort in the fact that when someone loses the keys to the PT Cruiser we rented in LA in the middle of Palm Springs, that I know what to do, and that it will take a few hours and a hundred bucks if it's a transponder key, and that that is not such a big deal; it's no excuse to freak out. And that anyone with a sufficiently deficient attention span can tell you losing an iPod is no occasion to freak out if you're used to being alone with your thoughts, which I am after hundreds of hours sitting and waiting for my number to be called at the current municipality's DMV. When the revolution comes and the paramilitary guerrilla dudes knock down the door to raid us of our valuables, folks, that's when you freak out. But see, the problem is I wouldn't freak out, because I have no fucking valuables, because I've grown hyper-accustomed to the impermanence of everything, at my happiest converting currency into beer precisely because in the morning I'll be sober, so thanks for salvaging the hoodie, dude, you are probably right that I am going to get cold.