Yes indeed… Or maybe, even better:
After all, maybe completely unbeknownst to me, I am very active in the real world; it is possible I only assume I’m shiftless because I simply haven’t noticed my many momentous, perhaps even historic achievements. (At any rate, I’m certain you’ll agree I’m awfully active in my use of italics.)
I mean, maybe it’s just that I can’t remember any of my missions, like the “Manchurian Candidate.” Every once in while, I get “activated” at the appropriate time by my handler, and I deliver the package, or carry out the assassination, or finish off the languishing doctoral thesis, all in a completely unconscious state, like an automaton. And then I “wake up,” and return to my life—where I habitually re-use coffee filters I’ve already thrown into the trash because I’m all out; where I weep with tender anguish for the broken-handled “kitty cats” mug, because, on this particular overcast Tuesday afternoon, I’ve convinced myself that it must be the loneliest object in the whole world; where, increasingly oppressed by my vacillating helplessness, I can quite literally spend hours trying to select a new ring tone for my mobile phone and, in the end, out of exasperation, settle (abysmally) for “La Cucaracha”; where I’m afraid that I will never ever ever truly be loved…—like nothing ever happened.
SUBJECT SOLITAIRE is highly intelligent and charismatic, but appears to suffer from critically debilitating neurotic complications. Furthermore, SOLITAIRE is fanciful, moody, easily distracted, and prone to embellishing her operational reports with exaggerations and outright fabrications. It is my considered opinion that SOLITAIRE lacks the basic drive and lucidity required of an effective asset in the field.
Based on extensive surveillance, signal intercepts, and self-report, SOLITAIRE’s regular activities have been determined to include:
- Engaging small animals — such as birds, squirrels, and bumblebees, encountered in the course of her progress around the city, in solicitous small talk;
- Preparing and consuming guacamole (a Mexican delicacy composed of avocadoes, coriander, lime juice, chopped onions and garlic), which seems to be the principal staple of SOLITAIRE’s diet;
- Coming up with excuses to forgo attending social engagements with various friends and acquaintances;
- Writing amusing but also often witheringly critical unremunerated reviews for established contemporary art blogs such as ArtFag.org and vacuumketchup.com;
- Leaving notes addressed to herself around her living quarters, composed in an illegible scrawl — a practice of questionable operational effectiveness, given that SOLITAIRE herself does not seem to be able to decipher them upon later consultation;
- Spending entire days alone smoking cannabis and completing large puzzles, preferably featuring images of cows, dinosaurs, or reproductions of early Flemish art;
- Taking very lengthy hot baths during which, on occasion, SOLITAIRE masturbates by candlelight, fantasizing about idealized extrapolations of unavailable acquaintances (it has been conclusively determined that SOLITAIRE is enthusiastically heterosexual – see annex for Honey Pot Section report #67488-98);
- Purchasing books at a local thrift shop, which SOLITAIRE then fails to read or, alternatively, never finishes — because “there are always more books to discover, more stories to begin, more horizons to dream on.”
[In green ink, a handwritten annotation next to this last paragraph enjoins:] DISREGARD
It’s comforting, the idea that at least someone is taking a personal interest in the minutiae of my life, even if it is only Big Brother.
