I’m heading back to high school this August. No, I’m not planning to trawl for underage girls (just because I hang out with monkeys doesn’t make me a perv). It’s my 20-year high school reunion. Yes. Dr. Safran will have to shed the lab coat for a few moments to meet up with lots of people who remember me when I was monkeyless. Oh, the circle of life… I’m not sure how I’ll explain that 96 of my 100 monkeys are on “vacation” (read that as labor dispute). Oh, well.
Here’s a video I just made for the occasion from an old super 8 movie. No monkeys but lots of Paul Simon singing Kodachrome.
We got both.
Blind dates can be so weird. So, I’m told.
My friend Molly used to have this really ancient cat named Morpheus. He was so old he would walk to the bottom of a counter or couch and wait for someone to lift him up since he’d long lost the ability to jump. At the same time, I had a cat named Munchkin. My oldest sister gave it that name because she was a huge Wizard of Oz fan.
As much as I like my monkeys, I still like my cats. However, cat lover or not, this email I received today nearly had us coughing up hairballs we were all laughing so hard. Thanks, Molly! Enjoy:
You can see an entire gallery of cat images at http://b3ta.hnldesign.nl/index.php?id=263.
I knew a monkey once.
He was brown, wild and free.
He could run faster than me
as he bolted up the nearest tree.
He’d rap his chest and shout,
“Oooh, ooh, ooh and eee, eee, eee.”
Then he’d jump from the tree
and land right on top of me.
I’d fall to the ground
and curse the crazy monkey
but he’d just laugh and flee
into the bushes to eat a berry.
Then one day he was gone.
I looked around but couldn’t see
where my monkey could be.
Now my tree is simply empty.
I wait in the cool shade
for my monkey to return.
It’s only my time to burn.
Some monkeys just never learn.
I’ll wait another week or so
but I know he’s really gone.
Sometimes I’m here until dawn
and wake up on the wet lawn.
Google’s new feature is the cool.
Not that anyone should really care but, look, I worked here about 19 years ago when a slice and a drink cost around $1.50. I was the only guy there without tats or piercings. This was one of my all time favorite jobs. I burned up at least one clutch and broke my ‘77 Toyota Corolla’s brake cable delivering pizzas.
I bussed tables at Saul’s Deli almost exactly 20 years ago. It’s still there and much bigger than I remembered. It seems to have swallowed the neighboring Basket and Robbins. I still remember my boss telling me to wash the walls whenever I stood in one place for too long (30 seconds).
Freezing in the cold storage, I stocked the shelves here 22 years ago. I used to roll kegs out to the local college kids. Joy!
Yikes! 27 years ago I hurled newspapers at this building for the Berkeley Gazzette.
“Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.” - Albert Einstein
I have to remind of that each time I wake up and my toaster is fighting with the cat.
It’s been a while since the SIMI Project lost track of most of our 100 monkeys. As I sit alone in the newly remodeled lunch room and stare at the posters of our monkeys of the week, it hit me: I’m getting pretty lonely in this place. The trips around the country following each lead of a missing monkey are wearing me out. I hearken back to when our typing pen was full. It seems like just yesterday that tails rocked back and forth holding cans of soda while hairy arms furiously pounded at the typewriters. Sometimes those hairy arms were mine but with 100 friends to share the work, I mostly spent my time scooping monkey poo from the walls.
I spent the day with one of our former scientists yesterday. We walked the old streets and talked about the old days. It was nice. A lot had changed in our lives but the lab coats were still the same. White, big buttons and poo stains. Ah, those poo stains. Isn’t it funny the things you miss? I can remember a time when nothing bothered me more than a fresh poo toss. I would jump up and scream, pounding my chest with anger at the audacity of it all. Now, the stain is all that reminds me of winters and summers past.
Back then my youthful idealism was as fresh as the stains. The world held limitless possibilities. You could even say infinite. But slowly that idealism gets stripped back. First when I realized I could never afford an infinite number of monkeys then when I realized I’d need to settle on 100. But we must always dream. I dreamed of monkeys.
The institute is quiet now. A few monkeys show up to type randomly at the new computers we set up. Even the clicking of the keyboards sounds different. Perhaps I shouldn’t have invested in the quiet keyboards. No, it was necessary. After all, our worker’s comp insurance required the new ergonomic workstations.
I don’t know if I will ever recapture all 100 monkeys. I don’t know if the floors will ever have as many banana peels and smeared poo skid marks. I don’t know if my lab coat will ever be white again. Right now I’m just thinking of the slide I went down yesterday and the rip in my lab coat I got from jumping off the swing. I was a little annoyed at myself for ripping a perfectly good coat. However, in 10 years that rip may be all that is left of this time in my life. I will hang my lab coat in the closet and smile at the rip. Yesterday took me back 20 years. Before monkeys, before stains, before gray hairs.
I recently traveled to New Jersey to try to locate a few of our monkeys. As you may recall, we’ve only been able to recover a few of the 100 monkeys that worked for the SIMI Project before we went on hiatus. The institute was doing some work for a huge pharmaceutical company so, naturally, we figured some of our monkeys may be working in “big pharma.”
After flying in to Newark via the Sunday red-eye (Okay, my eyes were only red from crying. Yes, yes… I made the mistake of watching Cool Runnings on my laptop again. The ending gets me every time), I stopped at the Dollar car rental to pick up my wheels. It turns out that I had to rent an entire car. Lame.
The clerk (associate?) handed me my keys and walked out to the car. Then I looked at the keys:
Why, yes, that is a locked key ring with two identical alarm remotes and two identical keys. Why do you ask? It then occurred to me. I was looking in the wrong place for my missing monkeys! After enquiring as to who may have put together my key ring, I found Milton! Sometimes serendipity just finds you (but usually when it’s looking for someone else).
