I bought a sandwich for lunch. It's nice when you know exactly what kind of mood you are in, and in this case, I was in the mood for a sandwich. It didn't even cost very much. I decided to eat it while walking around, so I unwrapped one end and started eating. After the fourth bite, the bottom half of the sandwich fell through the bottom of the wrapping paper and landed on the sidewalk. I stared in disbelief. A high-powered business couple walked by. The woman said, "Ooh, looks like that sucks." Yes, it did.



It felt like a cross-check from Jesus.

Now I am in a new mood, which is not so easily articulated.

(news) A local company was indicted earlier this month by a federal grand jury on charges of importing wild, underage and pregnant monkeys to the United States. LABS of Virginia, with local offices on Canon Boulevard in Oyster Point, was accused by the Fish and Wildlife Service of illegally importing the monkeys from Indonesia in four shipments through Chicago's O'Hare International Airport, said Patrick J. Fitzgerald, U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois. LABS of Virginia is run out of the same offices - and owned by many of the same people - as the Bionetics Corp., an established local research company that does work for NASA Langley Research Center.

If monkeys are in the news, I can be trusted to find out and get all worked up about it. As you may have expected, I have submitted my resume to LABS of Virginia for the position of wild monkey smuggler. I will not even have to commute for the job, since it's done through O'Hare, which is just a train ride away. I am excited about the challenge of passing off wild, underage monkeys as rambunctious children and midgets to get them through airport security. My track record speaks for itself. I am operating under the assumption that the company imports wild monkeys and then just lets them go, because its agenda is to turn Chicago into a new Bombay. Why else would they be importing monkeys?

What's really exciting about the article, though, is NASA's tangential - and unexplained - involvement with the monkey smuggling operation, and the fact that new Hubble Space Telescope pictures were released on the same day that the story broke, and if you give me a dollar I will write a nine hundred page book explaining the co-incidence, and Thomas Pynchon's lawyers will threaten a lawsuit and then offer me a deal whereby either I take Pynchon's place, assuming a shadowy mantle which has existed for thousands of years, or I get silenced and sacrificed to the godhead. Come on. One dollar.

There is a stain on my shirt from the fallen sandwich. I am trying to pass it off as "roguish".