Rushing back toward the building I work in, I reached into my bag to pull out my wallet so I could have ID ready to enter the building. Near my building, at the intersection of 8th and 16th, pulling my wallet from my bag, I noticed that I dropped something while doing so. I look down to see what it was, as do the other people around me, office workers on their way back from lunch. A free sample of lube that I had picked up somewhere! Lube! It was pretty embarrassing, more so because one of the guys who noticed said, "Hey, don't lose that. That's important."

Then I listened to Harold Bloom presumably lecture on Wallace Stevens' "The Poems of Our Climate," but really losing himself in digression after digression to the extent that it almost seemed like a parody of a lit professor. I have mellowed in my hatred toward Harold Bloom, no longer consider him the enemy. I can recognize that he is kind of charming and does have some nice moments of insight, but still, even though I am longer as committed to politicized readings of texts, I still cringe when he gleefully says that to avoid problems (you know, being forced to discuss black, Latino, and women poets), his course on reading poetry just won't include poets born in the twentieth century. Ignore that part and a couple of other parts and instead listen to this old man riff on life and poetry in a pretty entertaining fashion.

Now I am on my way to potentially use this sample of lube at some hotel in midtown with some man.