I have to work all day today, alone.

My children and my wife are like a tonic. I gulp a big draught of domesticity in the morning,like Lawrence slaking his thirst in an oasis before setting off across a desert; and then I go off in my solitary fashion and turn on the machines. Because the furniture elves did not come last night and help me out. The radio is on in the background, mostly because even at the volume of a murmur, it cancels out the buzzing sound of the fluorescent lights. That’s a fairly low threshold of entertainment to get over, isn’t it? More interesting than a ballast buzzing. It’s rarer than you might think. Maybe it’s me.

When I was a young man, both the Bay City Rollers and the Staples Singers would come out of the radio. The same radio station. I can’t quite reconcile that. I drift through the radio now, like an oceangoing fish, searching for anything notable enough to listen to. I would be hard pressed to explain to anyone exactly what I was in the market for at any given time.