Just For the Feng of It

It’s amazing the kind of curiosity you can stir when you do something as seemingly innocuous as clean your office.

I admit it, I’m a bit of a slob. OK. I’m not as bad as my old friend, Fritz. His apartment was perennially strewn with dirty clothes, dinner plates of congealing beef bones from the local Steak-Out restaurant and paychecks he never seemed to get around to cashing. One time he so convinced himself he was going to be fired from the newspaper where we worked as reporters that he stocked his freezer with six months worth of meat. He also bought a pair of pricey Kenneth Cole shoes for future job interviews, and then refused to take them out of the velvet bag they came in and actually wear them for fear of scuffing them up.

But I digress.

Neatness and organizational skills aren’t my strong suits. I like a tidy house just like the next metrosexual husband of the 21st Century. At home, I’m more inclined than not to pick up the stray sock and toss it in the hamper, empty and reload the dishwasher when the sink starts getting full and wipe down the bathroom countertop when it gets a tad too hairy for my liking.

Work, however, is another matter.

A lot of paperwork crosses my desk each day. OK. Not so much crosses as flounders halfway across the channel, gets leg cramps and sinks beneath the undulating waves of languishing press releases, story tips, newspapers, magazines, phone messages and notebooks, settling into a papery pauper’s grave. Dust gathers there too. And crumbs from lunches long digested and forgotten. Sometimes money and plastic toys my girls play with when they visit my office. Now and again I hear the faint howl and moan of a small dog, but I suspect this is rather a trick of acoustics and that the dog is actually outside somewhere or else a complete figment of my imagination.

Well, a week ago I decided to do something about the mess. My computer was being upgraded and could not be used for a couple of hours, so rather than stare out the window I thought it would be a good idea to neaten up the place where I essentially live for forty hours a week. I threw away a forest of paper, actually put files in my big gray file cabinet (so THAT’S what that’s for), wiped down all flat surfaces and a few vertical ones, donated an extra chair to my friend Blaze. My wife, excited at the prospect of no longer needing a tetanus shot when she comes to visit, celebrated my clean sweep by buying for me a small bookcase and a lamp so I wouldn’t have to sit in the glare of overhead fluorescent lights anymore. I had to admit, the lamp provided a nice aesthetic balance to the tabletop fountain I made during a fit of craft-mania one year.

Others seemed to notice, too.

“Looks like you’ve been watching a little too much ‘Queer Eye for the Straight Guy,’” my alleged friend, Blaze, said as he walked by my office one morning. “Trying to put a little more Feng in your Shui?”

I noticed he was carrying a bag full of potting soil and other products for the plants he was nursing in his own office.

“Look who’s calling the kettle black,” I retorted smartly, cranking up my CD of chanting Benedictine Monks to drown out his ridicule.

A couple days later Blaze stopped by again and took a look around my now clean and sparkly office.

“You know, you can get your aura realigned too if you want,” he said. A few minutes later he sent an email proving that he wasn’t fibbing – a university in California (where else?) apparently offers the service to students, faculty and staff through its health clinic. I tried to imagine what an aura realignment entailed exactly. Did they rotate your chakras? Top off your body fluids? Would hot candle wax be involved?

Another coworker used the occasion of my recent office purge to recount her experience at a local spa. After her massage, the masseuse said my colleague still seemed a bit tense and offered to do a "magnetic deruffling" for her, gratis. The masseuse drifted toward the foot-end of the table, but my friend was stomach down and couldn’t tell what the masseuse was up to down there.

“Now,” said the masseuse, sotto voce, “I want you to relax and imagine a blue flame at the bottom of your feet.”

“Oooookay,” my friend responded.

And then – nothing. No sound. No sensation. Curious, my friend craned her neck to take a peak and found the woman making dramatic sweeping motions with her hands, from just behind her feet toward the floor. Needless to say, my friend was not impressed.

Then I got a Feng Shui kit.

It was a gift from Blaze and his wife, Amy, who picked it up at a Starbucks, where they make almost daily pilgrimages for the new Chantico drink, which I’ve been assured tastes like a liquid brownie. Strangely, although I love chocolate, I find the idea of a liquid brownie unappetizing. The Feng Shui kit, on the other hand, is pretty sweet.

This is what it comes with: Tazo tea in three flavors -- Zen, Calm and Awake; a Feng Shui Color Guide, a Legend of Feng Shui, Three Powerful Figures of Fortune, the Feng Shui Guide to Happiness, a list of Nine Perfect Thoughts, a Feng Shui Wind Poem, Three Lucky Coins and One Powerful Dragon Figure.

Imagine, all that wisdom and serenity in a box that weighs in at just 1.4 ounces.

Of course, the figures are little cardboard cutouts, as are the coins. And the Nine Perfect Thoughts, which are to be torn off at the perforations and carried around for good luck, are about as profound as the slips of paper you find in fortune cookies at low-rent Chinese restaurants. They range from banal to painfully unfunny. To wit (or not):

“I possess the luck and the fortune of the dragon.”

“When my furniture is in alignment, I no longer bump my shins.”

“Don’t forget to turn off the stove before I leave to work.”

“Perhaps this is the year I will get new drapes.”

And so on.

In the brief Legend of Feng Shui I learn that the term itself is pronounced foong shway, not like something Garth from Wayne’s World might say when a good-looking woman passes by.

I have to admit, though, I do kind of like the Wind Poem, or “weathergram,” that comes with the kit. It’s basically a tag where you can write down a simple thought, prayer or poem, and then hang it from a tree limb for some stranger to find. Inside the tag it says, “If you are touched by the message on this Wind Poem, please feel free to take it: You might offer the string to a bird for its nest.”

I like the idea of leaving inspirational messages where people you don’t know might find them, the anonymous kindness of it. It seems like a very simple, pure gesture in a world where we’re bombarded by messages and demands and come-ons. There’s no reward for our gesture – or at least none we will know about. If we find the tag missing one day, it could just be that the wind blew it down, or some litter officer stuffed it in his trash bag, or a bird decided to use the whole thing to line its nest. Then again, maybe someone who was on the edge of despair came across it just when she needed it and thought of it has a blessing from an angel, which in a way maybe it was.

So the next time you’re out and about, walking among the budding trees, keep an eye peeled. There might just be a little Wind Poem blowing in the breeze, waiting for you to pluck it from a quivering branch.

How Shui it is.

V-Day

Last night two of my buddies and I went out for a night of drunken debauchery. Actually, since we all had to get permission from our wives to leave the house for a night, and because we are all parents of small children who think daybreak is a reasonable time to get out of bed, there wasn't much debauchery. Unless you count my running a few yellow lights over the course of the evening. We did, however, do some drinking, starting with some imported brews at one eatery (Blaze, pining for his college days, ordered a Schlitz, “for old time’s sake”), followed by a couple more beverages at a quaint tavern where each winter a Welsh transplant with a wonderful brogue and more than passing resemblance to Kris Kringle reads to the rapt audience Dylan Thomas’ “A Child’s Christmas in Wales.” Then we all settled in to a nice snifter each of B&B (Benedictine & Brandy, for the uninitiated), which glides down the throat like liquid fire and warms the stomach and cheers the heart until –- basking in the drink’s smooth afterglow -- you consider everyone in the bar to be your very best friend. It was so good in fact that we decided to pick up an entire bottle (retail $34 for a fifth -- and worth every cent) at the 24-hour grocer and take it to my secret He Man, Woman Haters Clubhouse (a.k.a. the home of my in-laws, who are wintering in Florida) for further imbibing and manly talk.

Unfortunately, the talk eventually turned to Cav’s recent vasectomy.

Now, I don’t consider myself to be an especially squeamish person. I was, for a while, a police reporter and saw (and smelled) a fair number of corpses, including one gentleman who tried to make a U-turn over an active railroad line with his semi trailer when a train came and jettisoned him from his cab onto the centerline of a highway about thirty feet away . But there are some subjects that just curdle my milk. Sharp objects near the nether regions is one of them. Cav’s vivid description of the procedure caused my arms and knees to draw up into the fetal position and I began mewling like a newborn kitten plucked from its mamma’s teat. It did not help that the last name of the doctor who performed the procedure was also Sharp. I jest you not. Or that every last person involved in the procedure (Cav excepting) was a woman, from pre-op to post-op.

As Cav tells it, he was told to put on one of those drafty hospital gowns and handed off, so to speak, to a nurse who expertly shaved him with a straight blade. (Is there any way other than “expertly” that one might wield a straight blade without doing irreversible damage?) Freshly shorn, Cav was laid out on the operating table and a sheet was drawn across his midsection so he couldn’t see what was going on. Cav, a bright and curious guy, told the doctor he wanted to watch the procedure. But the doctor discouraged it. “Trust me,” she told him. “Once we begin cauterizing and you can smell your own flesh burning you’ll wish you’d kept the curtain up.”

Then the visitors began to arrive.

The local hospital where Cav did the deed is a teaching hospital. So when the doctor asked if he minded having a few med students observe his vasectomy, Cav – ever accommodating – said bring ‘em on. So in they came. First one. Then three. Then four more. In the end, a dozen bright eyed, freshly scrubbed med students gathered around the maypole to see Cav’s manhood get snipped. A couple of them even peeked around the Curtain Of Unknowing to introduce themselves. And Cav, with his business all hanging out, said howdy right back because, frankly Cav’s a decent guy and because just about that time the Valium had begun flowing through his veins like milk and honey in the desert. Nor, apparently, was Cav the only person in the room under heavy medication. When one of the med students introduced herself, Cav asked if this was her first vasectomy. She replied, "Yes, yours?"

Me? I would have called off the operation right then and there.

Now, normally a vasectomy only takes about five minutes. But because Cav was so gracious about sharing his experience with others, the doctor made sure each of the students saw and understood every step of the procedure, holding up this bit of flotsam, shoving aside that bit of jetsam until she moved in – a good twenty minutes later -- for the coup de grace. But by then the drugs had begun to wear off and Cav levitated from the operating table, shouting, “What the hell was that? What the HELL was that?” The doctor muttered her apologies, poked him a few times down yonder with a syringe of dope (See? I’m not the only one in the fetal position here, am I?) and quickly brought the surgery to a close. A short while later, Cav was good as gold, back in his street clothes (and wearing a jock strap stuffed with a two-pound bag of frozen peas) and doing the Vasectomy Shuffle down the hallway.

It took me a few minutes to recover from Cav’s story. But with the help of a couple more B&Bs I was able to move out of the fetal position. I even stopped mewling after a while. And when Blaze vomited into my mother-in-law’s kitchen sink? It didn’t affect me one bit.