One thing I really hate about work is that I have to risk my life to get here. No wild stretch of exaggeration, I am literally risking life and limb on the raging asphalt rivers I must navigate daily. Whitewater, indeed�trying to merge onto the outer-loop at 8:51 a.m., dodging tractor-trailers, rudeness, impatience, poor anger management skills, listless inattention to one�s surroundings. Sometimes rush hour feels like one big, sweaty group therapy session where every possible freakish idio(t)syncrasy is proudly and neurotically trotted out and put on parade. �Hello, my name is Isuzu Land Crawler Para-Military Vehicle, and I am a megalomaniac.� Or the suburban matron crawling in the fast lane who might notice her tailgating entourage if only she didn�t have to peer through her entire family�s curricula vitae plastered on her back windshield. �Hello, my name is Outback Volvo, and I have general anxiety disorder characterized by insecurity and stress. My daughter goes to Brown.� Yah! I�d rather be safe at home, sipping a cup of joe, and thumbing through the DSMV-4.

And ultimately, this big death challenge is pointless because the last ramp you slide down off of Route Styxxty-Styxx simply deposits you here: in a small, boxy, windowless room. Neat. So simple, and yet so punishing.

Adding insult to my lack of injury sustained during my commute, work has recently acquired many new pieces of �art� that are now adorning every nook and cranny of the hallways around here. Yes, I bunny-eared the term art, and might as well add the �cough, snort� because, yes, I am a fucking snob. I like what I like, and what I like is not pre-fab institutional art and repros of the great masters over the water fountain. This whole place now looks like the Salon de Refuses for the new millennium as in, �I refuses to look at this sad-ass shit.� And I wasn�t even consulted�that�s what really pains me. Some executive, unilateral decision was made in one of the important inner-sanctum meetings to which I am never invited. The results of such insular bureaucratic rigidity are now strewn about our walls, as if hundreds of Holiday Inns and sorority girls� dorm rooms were ransacked for their Monet reproductions, as if hundreds of doctors� offices were burgled for their Rockwell knock-offs.

Anytime I want to peer out of my office, I now have to look at a picture of a sad boy done up as sort of a pierrot (that�s a whimsical French clown, my dears) in a foppish lace color and silly hat. Sniff, it�s not even a repro. It is an original (example of an asthetic so bad it cannot even be redeemed as kitsch). It belongs at a yard sale, unsold. It doesn't even deserve fake wood paneling behind it, much less the sophistication of a bare white wall. It could be worse though. The poster-painting down the hall is this putrid sunsetty scene over a lake and some mountains and some elk and a cabin and some happy children in the foreground, and the entire scene is done up in this fakely radiant wash of exquisite light. On the whole the piece is the equivalent of Thomas Kinkaid painting on crank while channeling Kathy Lee Gifford.

The big boss has a lovely Ansel Adams print outside his office, which, given the overall selection, is pretty much like getting the pick of the litter of two-headed, bald kittens. Coincidence?