Ejector Seat Reservation

Mr. Bir Toujour and I were walking down our street on an overcast New Year's Day afternoon when I noticed a beaded necklace half-buried in the grass right next to the cracked sidewalk. I picked it up and saw five very detailed cast-resin beads in the shape of monkeys, strung along on the necklace with bright yellow plastic banana-shaped beads. Each monkey was about an inch tall, and their poses varied: one hunched mischeviously under a rhodedenderon leaf; one squatted on a tortise; one sat on friendly-looking horse; one pulled at his cheeks with his fingertips in horror; two monkeys clutched each other in an almost erotic embrace, becoming one.

Well. "I wonder where this came from," I asked Mr. Bir Toujour. "It's very tacky, but kinda cool, too." I imagined an inhebriated reveler the previous evening, stubling across the sidewalks with a larger pack of partiers and snagging her--er, unique--necklace on a nearby branch or shub without registering it. I've bene drunk and lost jewelry before.

Who wore that necklace? What were they like? I would have worn a necklace like that--bright, chunky, completely without refinement--at one time, during my "artistic hippy" phase. If I had lost that necklace, I'd be sad.

"You should take it!" said Mr. Bir Toujour.

"No," I said, "I can't--that's mean. What if the person who lost it is sad and comes looking for it?" I'd be sad I were wearing that monkey necklace and lost it in the middle of a beer-drenched New Year's Eve. I considered putting the necklace back where we found it, but then I remembered the time we found a Discman on the sidewalk in the same neighborhood. "You put it back on the street," Mr. Bir Toujour reminded me, "and the next person who walked sown the sidewalk too it."

So I figured that if someone was going to take the lost necklace, it might as well be me. It's hanging on the cubicle wall over my desk. The clasp is broken (well, that accounts for why the necklace was on the ground), and I can't decide if the necklace was purchased already assembled like that or strung together by an adventurous, eccentric beader. It's mine now, a mascot for the last few remaining weeks of the Year of the Monkey.

I'm listening to Swervedriver's "Ejector Seat Reservation" right now. Last night I cut my index finger on an open Spaghetti-os can and I'm having trouble typing because the band-aid make my finger bulky.