TUNE INTO AM 530 FOR THE LATEST CH'I UPDATES

(quote by Joe Queenan)

Honestly there's no way I can get centered before I get to work. I woke up fifteen minutes early to watch the Wellness Channel and get the pollen count, biorhythms, and solar flare radiation danger levels, and when my wife Cynthia shuffled out of the bedroom in her threadbare terrycloth robe (a hotbed of infection, she rarely washes the thing at all, let alone with the de-ionizer on, and I paid good money for the thing), I had gotten stuck in a special report about a fire in a warehouse down the street from my office and a list of the different particulates and negative energy just gushing out of the top of it in billowing, malevolent pillows. "You're going to be late," she told me.

"Why bother to go?" I think I said; I don't remember now, I was very upset at the time. "The owners of the property have been there; that means their unhappiness field is probably blanketing the whole region by now. They had just bought the place."

"What about their insurance?" Cynthia said, "they'll get a lot of money back. Maybe the insurance agents remembered to bring a field dampener?"

"Wellness Channel mentioned nothing about insurance," I said. "But I do have to go in today; if I miss another day without an official debilitation credit from a doctor, my outgoing morale counter drops to fifty and I have to buy everyone else on my team presents."

"I can cobble together a hedonic field for you right quick," Cynthia offered. She started with ditching the robe, which brought on palpable waves of positive ch'i out of my liver and prostate, and concluded by climbing off me and changing the channel to a soothing, neutral blue screen, which has been shown to slow and steady agitated brain waves. "Now go to work," she said. "You can't make me late, too -- ever tried spreading a hedonic field to ten sets of P.O.ed parents? I don't think I could give that many blow jobs."

So I got in the car, thinking about my wife giving head to twenty or so grim-faced progenitors, and I wondered if she would have to do them all in private, so that the percieved infidelity didn't spread an even wider orbit of displeasure, possibly engulfing and destroying the whole education center. My car distracted me by offering me a choice between good vibes and bad vibes.

"I'll take the bad vibes," I said, "as long as they're below level eight." Level eight is for things like "your pet has been killed", "your employer needs a private conference with you", "they've just cancelled your favorite show". I figured I could deal with anything up to that -- Cynthia slings a mean hedonic field.

The car proceeded to tell me the same information I'd already seen on the Wellness Channel, and added that my Golden Lotus was very far out of alignment with the Monkey, and that I'd have to get it checked out before my meeting later in the day or risk disturbing the feng shui of the assistant v.p. and possibly botching our deal. What an ass pain. It's not as though I can realign my Monkey without a lot of jumping and crouching and drinking twig tea, and I have stuff I have to get done this morning that will spill over into the evening. The car then proceeds to tell me that my internal ch'i has become dark, and plays some wood flute music at me.

I drive past the burned warehouse and the men are standing around staring at the smoldering hulk, some of them with white maxipad face masks and some without, some with clipboards, some without.Traffic is snarled outside as people drive by slowly to gape, having not seen a burned plastics warehouse in probably weeks or longer. My car quits fluting and says, "The law clearly states that staring at an accident scene disrupts the feng shui of the city as a whole and can ruin your ability to absorb nutrition from foods and is expressly forbidden. Please accelerate or I will have to switch to GPS Automatic and drive for you."

Ahead of me cars suddenly spurt into speed as their GPS automatic systems kick in and the cars drive themselves to their prearranged destinations; I relax and let my car do the same. My car wants to be like other cars; it wants to obey herd behavior, it wants to run free, have its head. Cynthia took a set of wrenches and permanently disabled the GPS, another act forbidden by law. What if she were to sustain a head injury, an embolism, perhaps? Who would drive the car?

Cynthia has incredibly good, clear, powerful ch'i, naturally, and she's done almost no work in trying to keep it that way. She eats lots of meat and garlic; perhaps it's a Mongolian form of ch'i, well adapted to the harsh climate of the steppes; mesomorphic, a woman of tools. She drinks coffee. My qi gong instructor will not come into the apartment when she's there. She doesn't even take yoga.

"How about those good vibes?" I ask the car, gently realigning my rear-view mirror so that the smoke clouds vanish from my field of view, and my positive ch'i meter on the dashboard clicks up three more green blips. I will try to align my Golden Lotus and Monkey before I even get to work and maybe I'll only have to drink one cup of twig tea.

The car begins again with the wood flutes.

I might just survive this.