Keys – evasive yet persuasive:

I have been training a new evening employee and as such have been working an odd schedule on the days that she is training. She trained yesterday so I came into work in the morning at 8:15 and worked until ten a.m. I came back to work at 4 p.m. and worked until ten p.m. I need to get keys made for my new worker, but I am holding off until after the locksmith is here today.

One of the weekend staff somehow managed to break the front door lock. It is designed such that after you lock it people can get out, but no one new can get in. Thus the store can close at nine. The worker can lock the door, leave, and the students still in class will still able to exit when their classes end at ten p.m. The now broken door will lock, but it traps everyone inside. So after we closed the store last night I had to hang out until the building was empty.

If the locksmith doesn’t show up or can’t fix it right away, I’ll have to be back again tonight. This is only a riddle, only odd lock karma because in the middle of the day on Monday, while I was on my break, I managed to lock my keys in my new van.

I had driven to Ghetto Schnucks (see earlier entry on the variously named Schnucks) to pick up some dog food and they were having a sale on the uber-bag. I shouldered the fifty pound chow out to the car, opened the trunk, and hefted the bag on top of a box of recycled paper. The impact split the bag and sent dog food all over the back seat. I set the keys down to clean up the mess and when I had it under control I slammed the trunk. Like an eight year old at an aquarium I pressed against the glass in search of my keys. A women behind me, still in her car, slowed her passage to state the obvious, “You lock your keys in there?’

Are you bored by this story yet? I am. “Tom crossing the (fucking) desert,” as my father would say, calling to mind the often terrible pacing of the spaghetti western (the fucking is only implied as his ministerial duties required the swallowing of many expletives). So I walked home, got the dog and the spare key, walked back, end of story. Moral: two odd key related events. Question, are these events key? Leland literally just walked up to me to hand in his store keys for the new girl. Synchronicity thus implies that there is something key about all this key-ness, or at least that I now have ample opportunity to project some meta-fiction onto this coincidence.

Think of it as an echo Karl. The cliché is that as one door closes another one opens, but that cliché’ does not include the more cynical truth that as one door closes maybe you’ve locked your keys on the other side of it, or the even worse possibility that the lock itself is broken and will require professional help to reset. The lock that’s set to keep people out is now unfortunately keeping them in as well. Apt metaphor universe, thanks. Well, we live in age that favors cesarean birth, perhaps doors are portals of habit and not necessity. I’ve summered in the land of the new age after all and walking through walls is a simpler of the *siddhis.

*Siddhi is a Sanskrit word for the magical powers that come with regular yoga practice and can be pitfalls on the path to enlightenment. The unchecked ego mind can misuse such powers to karmic-ly silly ends – so watch out for that my little yogins and yogini lest you fall for that illusive mirage: a Siddhi on a hill.