Praise to the outsiders, the interlopers, the curious that gather at the edges of the circle. Those who are blind to the charms of fortuny pleating and deaf to the lure of “Call Me Maybe”, we shake your hand.  If you delay the haircut, a visit to the gym in favor of something more than simply the pleasures of solitude (think Burgess Meredith surveying his piles of books then tragically breaking his coke bottle thick glasses), we send you our secret handshake and welcome you. Maybe you push up the unbuttoned sleeves of your shirt cuz they’re vaguely annoying, but you’re too busy with that “thing” in the moment to register that the sleeves need buttoning in order to stay in place. You speak when you shouldn’t. When all eyes are on you, the words won’t come. You tell meandering stories that never land because you’re lost in the details that are too perfect to omit. You struggle with names, sometimes sensing a letter of the alphabet and sometimes nothing at all. A moat of books encircles your bed gathering dust. Though you sneeze as you tuck in for the night and recognize that you’ll never crack the binding on that book on the Klondike Gold Rush, you’ll never clean up your act. It’s not worth it. Your sense of balance pivots on those elusive clues signaling who you are to yourself.