Brenda and I watched Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room last night.

A couple of people in the movie commented on how Jeff Skilling was a nerd who remade himself into, ah, whatever the opposite of a nerd is, and how the executives who ran the company into the ground were like an exclusive clique in high school that even the principal was afraid to rein in.

High school, and cliques, as metaphor. Nerds and corporate executives going to titty bars, or on Baja motocross outings. Getting lasic eye surgery and worrying about baldness.

I identify with a guy who ends up in an insane asylum because he doesn't understand what everybody else is talking about. Seeing other people natter away as if they understood each other baffles and nonpluses him.

Or he doesn't end up in an insane asylum, he ends up in corporate America, with a job and co-workers, a boss and annual performance appraisals, he is forced to speak meaningless bullshit as if it means something, and the robots who speak it give clear indications that have no idea what he is going on about if he tries to communicate with them on any kind of human level.

I felt estranged, and alienated, in high school, and I haven't gotten over it yet.

What I have done with my life seems quixotic and daft, to most of my neighbors. Impractical. Loony. Their lives seem just as pointless and backwards to me.

How does a job in magazine journalism lead to a book contract and a movie deal? That is, how is that different from Enron?

I'm still out here with no book contract and no movie deal.

There's no interest in what I am writing.

Who do I think I am? May Sarton?

Something like that.

After the Stroke: A Journal. Before the Stroke: A Memoir of 35 Years as an Unpublished, or Underpublished Writer.

You'd have a stroke, too. Wouldn't you? Why not?

I don't think I'm a nerd. I think people with successful careers in magazine journalism, books, or movies would have done just fine at Enron. I think I wouldn't have made it past the job interview.

As the wife beater said to Henry Chinaski, in Barfly, "I don't like you and you don't like me. That's just in the nature of the way things works."