While we wait: something I wrote during a seminar at a conference

Here I am at a conference in the Orange County Hyatt. Several partitions have been folded away to make room for our presence. Each quadrant, on its own, gets four light fixtures. We have 16! I'm looking up at one. They look like giant jellyfish--a giant jellyfish that has had its tentacles used to make rock candy. And they are brown. I'd like to think it was a local couple who landed on this design, and after hitting the craft show circuit, got enough attention to have their product picked up by the Hyatt. I've imagined them in their modest home near the beach. It's not on the beach because they sold the place they inherited from her mother because: A) they were tired of the kind of people moving in and B) they were broke.

But there they are savoring tea and Quinoa, and having just done yoga, feel relaxed to the point of being tired. Then everything changes via the cheap Chinese circuitry of their Cricket cell phone. They never use it, so when it chimed the factory chime, both were equally surprised and suspicious. The man jumped to get it. He felt a little satisfaction at the opportunity to protect his wife. Just a few nights prior he'd been drinking with a friend and saying he wished he had a dragon to slay because getting this business off the ground was a whole lot harder way to impress her.

A dragon, however, would have killed him as he had trouble answering the phone. The small, slick, hinged device nearly snapped shut and hung up on the guy from the Hyatt. Turns out the slick guy named Chad envied their lifestyle and wanted to promote their work, and would have called back anyway. So they danced around the room and didn't at all mind that they'd broken a vase. They hugged and pulled away to look at each other. From this moment--after the apologies for things said during leaner times--began the new era. The hiring of down-and-out friends. The niece who made the website and the story in the regional newspaper. Soon the brown, rock candy squids dangled from hotels everywhere, even the big Hyatt in Portland. Things were not always easy, especially firing some of their down-and-out friends, but they hired Chad to consult them to success.

That's what I'd like to think. I'd like to think these light fixtures weren't secreted from a dingy faraway factory. I'd like to think that. But I already did. Because Chad finally got them to come to their senses and ship manufacturing overseas. So now I sit under this alien invasion, brown shards of plastic crowding the light out of oval openings. They're frozen in attack mode. They left so many light years ago with a mission they've now forgotten. They're just stuck there, detached and feeling quite dumb. And somewhere there's a lady picking up the pieces of a broken vase.