Two or three times a week, when I’m working from home and have nothing in the larder, except the emergency provisions our vigilant governor has urged us all to keep on hand (several liters of bottled water and a variety 12-pack of ramen noodles, some duct tape, and The Book of Mormon), I amble over to the nearest Dunkin Donuts for my Bavarian cream fix. Say what you will, I’m not ashamed. I am a cream queen, and proud of it. I mean, a donut’s eighty-nine cents whether there’s just a hole full of air in the middle (hold it up to your ear and you can hear the wind whistling through it) or a hole filled with pudding. HELL-O. Is this an intelligence test? I’ll take door number two, Monty.

But the great thing about my Dunkin Donuts, roughly at the intersection of Mass Ave and Columbia Road, is that along with your Bavarian Cream and coffee, you get your daily recommended dose of DESPAIR, absolutely free of charge. Jesus God, that place is Desperation Central.

I mean, first of all you’ve got all these people rushing to get to their dead-end jobs. There are little acts of kindness, of course–a big, burly construction worker type (rowr!) held the door open for me this morning, as an entry-level schlub tried to shove his way past me–but even the kindness has the poignant feel of politeness between doomed seamen (oops–there’s that cream again) aboard the Lusitania.

But the real misery is behind the counter. Always new faces, always the same look of doom on them. Doing things is definitely not what they like to do. Nope. The thing that gives me that extra kick on the way to my daily existential crisis is that the despair is always fresh (like the coffee and donuts), and there are so many varieties to choose from.

This morning, for instance, the young woman behind the counter was overly affectless. Overly unresponsive to any attempt at human kindness. She seemed to have a force-field of affectlessness all around her to repel even the most minor acts of compassion one might feel compelled to engage in on her beleaguered behalf.

I want to be clear: I believe–really it is the cornerstone of my “belief system,” if you will–in the sacred autonomy of each individual. This belief has many implications that I won’t get into at the moment. I don’t for a moment think that this young woman’s job at Dunkin Nonuts entails fulfilling some psychic need of customers for some semblance of humanity along with their purchase. This young woman is obviously not present inasmuch as she can not be present while being present, and is likely not paid enough to be fully present. With her aggressive affectlessness she says to her customers: I will use certain of my body parts to fulfill certain simple requests, but I will not use my soul. And a customer has no right to ask it.

She is, of course, working out her own answer to the old mind-body problem. I would say, from my brief interaction with her this morning, that she’s probably your average, garden-variety substance-dualist. It was not mixing well with my physicalistic-monist mood, though. If they had been out of bavarian cream donuts, there could have been an ontological rift into which all of existence would have been spontaneously sucked.

Not to say that existence sucks.

And so another day begins.