I have decided to phase twist ties out of my life, because they’re a true annoyance. If a tie is tightly twisted, it’s impossible to tell which way you’re suppose to twist, and if you choose the wrong direction it only makes your situation twistier. This always nettles my goat, but in reality I’m not upset with the twist ties—I’m mad at myself for twisting the wrong way. The only thing to do now is own up to my error and begin twisting back the direction I came. Once in a great while, however, twisting this opposite way is also wrong. There are never any witnesses around when this happens, mostly because nobody has ever sat down and watched me retrieve a piece of fruit, but I can promise you that this has happened to me about a dozen times over the course of my life, and I’m tired of being silent about it. In these instances my anger transforms into an abstract feeling of confusion and loneliness. I retwist the tie in my original direction, which has somehow become correct, but by now I’m not even hungry for plums or nectarines or whatever bullshit fruit I have in my little plastic bag. I’m too emotionally spent to even weep, which I know will come later. The best thing to do in the meantime is eat some clementines, which come in cute little wooden crates as if they were shipped especially to me from the tropics.