I find that the best way to overcome a destructive temptation is to stare it in the face, which is usually by the barcode if it’s an object. Some people find this approach crazy, even tortuous. They’d rather throw away the carrot*—the Blackberry, the chocolate, the pornography—than throw on the chastity belt and sleep with it. They feel that if the attraction is physically unattainable, they naturally can’t attain it, and their resolution is met.

Maybe. Resolutions—and life changes—aren’t really about the physical.

Circumstantial change is doomed to fail, because circumstances themselves change. Eventually, despite your best efforts to avoid them, God is going to drop a chocolate souffle in your lap, with a Blackberry on top, and some porn on the Blackberry (starring, ironically, the world-renowned Chocolate Souffle, again with a Blackberry on top—her lover, not the device. And some oddly utilized carrots). It’s the God double decker: Blackberry on Chocolate Souffle on Blackberry on chocolate souffle. And you’ll indulge, because you never figured out how to overcome these things; they’ve just been held at bay on a long mental leash. On the bright side, you get to read God’s Blackberry. What’s the deal with famine.

I think that real change is sculpted from something less volatile than circumstance: thought. While you might think you think new thoughts often, you’re probably doing little more than changing outfits. Sure, some days you wear the jeans, other days the shorts, and still others the khakis with the embarrassing stain from that time God hurled chocolate souffle at your crotch all willy-nilly. And some days you worry about your job first and family second. But you only have so much space in that closet. (And yes, I compare your brain to a small closet. Poetic license.)

Only once you extinguish the urge, only once you can spend all day with your Blackberry (the device, not the porn star) and never take it out of your pants (the device), will you be able to watch in twitchless satisfaction as your friend fingers his own Blackberry (ambiguous). God can throw all the souffle He wants, but you’ll never bite. Then maybe He’ll start tossing it at the people who are actually hungry, because seriously God, famine. What’s up.

* Why does “carrot” epitomize an attractive reward, as in “carrot or stick”? Who does things for carrots?

I like to take walks at night through the backroads. I take my iPod and play some song I’ve heard a million times before, there are no surprises in the chords anymore, and that’s okay: it’s just the elevator music. I confess I sing out loud, almost involuntarily and without recourse, because there’s nobody else around.

Daylight mirrors your existence; you can’t help but remember you’re alive everywhere you go: Pedestrians move out of your way, an intimate conversation dwindles while you pass, civilization carves out space for you.

Night, less courteous. You can look around, to be sure, but it seems that at any moment a ficus could take your place should the land-Lord decide that you’re a bad use of real estate at the corner of Forest and Cowper. Nothing bends for you after sundown.

Tonight I cross an intersection against a man in a grizzled gray beard. His pants are pleated in a dozen directions, and his fly is open. His red plaid shirt is pulled out through it like a rose blossoming from the unlikeliest of places, but it is well watered with amber…rain. His body bobs and swivels, his back is grossly arched and his head is down, and he looks like a scythe chopping lazily through a world that is of a much swampier consistency than mine, a jello to my smooth garlic aioli (no wonder he looks so tired). I can’t say he’s moving so much as being moved, frame by frame, a marvel of claymation. His arms shuffle to some beat but it’s not mine. He’s singing something but there’s no music playing. An original.

It seems a pure coincidence that he crosses at the crosswalk, and I think if there happened to be a mountain or a desert here, he would cross those instead.

Side by side in the dark. He doesn’t change a thing, his timbre and gaze and shuffle all metronomic: a true steward of nighttime callousness. I, on the other hand, have stopped singing in hot self-awareness. He cuts me nothing, but I’ve carved out his space, a scythe in deed if not form.

I don’t want him to hear me. I’m not sure he even knows I’m there, but I am embarrassed that the man with the blooming crotch will hear me, and in that moment I am only certain that one of us is crazy.