found drama

You’re being chased. Your pursuers… used to be friends? allies? associates? You know them. But there is a tension now. They are after you, and are close behind. But you manage to keep giving them the slip. You’ll dodge down one seemingly endless corridor of apartments (hotel rooms?) and head down some other stair case. You hear their steps behind you. You take the stairs two at a time. You dodge down another hall. If you can zig-zag down a few of these carpeted hallways, will you lose them? You head into the heart of the building, where the apartments have no windows and are totally enclosed. You find another stair case, this one more industrial-looking — like something out of a factory or a school. They are still behind you, but you seem to be gaining distance. At the bottom of the stairs you come out into a busy shopping mall. (A shopping mall at the bottom of the apartment building?) You dive into the most crowded throng of people and start to work your way into it. You’ll lose them for sure if you can just get to the other side. But a different panic starts to set in.

A crowded bookstore. There are several simultaneous talks/book-signings going on here. All around the perimeter of this (oddly shaped) bookstore, you see tables and lecterns. Piles of books. Folding chairs. People (mostly middle-aged women) sitting in the folding chairs, or else standing. You’re searching for the table that has lured you here. (And you fumble around in your pocket, noticing that you phone is missing.) Finally you see him: Nassim Nicholas Taleb. He paces back and forth behind the table; he grabs a glass of water from the lectern as he passes, sipping and then putting it back down as he passes the lectern again. He is smiling and making small talk with the women in the very front row of chairs. (The chairs in front of his table only go back three rows.) (You fumble around in your pocket again. Your phone is definitely missing.) You try to find a chair to sit in, and though the bookstore is crowded, there are still plenty of empty chairs here. But you cannot bring yourself to sit down in one. You wonder: how am I going to be able to call a cab without my phone? And somehow you know that someone here in the bookstore mistakenly (or maliciously?) holds your phone. You wonder: If I could just call it and here it ring… You wonder: would Taleb accuse me of being fragile if he knew I was thinking this?

You’re moving in with a different roommate. (College roommate? Are you in college? This looks like your old college campus.) The room is in disarray, but that’s to be expected as he makes room for you. You’re moving in not because the campus housing authorities have told you to, but because… the two of you are starting a business? Naturally the first thing that you do is get your equipment set up. But before you can do that, you need to get the desk set up. You have a desk in your old dorm room, and you say so. So you take off, marching along campus, against the flow of traffic. An ever-thickening flow of people, all of them walking in the opposite direction. Fighting, elbowing through them, until eventually you find a way to walk over them, stepping on shoulders and heads. And when you finally get back to your own room, it occurs to you that you cannot carry the desk back with you. Could you disassemble it? Carry it back in pieces? And/but then you call your new roommate/business partner on the phone: “Wait! Don’t we already have a desk in the room? Couldn’t we just use that? And sell this one for extra cash?”