I'm guided into a sleek, expensive looking office with thousand dollar ergonomic chairs and edgy desks made of exotic, state-of-the-art materials by a secretary named Elise. Elise's ass sways in her tight designer skirt like a perfect pear suspended in a drawstring bag, swinging like a pendulum. The view is of downtown Manhattan from the 40th floor and on this day the sky is ominously dark, full of swollen clouds and distant lightning flashes.

"Ms. Barnes will be in to see you shortly, and just FYI? She prefers you call her by her first name; Karen," the secretary says with the sharp clip in her voice only years at the top of the corporate assistance heap will teach you. "May I get you anything to drink? Tea, sparkling water?"

"Sparkling water," I say, my voice cracking. She goes to the small executive bar near the entertainment center, leaning down to pop open the small fridge to snag a Calistoga. She twists the lid, pours the contents into a waiting glass of ice. When she hands it to me I'm transfixed by her impeccable French manicure and her ten thousand dollar gleaming white veneers.

"Thanks," I say lamely.

She steps out backwards with a pert nod, shutting the door with a little too much force. For a moment I'm left alone with only the sound of the gurgling aquarium keeping me company. My eyes wander over to Ms. Barne's - Karen's - desk, which is a granite-topped monster devoid of a singer stapler or pen cup. In fact, the only thing on the surface of the desk is a recessed flat screen control panel. I get up to go take a closer look, leaning in to try to read the tiny inscription on the plastic paneling when suddenly the door opens behind me.

"You must be Mr. Lamaar."

I turn, slightly embarassed as if I were caught snooping, to find an early-40's woman in an expensive designer black pants suit striding forward with the confident swagger of a major league pitcher, her arm outstretched and thrusting toward me like she wants to reach through my chest and squeeze my heart into motionlessness. After an akward pause when I realize she wants to shake my hand and I finally shake hers, I say, rather lamely, "and you must be Karen,"

Her eyes twinkle with a tiny hint of sadism when she replies, "Ms. Barnes, if you please." She squeezes my hand so tight we can both hear the bones pop, and though I wince she offers no apology, circling her desk and descending into her chair like an Olympic sprinter between events.

"Please, sit down," she says, indicating the fifteen hundred dollar chair in front of her desk, a reclining slab of green plastic suspended on 36 steel posts. I do my best to make it look comfortable, although it's clearly meant to make her visitors feel physically inferior when faced with the imposing gargantuanism that is her granite desk.

"I understand you're interested in partaking in the program," she says, punching a few buttons on her recessed control panel. All the windows in the office begin to dim as a flat screen monitor flickers to high-definition life on the wall behind her. "Let's take a look at your qualifications."

"Psychic real estate is so now," he said, his face so close to mine I could smell the chicken parmesan and cigarettes on his breath.

"What exactly do you mean by that?"

"Exactly what I said. Real-world real estate is plummeting. Advertising has maxed out their potential in TV, movie product placement and search engine ads. Everyone's scouring the world for the next big money-maker and I'm telling you, right here and now, that the next boom is gonna be in dreams."

His eyes were bulging, a vein as thick as my pinky finger was throbbing near his temple. Small sweat balls were emerging from his enlarged pores. A string of spittle was oozing down from his wide, grinning, veneer-enhanced smile, dangling its way toward his white dress shirt.

"You'd think a smart young man such as yourself might wanna be in on the biggest thing since the fucking wheel. Until they start figuring out a way to charge people to breath the goddamned air this is it. IT!"

I shifted uncomfortably in my seat, making an attempt at showing some kind of composure by folding my arms across my chest. "I think I need to hear a little more about how exactly you see me fitting into the picture before I commit."

His Chestshire cat grin only widens at this. He lets out a long slow hiss as he backs away from me, circles his desk and seats himself in his high-backed ergonomic chair with a little whimper of delight.

"Very wise of you, young grasshopper, very wise."

Dave was the kind of guy who liked to let the dust accumulate. He'd rather sit around in his boxers all day and watch the mold grow on that 3-month old bowl of cheerios still sitting in the middle of the livingroom floor. The bowl had been kicked by negligent roommates a couple of times, knocking fetid milk over the edges of the paper bowl, so that the what had once been deep-pile shag carpeting surrounding it was thick and matted into rug dredlocks. There was mold growing on the carpet now, too, and it was spreading.

Dave was a chronic masturbater, and by chronic we're talking on the hour. Sometimes on the half-hour. Dave beat off so much he had callouses on his penis that were shaped like his fingers. You could see Dave's grip on his dick when it was hard; when it was soft, it just looked like his dick had a dog's paw growing out of it - those thick, leathery oval pads like little raised moons of hardened flesh. He didn't pump out much sperm as a result, maybe a drop the size of a pea. Who's testes could keep up with such output? Not Dave's. He didn't care. In fact, he looked at is as a major plus: This way he didn't have to wipe the spooge off on whatever shirt he was wearing at the moment, causing odd stares at the grocery store from other patrons who couldn't help but notice the large, crusted white stains on his clothing.

Dave went through roommates like most people go through the junk mail at the end of a long day at work as a result. It took a while before he could find people who didn't mind the rotting laundry balled up in the back of the stinking refrigerator, the dead mice dangling by their tales over the iguana's cage, the thousand tiny balls of dark green affixed haphazardly to the "booger wall", or his incessant beating off at all hours of the day right there in the Lazy Boy recliner positioned directly in the middle of the living room. Dave surmised that had he been blessed with the genes of say a Brad Pitt or perhaps an Ashton Kucher, they wouldn't have minded so much stumbling into yet another session of self love. No. They might not have minded at all.

Marketing had got wind of a new campaign from the diamond industry trickling down from Corporate. Apparently they wanted to up the public rare gemstone awareness factor well before the holiday shopping season by planting several stories in the media. Editorial hooked into a killer campaign - a woman in South Africa had found a massive diamond, over 600 carats, and everyone in Production agreed that it skewed nicely in all demographics. So they went with it, this story about this massive diamond, and provided links to several related "stories" about diamonds and how the average Joe or Jane might purchase one. Size, price, placement, characteristics. Written with straight-faced seriousness and accompanied by a few full-color pictures bought from a stock photography shop for rights world-wide, in perpetuity, throughout the universe. Ad Sales reported back that clients were thrilled with the resultant uptick in purchasing, with several side quandrants reporting parallel rises that caused champagne glasses in boardrooms from New York to London to toast like it was New Year's Eve.

He had brushed and flossed his teeth, set his alarm, and put an envelope he wanted to mail on the mantle. He turned on the porch light, turned off the reading lamp in the living room, doffing his robe to slip naked beneath the cool sheets and was just drifting off to sleep when he heard it. A noise coming from the kitchen. The sound of a pot shifting on the drying rack? He was about to ignore it and turn his focus back inward, closing his eyes and rolling them back, when the unmistakeable sound of footsteps creaking across the wooden floor of the foyer made him sit up lightning fast. He held his breath, eyes wide, listening intently, but the creaking had stopped, as if whoever it was had heard his reaction and stopped mid-step.

It was then that he saw the head creeping around the doorframe, the eyes on him.

"What the fuck are you doing in here?!"

And the eyes disappeared, the sound of feet running across the foyer into the kitchen. He bolted from bed, naked, running after the intruder, almost slipping and falling on his ass on the polished wood floor. The intruder got to the back door leading out of the kitchen and fumbled with the lock, just enough lag time for him to catch her.

It was a woman. She was crying when he grabbed her, spun her around in a furious rage.

"Who are you?!" He demanded.

She collapsed in his strong grasp, sobbing violently. Her face was dirty, a patch of blood dried at the corner of her mouth. Her sobs only angered him further; he shook her fiercely.

"What the fuck are you doing in my house?!"