Waves Accumulate

I would like to tell you a story of a man named Engrid.  Engrid lived in a small town on the prairie, west of where he was raised.  His chief occupation was in the field of labor relations.  Meaning he started fights, and occasionally ended them.  Like many men, his occupation tried desperately to define him, but Engrid was quietly defiant on that one particular point.  He was more than a toady for the union.  He (he often told himself, silently) was a mathematician.  Numbers were the language native to his soul.  As he threatened strike as a recourse for every dispute, he was distracted by his urge to calculate the possible losses to the worker, in terms of 401k contributions, sick leave accumulation and tangentially, salary.  On the surface this seems helpful, but you have not spent any time inside the head of Engrid.  Numbers fly around inside the cavernous expanse of his intellect like the arrows of an army of blind, disoriented morons.  In fact, mathematics so distracted him, that it would often get in the way of his accomplishing anything at all.  That is to say, Engrid was a single man.  But he longed for the warming presence of a mate.  He was not a picky man.  Labor negotiations had taught him that you often get what you want without realizing you were asking for it, or conversely, asking for what you want would almost ensure you would not get it.  So in the category of women, Engrid saw value in everything.  Or, as the years advanced, anything.  

One fine day, Engrid walked into the local cafe.  Engrid always sat right in the center of the cafe where, he hoped, his presence would hint at a service workers strike and engender better treatment for the staff.  But today, his automatic calculation of floor joist deflection seemed to hint at his sitting in the corner, far from the action.   It was here that his life changed.  Here in the corner of the room, there was not only a potential for greater silence, allowing him to focus on finding patterns in the floor tile and convert them into haiku-like mathematical structures, but he also discovered Muerta.  Muerta was a woman of great size and promiscuity.  She disrupted the movement of everything around her with her great buttocks and her keen sense of where to place them to greatest effect.  Engrid, in between 5's and 7's, was distractedly smitten.  After finding the requisite 575 unique tile arrangements within the apparent repeating pattern, he asked her for an iced coffee and a doughnut.  She spun on the balls of her considerable feet, lightly brushing his casually placed hand with her best feature.  His heart raced at a pace previously unknown to him.  He hurried to finish adding up the wattages of the lightbulbs in the room so he could, perhaps, stare at her for a free moment, undistracted.  That moment never arrived, because as she was gliding back his way, hot coffee mistakenly in hand, his greatest fear was realized.  The vast preponderance of numerical evidence hit him squarely in the heart.  In a world where thirty-one 60-watt lightbulbs would overload a 15 amp circuit, Muerta could never love him.  She was too much woman for a distracted union rep with a head full of numbers.  She needed more capacity for affection than he could ever supply.  His heart was shattered while his brain started laying the groundwork for some very interesting load-bearing calculations related to table legs and beef commercials.  He drank his dismally hot cup of coffee, took two bites of his poorly glazed doughnut, and left a 15.27% tip for his failed aspirations.  Counting sidewalk cracks he recklessly stepped on, he went home to count aspirin.