I'm in my office late at night. A herd of students have just noisily left the building, and now all is quiet, except for the Pell Mell instrumental playing lightly on my computer. But I can't really hear it. I'm sitting over by the white board chewing on a dry erase pen.

I'm working on a problem, trying to find semilattice polymorphims in reflexive absolute retracts. They should be there, absolute retracts are retractions of grids, which have an easy semilattice polymorphism, but the retraction doesn't necessarily preserve the polymorphism, so it is non-trivial. My board is full of grids with various vertices around the edges retracted in. And I can always reroute the polymorphism around them, but I can't see the whole picture.

Rubbing my eyes in defeat, I look back up at the board with my head tilted, and see this nasty fellow looking doubtfully back at me.

If life was a movie, or Rubicon, seeing this frowning jester would set off a string of recollections that I would cleverly piece together and find my polymorphism. But life isn't a movie. The jester simply jests, "You're never going to get it."

Startled at the talking white board, I jerk back and tip my chair. The jester laughs derisively as I pick myself up from the floor.

"I'll get it," I assure him. I assure myself.

"And you stink like shit." he adds.

"Sorry," I say. "I didn't know anyone else was around."

I go pour the rest of my coffee down the sink. That's enough for tonight.