Progress doesn’t like to sleep. When he tries, he has too much on his mind. Last night he laid in his bed restless for forty two minutes, then sighed, got up, and went downstairs to his woodshop. Progress has a lot of projects. Sometimes he can’t quite keep track of them all, but he still manages to get them all somewhat finished. For progress it’s really all about the journey, when he finishes things he normally just tosses them aside and moves on to the next one. He leaves the finished piece to whoever’s around. Progress has a lot of love-hate relationships. For example I ran into him on the street the other day and he was trying to finish the last twenty pages of The Brothers Karamazov while on the way to a Neil Degrasse Tyson lecture. He told me he just wanted to finish the goddamn thing. Reading is hard for someone who can’t quite sit still. Coffee and Adderall are his most firm allies. He’s widely considered a good person, though most don’t know him well. When he gets excited, you know it must be about something pretty important. Sometimes he’ll have bunk ideas too though. He worked on a project with Violence and they restricted his passport. I think the people he works with determine the impact of his projects. I’d say he is a bit proud. When The Third World called, he said he’d have to get back to them. Sometimes he just disappears, he won’t be around for a couple weeks, then you’ll go to the coffee shop and pick up a NYT to find him on the front page, touting some achievement for the Brits or the Chinese. He seems to travel more often these days. Being so busy, it seems crazy that he’s only taken on more and more responsibility over time. Science, his boss, seems to believe he’s King Midas or something. He’s got streaks of grey in his beard now though. When he’s gone, sometimes you think it’s for good, that he finally called it quits, that maybe he couldn’t quite get something and it drove him off.
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