John Cashmore wakes up grumpy and grumps at his family throughout the morning, apologizing morosely after every snappy comment. On the train from Connecticut to Chicago, headed out for business with coworker Charley Addison, he encounters a beautiful blonde woman dressed in blue from head to toe. They watch construction workers at a steel mill, and John reflects aloud that the workers must feel a sense of purpose knowing they’re building something, changing the world concretely. He could have been in that position if his father were an immigrant as opposed to an architectural executive, he muses. But no one had really asked him what he wanted to be when he grew up. The answer, for as long as he could remember, was a pirate.

Back at their New York office, John reminisces over the days when he read poetry in his lunch hour. He heads out to buy a book and some lunch, and balks when a man pushes in front of him to order. He yells at the man, calling him a pig and a cheat, and the encounter comes to blows. He leaves the store fuming, decrying all the lousy, pushing and shoving cheats in the world just vying to get ahead.

John stays late in the office with his head buzzing, eventually agreeing to join an open house with a younger worker. He invites a woman from the company to leave with him for a bite to eat, but then escapes before she can join him. He walks with an eye to the sky, conversing with the figment of the blonde from the train – she laughs at his failures, he cries out aloud to her in the street. At home he is silent and morose, his wife finally losing it when he won’t tell her what’s wrong. It’s always something, she yells. And even as he breaks down and cries, and she comes to hug him, he is burdened with the realization that not her love nor anything else in the world will relieve him of his hatred of the life he’s built for himself.