scrawls.

scrawls

still cheaper than therapy*

31.10.03

sleepy. all week. halloween to-day. lovely, that. wore my five-inch heels to work. and nobody said anything, because they were all too busy staring at Fat Motorcycle Chick and Inflatable Pig. i'm not kidding.

they go batshit over this stuff.

and then as soon as they lose the Big Costume Contest they change into - get this - normal clothes. what's the point of halloween if you can't pretend to be a freak all day?

and there is a pair of pigeons fighting outside my cubicle window. nice, being on the ground floor, to see that. really makes one's day.

the pigeon that won is all fluffy and self-important-looking. now *that* is a halloween costume.

Labels: work

scrawled @ 22:37

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FEAR

There's something deadly about a daytime building at night. Anything that happens, throughout, is clear and audible; if, on the second floor, a refrigerator turns on, far from the elevator shaft or the stairwell, the dust bunnies up on fourteen waft along to the hum, their loosely connected atoms vibrating with dreams of the burning, deadly coils behind the ancient Sears model that they so love to collect on but are fried every time they try. If the last worker of the night dares to speak, the ducts behind the walls, which function as an auditory canal for the monolith, serve to record permanently the echoes of human communication, there to be found millennia hence by alien archaeologists who wonder what, not on earth but some other rock of dirt and ice, silence was, in an experience of four-dimensional telepathy and gamma radiation. The building smothers its sole occupant in stillness and mechanical efficiency, pressing its evening entropy on the pitiable, soulless worker still praying for overtime to that big time-clock in the sky that makes us all check out early. A myriad security eyes glow, watching him and recording every move, so that if the building is vandalized with paint or violated with unauthorized entrances, its revenge will arrive flashing blue and red lights from tops of authoritarian cars that the building towers over, contemptuously apprehending their scant respectability even as they arrest its interlopers.

The worker does nothing out of the ordinary.

He sits instead at a small metal desk in a windowless office, reading and preparing memos for paper-shredder consumption in the morning. Midnight comes and goes until the witching hour of the morning arrives, when all but the classic rock goes off the air because not only is the building nearly deserted, but there are no people in the street or drinking in alleys or hitting a fellow nightwalker for money, as they are all warmly asleep, as is god its unnamable self, leaving the world to the minions of hell. Any who see this hour in such a building can never hope to see the blue noon sky again, and the realization comes only after, of course, it is too late in more ways than they could ever have thought of before.

It's then that the worker becomes restless in his grey room, and though the structure is only two years old, voices come out of the aesthetically conspired woodwork, passing shadows on the walls, creeping around the corridor, and whispering in the worker's ear things no human can understand, making him watch the family photos on the desk of two children in soccer uniforms and a golden retriever as they laugh, mocking their own existence as lost time.

The worker notices how loud the lights hum, and tries to concentrate, impossibly.

Now the heat disappears, making the worker put on music to keep away the silence, singing in contribution, so that the voices in the walls sympathize, adding to the loud, obnoxious, jarring cacophony, filling the badly upholstered office and the narrow hall and the stairwell with what the aliens will think of as color until the building catches itself and forces upon the worker the realization that it's really only him and Steven Tyler, killing the marvelous disharmony, leaving its poor creator staring, now, at the miniscule dots on his computer screen, trying to remember how the sentence he was just writing was going to tie up its own loose ends without getting overly tangled in endless metaphor, pointless in the extreme at this hour, really, when everything logical and grammatically correct goes to wonderland and through the looking-glass, appearing on the other side as no longer rational or even likely.

The thought was eaten by the building, which is angry at being inhabited in a time rightfully its own. It sent the sentence, along with the remainder of the memo, through the ventilation system to the boiler room in the fourth basement, which is responsible for destroying all the emotion and consciousness the building collects, filling itself with the wails of lost souls combing through an infinite Rolodex in search of an appropriate scapegoat.

The worker is hungry and tired, and caffeine and cigarettes can only do so much.

The smokeless ashtray he uses to hide from the alarm is starting to sizzle conspicuously, so in an attempt to be self-sufficient he rings the exterior universe, calling all the pizza places in the neighborhood and then in the phone book, ringing time after time in the desertion of a powerless cityscape, and it is increasingly clear as he tries one Giovanni's after another that he is now painfully alone in the world, as the building has cut off all access to the now-worried family and golden retriever and delivery boys who look questioningly into the security eyes, jealous of such a cushy job as to be able to order food from miserable red-faced teenagers in the middle of the night, looking out of what they picture as a fully windowed suite over the city, wondering who else would decide, voluntarily, to still be awake.

Lapses in consciousness and strange thoughts intruding on his memos are keeping the worker from productivity, making him dream that Salvador Dali is masturbating on him with disembodied hands, but he nods awake anyway, determined to finish the report by morning, by morning, while the building's shadowy regulars tap and hint into his mind, and he struggles to keep his eyes focused on the screen ahead but can't, perceptively losing the will to keep trying because the building is winning, and the building has always won.

The worker wakes up, one final time.

He slumps, mindless and assimilated, on the cheap desk they bought for his second most recent predecessor only three months before, and the building watches for his breath to become shallow and slow to reanimate him and show him into its most exalted corner where only those most dedicated to their work can go, and his superiors puzzle over the loss of one more worker and hold yet another job fair.

Labels: writing

scrawled @ 18:16

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27.10.03

one of the nasty things about having the whole world of the internet in a cubicle is going to those sites with noises, and wondering if anybody else is around or if you can play the noises.

and i have a nice little lamp to help my plant grow. but somebody keeps turning it off. grr.

and my boss has been gone all morning. but his car is here. it's a big mystery. where is the boss?

it's kind of like where's waldo, but without the scarf.

Labels: work

scrawled @ 20:53

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22.10.03

Everett's

The same place, every night of the week. The same cheap neon in the windows, erratically blinking. It's so easy to keep coming back, so the same people, predictable by the hour. Strange that this town services so many tired men. They all buy Miller. Lite, in deference to growing, undesirable bellies. Their wives regret everything, so they leave, hoping to start over somewhere else. And their bellies grow.

And they know what they've come to, and they know where they could have gone. They look at us and are jealous, because we might go on to do the things they couldn't. Maybe their families needed money, or maybe they just never got around to it, or maybe the whole gang decided to stick around after high school. But they know they used to have potential, before the frito lay work and the stint doing security and all the lotto tickets. They even know we call it the tax on stupid people. If they ever talked to each other, they would know everything.

We're lucky, that way. They don't coordinate like we do, they don't realize their power. If they ever did, we'd be cooked like so many pancakes. Flat and sticky. We see them doing construction, walking dogs, fixing their blue pickups. One of them followed me home the other day. A Ford, with rust along the bottom of the doors. It pulled into all the driveways I had to walk past, so I had to walk around the bumper. I suppose all that would pass for a compliment around here. I hid for four hours. Imagine what they could do if they ever spoke to each other.

They look at us when we buy our liquor. One of them sits in the rusty sedan, watching, while the other one goes in. They play music they will never see live, because the groups will never come here, and they will never leave. Sometimes they plan on going somewhere, even just for a day or two, but then something comes up and it's all cancelled and they are here for another eternity, until they try to escape again.

And you know it's the worst when they get to us. When one of us becomes one of them. I met one yesterday, at the wall. She graduated eight years ago, and she works at frito lay now. She hasn't got any student loans, she says, but it's real hard to get anywhere in the world. She was giving beer to the first years. MGD, because she's too young to have a belly. She talks about moving to madison, but "it's not the kind of place you live," she says. "it's nice to visit, but it's full of college students, and I've graduated, so..." I wonder what she majored in.

She looks as tired as the men. She was obviously cute and snappy once, full of energy, but her eyes are flat. What is it that makes them so tired, I wonder, and does it extend across the midwest and across the country and across the world. It could be such a problem if so many adults were so tired. They say Americans get less sleep than ever before, with electricity to extend the day and commodities to fill it. This is one of the times when that has to be believed.

This is the destiny to be avoided at all costs: the permanence of sloth. It's the sin of the seven that'll kill you the slowest. Even pride causes ulcers. At least if you do it right. But sloth eats away at you, and you never notice until it's too late, when you look at the young people who might be going where you should have been years ago. Then you realize you've been wasted. That of all the fantastic things you could have spent your life doing, you're in a town that isn't even a nice place to raise children. That you've become one of the salivating, consumerist masses you used to pity.

In a meagre effort to throw off the laws of inertia, imported, swanky-looking beers flavored with cranberry or cinnamon become the drink of the moment, but these things never last very long. Then it's back to your basic hops and American piss-water lite.

I can't let this happen to me. I have to avoid this, and I have to do it consciously, continuously, and without panicking. Remember that Karaoke Night doesn't count as doing something constructive. Keep the image of the twelve-year-old prodigy, more succesful than anyone else in his country.

Labels: writing

scrawled @ 16:40

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16.10.03

a couple i know is splitting up. this is very odd. and they're not young and mobile, like us; they have a dog, turtles, a lovely place outside of town with a pond and a tomato garden.

i've always known them as a couple. it's always been both of them. and though they each say, when you ask, that they're amicable and they'll be good friends ("better as friends than as.."), i wonder if they'll be ... companionable enough to have over simultaneously, for example.

i don't think i've been very good at breaking up with people, historically ... though further practice is not something i'd wish for.

some of my friends have had those on-again, off-again relationships. i've never had one. i've never understood the rationale for getting back together. it's been broken off once, presumably due to some sort of reason, and they're always suprised when the same thing happens again.

why is that?

Labels: people

scrawled @ 19:28

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13.10.03

They did it.. They did it, they did it, they did it. Not even all the Republicans wanted this to go through. They've got rural West Texas in the same district as the Fort Worth suburbs - and those are not the same people, and they do not have the same interests. At least two of the R's came to their senses. But of course it wasn't enough.

My new sod is mostly doing well. A few bits of it haven't quite taken yet - but i think all this rain-and-no-sun is not so bad for it as i thought it would be. And i don't have to water.

Labels: politics, texas

scrawled @ 20:42

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10.10.03

october has always been my favorite.

it's all dry and crispy and clean, and people do those nice pagan things, and there are apples, and you start to see nice warm soups and hot desserts ... and it gets all cool at night ... and i can wear nice long sleeves ... even if there aren't any leaves to speak of down here. they go straight from green to brown - no passing of Go, no $200. though of course they're still nice and swishy on the ground. and the grass finally turns a more proper green, here, and it starts raining sometimes.

we're going camping tomorrow. in preparation for this, i went and bought a combo-utility-tool. in removing it from that extra-sturdy plastic carton it was in i managed to slice my finger open. Just a little bit. But in exactly the wrong place - so i can't type properly.

Labels: texas

scrawled @ 17:31

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3.10.03

Two years ago, Le Monde declared, nous étions tous Américains.

Now, i think, even citizens are no longer. Good freedom-lovin' people are marginalized, vilified.

...whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these Ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or abolish it, and to institute new Government...

humm.

Labels: politics

scrawled @ 15:34

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