The Non-Paradox of the Missed Phone Calls

Unfortunate how often we miss each other; how—even in an age of hyper connectivity, of a dependence upon machines so fetisistic its edging every closer toward the cybernetic—we still manage to leave the house in time to miss that one phone call…particularly if, like me, you have no desire or use for the cellular phone. Not to mention the fact that we both Stephen King is exactly right: one day, every single one of the battery-powered, bacteria ridden, life sucking noise machines will ring, all over the world, at exactly the same time. Everyone who answers will be driven hopelessly insane and then where the hell will the rest of us be? I ask you.

When the Stem Cell Wars are over and done and Alzheimer’s is to the children of the First World’s Future what…say…polio is to us now…then the Christo-facists will just have to find a new innovation to demonize as “an offence against God.” I’m better cybernetics will become the Next Big Thing, especially once it becomes commercially viable and all those Pre-Meds with Art Minors start dreaming of manufacturing new limbs.

(Not that I’m naive enough to believe that the not-so-Right Wing will ever give up the Stem Cell Wars, or the larger war against a woman’s free choice to kill her own resource-depleting babies…but its fun to dream. After all that we’ve seen, all that we’ve been through, I take comfort in the fact that on occasion it’s still fun to dream.)

Music on the Wall

At times like this, I wish I could write songs. When my head is full of vindictive morass the honestly expressed emotion of a good, angry song seems to me a much more honest expression of human emotion than the dry, clinical detachment of more traditional prose. Think of it as the difference between laying the bricks of a wall and spray-painting the graffiti that covers them…that will get you started on the road to what I mean, though (in an only-half conscious further illustration) this is a description so far flung as to be totally inaccurate. At best this is only a metaphor for the roiling sea of ideas that I (at the moment) have no idea how to properly express.

Joyce Stick

There’s never enough time in the day. But, of course, how could we ever have time if we never make time? Isn’t that what the devil said?
So I’m making the time to read James Joyce, and finding myself fascinated by the extended sermon on Hell that takes up a vast portion of chapter three. The hero of the novel, Stephen Deadelus (the author’s semi-autobiographical avatar) spends most of said chapter embroiled in guilt over the nightly bouts of in-and-out he’s indulged in since the end of chapter two. Poking and prodding him toward repentance is the sermon on Hell delivered
It’s a particularly Catholic vision of Hell—five hundred years of over-thinking and categorical sub-dividing. The sheer uniformity of it leaves a down right institutional aftertaste in my mind. The way every sense of body and soul is assigned its special torment, the unflinching, ponderously serious detail of it, strikes me down and tries my patience, much as the book itself tries my patience. There’s none of Dante’s Twilight Zone-brand of justice in James Joyce’s Irish Catholic Hell. None of John Milton’s haughty, fuck-you-I’m-English rebellion. Certainly none of Richard Matheson’s good ol’ America melodrama. It’s (if you’ll pardon the phrase, which I know you won’t) on Hell of a depressing pit of eternal damnation, devoid of even the Inferno’s saving grace: its manifold variance. The depraved imagination of a single politically-minded fourteenth Century Italian has a lot on the institutional imagination of the Holy Mother Church.
I shouldn’t be surprised, given the amount of energy wasted on pondering the after life. Visions of it fill volumes, and spill out across the world. Stacked together they’d reach the moon and fall on that plaque with Nixon’s name on it.
Would that human beings put more energy into examining their own lives, and the neglected world that they inhabit. We might all be better off.

Stock Taking

Novel in progress, two years after initial conception: 33,854 words, less than one-third completed

Short story number one, nine months after initial conception: 11,553 words, over four-fifths completed.

Short story number two, two weeks after initial conception: 1,472 words, the red-headed stepchild of the bunch. Impossible to fractionally calculate how far this one is from completion.

Movie review, two days after initial conception: 2,267 words, not even close to completion.

Leave the house to gather provisions: chocolate milk and sweetened tea. Watch a crow dive down into the wet, shinny streets, chasing a walnut that’s fallen from his/her grasp into the middle of an intersection. The crow spears his/her prize on his/her beak and lifts off, alighting on top of a streetlamp from which the nut will surely fall again.

I wish him/her, “Good luck, yo. That looks like a tough nut to crack.”

The crow stares down at me with its oil colored eyes and does not acknowledge my pun.

Return home, type out the above, and get back to the Work.


Tag: Personal: Writing:

Something Appropriately Baroque on this Cold and Raining Tuesday

Tuesday again, and I’ve settled into my new job at my new cube farm. The end of training has bequeathed me a measure of autonomy that should last, at the very least, until my first cataclysmic fuck up. Which, with God’s help, will be far off, as this job is heinously easy. In the meantime, I read.

Though my college, Col. Giddens, has graciously loaned me Pullman’s His Dark Materials I am a horrible friend when it comes to reading recommendations. I hope this will keep me from coating the dust jackets of other people’s books with my asinine endorsement blurbs. Then this tendency to fly off and read any old goddamn thing I chose will most likely be used in the service of Justice. In the meantime all it’s good for is adding height to my Must Read pile.

The Pile shows no signs of shrinking, as I’m currently re-reading A.A. Attanasio’s Arthurian saga, staring from the beginning with 1996’s The Dragon and the Unicorn.

Previous to this I tried (honestly I tried) to wade through Malory’s Le Morte d’ Arthur, having no wish to even contemplate Tennyson’s Idylls of the King…but 1468 is a long way from 2006, and the English language has (to borrow Stephen King’s phrase) moved on . I don’t care how much of a philistine admitting this will make me: man can only take so many Chaucerisms at once. And with all the closeness of Sir Malory’s to our own, you’d think we’d be able to “modernize” his text in a way that preserves some modicum of style, in the manner of, say, some of the better Bibles I’ve read around the local college reading rooms. They may not have the authority of the good old King James my grandmother gave me, but they can beat it like the family mule for a good turn of phrase.

There’s plenty of style, and turns of phrase, crammed into Attanasio’s two thousand-plus page re-telling of the Once and Future King’s life…and considering he isn’t even born until four hundred pages into it one is tempted to criticize Attanasio for both stylish and substantive glut…if, that is, one is a heathen devil with no sense of beauty in his or her soul. I’d not have a word of these books cut. Better to see them released as a single, massive tomb, the way Lord of the Rings was intended to be. Sometimes I think all great epics should be monstrous giants…until I stop to consider the power this would give already too-indulgent writers the world over. Then I shutter.

Afterward, I read, not from any great love of epic fantasy or chivalrous romance. Attanasio, bless his Hawaiian heart, chose to go down neither of those well-traveled paths. Instead he hacked a third one through uncharted, genre bending lands, and I doubt it worked as well as either he, or his publisher hoped…though in all honesty I could care less. I have the books, and tell God thank ya for ‘em. They’ve done exactly what I need them to do for me.

I picked them out of a Hastings Bookstore shelf at the age of thirteen. I got them then, but feared that, a decade later, they would fall short of my memory. That’s yet to happen. If anything, I feel as woefully inadequate now as I did thin, faced with Attanasio’s prose stylings. The man writes beautifully, as if he’s swallowed a page of the Thesaurus every morning with his coffee and cornflakes. My mother and I both agree it has to be because he lives in Hawaii, where all is green and good, save the twin poles of sea and the mountain, and the artificial ones laid out by man.

Not only does Attanasio re-animate the overly-archetyped, near-entirely abstracted characters of this myth (Arthur; his father, Uther; his mother, Ygrane, Queen of the Celts, whom nobody ever remembers…and Merlin, ‘natch) he creates a universe of supporting cast members by adding equal doses of historical reality, electromagnetic physics, and new age metaphysics…which is really no more than old myth in new clothes, anyway.

Even the metaphysical is given a physical basis. Gods, demons, the titular unicorn, all are beings of sentient plasma, held together not by magic so much as will alone…and electromagnetic physics. They live above us puny mortals, eternal, everlasting, inside the magnetosphere thrown off by our planet’s poles. To them it appears as a multi-tiered Heaven. We on earth call it the World Tree, and it is as real as the force that pulls our feet down to the floor every morning, and brings our hand down on the Snooze button. It is spread across the Earth, just like Jesus said, and men do not see it.

But more than this melding of physical and spiritual, which struck me as both obvious and stupendously liberating at the age of thirteen (one of those ideas that’s so good you kick yourself for not independently arriving at it), it is the idea that opens the book, lifted whole from Asian mythology and dressed in modern, pseudo-scientific skin, which still rivets me:

There is only one Dragon. It lives inside the earth and is as large as the entire planet. Its mind thrives within the magnetic field thrown off by the core. Its blood circulates with the slow convections of magma beneath the rocky crust that serves as its perdurable hide. Slowly molting with the slidings of tectonic plates, the Dragon renews itself over eons: mountain ranges fin from its back like thorny scales replenished every hundred million years as maritime trenches subsume its old flesh.

My thanks to the author.


Tag: Personal: Reading: The Dragon and the Unicorn:

Snapshot of the Past

Over the weekend I relapsed and smoked a cigarette, putting me right back into the noxious, gray wastes of the addictive cycle, where anything and everything under the sun makes me long for a smoke. Just one. Good God, at times I’m sure I would birth children just to sacrifice them for a fucking cigarette. Just one.

It’s been five years since I told myself I could have just one. Since I assured my friend-who-happened-to-be-a-girl that, hell yes, I could have just one. That, unlike my parents, my uncles, my grandparents and friends, unlike all those other unlucky bastards throughout history, I had self-control, thank you very much. I could quit, I assured her, whenever I wanted to.

At the time she smiled her best, predator’s smile. “I’m gonna get you addicted,” she promised. It was one of the few promises she kept during the long, slow course of our co-dependent “friendship.”

Tag: personal: authorial bitching: reminiscence:

Untitled

You paid attention during 86% of high school!

85-100% You must be an autodidact, because American high schools don't get scores that high! Good show, old chap!

Do you deserve your high school diploma?
Create a Quiz

This is a horrible overestimation.

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Sunday Un-funnies

I’m trying something new on this gray, rainy Sunday. Something I hope will lead to further writing and a greater increase in my general output…however I chose to measure it. “Output,” is such a bastardly nebulous term anyway. So nebulous I can hardly use it without falling into a philosophical cluster fuck of inane, unanswerable questions about what, in fact, constitutes “output.”

Should I measure the number of stories completed? Or the number of words on a page within each? The number of words in total for all the various projects I’ve completed, present or past? Or the number of words in each of the three stories-in-progress I currently have kicking against the placental walls of my brain?

And then there’s my damn novel, also in progress, which my colleague Col. Giddens so aptly labeled “your baby”. As a dog mother (who spent the majority of her teenage years raising her little brother, for all practical purposes) she knows a fretting parent when she sees one. And, oh, how I fret over my baby. Over all of them, really, for they are all my children…even the ones that arrive stillborn, malformed and hideous to behold. The ones I kiss before gladly dashing their heads against the nearest unyielding surface. Believe me when I say its better that way for all concerned. Especially the stories themselves.

Occasionally I get the hot idea to use this blog as a journal of my writing, a record of progress that I could look back upon with awe in those dark times when the melancholy rises like a five armed octopus and wraps its tendrils around the support beams of my frayed self-confidence. Unfortunately, by the time I wrap things up for the (day/night/hour/minute/whatever) I rarely if ever have the patience or energy to spend any more time writing…certainly not writing about my writing.

At various times in various magazine interviews, Hunter S. Thompson decried the whole business and practice of writing. “Nothing’s fun when you have to do it every day,” he said. It was a specific reference to journalism, particularly the type he practiced during his drug-fueled hay days of the late-60s/early-70s. And in this, as in so much else, Dr. Thompson had a point. There are times when this—this hum-drum magic making, this everyday necromancy, this thing that is the Art and craft of writing—is the last thing on earth I want to do.

There are times I’d rather walk down to the Southern Pacific rail lines and just lay in wait on the tracks. A train is bound to go by, sooner or later.

Now is not one of those times. Now the pensive weight of a week spent in idle fantasy (and a day [yesterday] spent in hedonistic splendor) is moving my hands with unearthly speed. The Col.’s Ritalin is certainly helping and if I hadn’t already, I’d thank her.

But now I must get back Into It, and say good afternoon to this damned, dusty blog.

Tag: Writing: personal: authorial bitching:

Linkage

Why are you even here? Go read something else. Something good.

The American Prospect: Battlestar Galacticons by Brad Reed, discusses the rise and fall of Battlestar Galactica in the eyes of many a Right Wing pundit.

Rolling Stone: The Worst Congress Ever by Matt Taibbi speaks for itself.


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Philosophizing, Issue One: Schopenhauer

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Critical Spear

From the bowls of UCLA comes a wonderful socio-philosophical reading of Brittany Spears, as seen through the Critical Theory of Theodore Adorno, among others. I’ve been getting heavily into western philosophy these past few months, so expect notes to follow. Pray it’ll all matriculate through the soapy mesh of my brain to birth some new and glorious idea (or Ideal) for these malignant modern times.

But for now, read you fools. Read and think.

Tag: Personal: philosophy: Critical Theory: T. A. Adorno:

Blinking in the Face of Poverty

Whenever I write and I find things go…less than admirably….I find myself walking. Most often I walk the twelve blocks to 39th Avenue, thinking, and muttering to myself. I work through snatches of dialog, plan out sequences of events, and once I’m at 39th it’s a simple matter to turn north, walk two more blocks, and pick up some groceries from the Safeway.

Three days ago I took the trip, picking up a rasher of bacon and some tortillas. I paid with plastic and caught the bus back home, being too lazy to walk, my head too full of ideas. I was thinking about giant monsters, scientists and the way the afternoon light fell flat as a flapjack on my neighborhood’s sidewalks.

I found a homeless man sitting outside my house. Right outside, on the treated wood planter the keeps the English ivy from swallowing the sidewalks and rampaging, in a very prim, proper, English way, down the road.

He word red and black plaid—a long sleeve shirt I’m sure feels much colder in the dead of night when one is sleeping on the ground—and faded pants, once black, now as gray as the hair sprouting from his head and beard. “Excuse me, man,” he asked. “You have a quarter?”

I’m not afraid to say I lied. Of course I lied. I lied to him as surely as I lie to his kith and kin downtown who regularly troll through the human sea of commuters, asking similar questions. At times I think the only upside to my not smoking (other than the decreased risk of catching every form of cancer not caused by the sun) is the ability to tell those homeless that, honestly, no, I don’t have an “extra” cigarette. Even when I, theoretically, did I bought them all for myself and was never in a mood to share. I don’t believe in assisted suicide when doing so is inconvenient.

It’s a simple thing, lying to the homeless. Practice awhile and it’s as easy as slipping on shoes. So easy it becomes an autonomic response, as it has for members of my class from time out of mind.

“No,” I said, adding, “I’m sorry,” though I was not. I was thinking, Shit, man, I’m not doing so well, myself.

Except that was a self-severing lie, and I can’t lie to myself. I caught myself before I even made it the twenty-plus steps to my doorway. As I put my food into the ‘fridge I peeled off the layers of my lie until it stood naked in my mind and shivered.

After all, I thought, you’re miles from that man out there. That man who’s out there, not fifty feet away, wearing all the clothing he owns. Who sleeps on wet grass when he can find it and hard concrete when he can’t. Who’s come to here, to this neighborhood, in search of peace, out of some vain and fleeting hope he’ll be unnoticed by the policemen. As if the police in my ‘hood were some mystical, benign sub-species that doesn’t get drunk on its own power, that doesn’t rouse you out of concrete sleep to present you with the immortal choice of, “Move it, or loose it.”

I looked at my ‘fridge. Dirty, sure. A little light on the protein, but stocked, running. Humming blithely along, putting paid to my lie and shaming me into action.

I peaked into my wallet, thinking, Is this how Bruce Wayne feels? Five, six, seven, eight dollars total. No, I thought, Bruce Wayne is moved by grief and honest-to-God compassion. If there’s any guilt moving his hands it’s the gnawing, niggling guilt of plane crash and earthquake survivors. Not at all what I felt as I stood in my kitchen and counted my money again.

—Eight dollars, my mind said. —Great. Why not just escort Mr. Red-and-Black to the nearest ATM, pass him your card and say, “Have at it”? It’ll do more good. Or just as much, considering the old bird’s probably drunk. Or insane. You see that brown paper bag next to his feet?

I had. But at that moment I didn’t care. I put my money in my pocket and stepped back outside. These are the moments, I thought. When the wolf is at your door that you have to stand and see what you’re really made of. And you have to be honest with yourself. Talk is cheep if you’re not prepared to walk the walk of the honest, the just and the damned.

—Which one are you? My head asked. I didn’t know, and that vaguely frightened me as I walked down the parking lot and turned left.

Mr. Red-and-Black was gone. Phlegm and the brown paper bag were all that marked his passage.

—Too late, too late, my head told me. At times I think of this as my Joker voice. We’re connected, that voice and I, like comedy and tragedy. It derives comedic pleasure from my occasional tragedies.

I turned right and there he was, shuffling up the block, past the Japanese restaurant and its neighboring bar. Past the once-thriving Korean market that’s now a hollow, boarded up shell, to the grass and sidewalks of the next block. There he half-sank, half-fell to the grass in an apparent dead faint.

—Or stupor? I nodded. Or stupor. Big deal. Because you can mouth pretensions of charity until the vaults of heaven fall down. As the dead rock star once asked, who needs action when you’ve got words?

I do. And so I shook the homeless man’s shoulder. “Man. Hey, man.”

It took three shakes before his gray, watery eyes fluttered open. “This is all I had on hand,” I told him, slipping the money into a dirty, yellow-nailed hand. “But you better move on, yo. Some of my neighbors aren’t as…gracious as the rest of us.”

Mr. Red-and-Black blinked twice and his eyes were the color of cataracts. “Sorry,” he half-muttered, speaking through nubs of teeth and a tongue as red as the checker board on his shirt.

I shook this off and turned away. No, no sorry necessary. Hell, I’m sorry I keep blinking whenever I come face of face with poverty. Real, honest to god poverty of the kind you can rarely find in the woody creeks that birthed me. I’m sorry I cannot do more. Or will not do more, as the case may or may not be. I’m sorry I couldn’t express any of this to Mr. Red-and-Black at the time. I’m sorry for the fact that he probably wouldn’t have understood me, anyway.

I went back into my house, my clean, pristine, paid for apartment with its dirty but-stocked ’fridge. I mixed myself a drink, sat down and fired up this humming box of a machine, all the while wondering if I’d done something noble…and if I had then what was this ambivalence in my guts? More middle class guilt? Or some other, more malignant species?

I began to wonder as I began to write. I’m still wondering now, as dawn breaks over My Fair City and the homeless shuffle toward downtown with its kitchens and its haunts.

Tag it and bag it: Personal: the homeless: poverty: class warfare:

My Brain Has a Vagina

In lue of actual content, I present this not-quite-all-that-surprising quiz result.

Your Brain is 73% Female, 27% Male

Your brain leans female You think with your heart, not your head Sweet and considerate, you are a giver But you're tough enough not to let anyone take advantage of you! (Test taker's note: Ha!. Well, that's a goddamn lie, right there. Shows what you know, random blogthings brain gender quiz.)

What Gender Is Your Brain?

Via Poppy Z. Brite’s most-excellent blog, Dispatches from Tanganyika. Buy her shit on eBay for she is a native of New Orleans and a writer in search of a house amid the wreck of her Fair City.

Tag it and bag it: Personal: Writers: Poppy Z. Brite: quiz results:

Four A.M. Voices and the Week to Myself

My college, Col. Giddens, has suggested that is the duty, nay, responsibility, of all writers to “communicate the in-communicatable,” a calling as daunting as it is practically impossible. Is that, I wonder, the purpose of these notes from the dulling edge of the American Empire? To communicate some incommunicable Truth about It All? Oh, the horror…the horror if this is so for I feel it is a project as far beyond me as the stars of Andromeda; as intangible as the halo the forms around the moon when the night is filled with clouds and your head with LSD; as devoid of meaning as the bleating of Our Glorious Leader, George Dubya Bush.

So much for all that, yar. And so much for my writings here. Dispatches from Within the Empire have been short and sweet in coming due to that oldest of all devils, Circumstance. I am currently embroiled in a transitional phase of my life and times, both as a writer and a man…or perhaps I mischaracterize the situation, investing it with far more Drama than it is due.

In any case, Things have occurred since last we spoke. I have swapped one cube farm for another, changing my job with what, to the casual, must seem a callus disregard for my employment record. As if my resume were some unbroken chain of blameless upright-itude, rather than the erratic patchwork of piecemeal employment that it is today. By the time I am a famous author of notorious public excess I expect my resume to look much worse. I am banking, after my own fashion, to hold more jobs than Mark Twain by the time I am done (while at the same time making much more intelligent investments). I’ve already beaten out another famous Missouri native on this score: that great sage and Beat groupie/godfather, William S. Burroughs, one of the few junkies lucky enough to be born with a silver spoon already at his disposal.

So, yes, I quit my job, and burned the bridge behind myself. I have told everyone I did it out of malignant hatred of the work, but that is not the truth. I’ve told everyone I quit because of foresight and convenience. After all, that cube farm was a 90 minute train ride away, both ways. That’s twelve hours a week lost to commuting alone, another unpaid workday in itself. One hundred and thirty-two hours in all, lost, never to be regained. A lot of time that could’ve been spent writing. And besides, my Fair, adopted City is scheduled to begin a grand maul re-design of its downtown transit hub this coming January. Ground break falls on the 9th of that month and god help all the poor bastard bus drivers who’ll be force to re-route or catch a grill full of civic construction worker. Better to net myself a job on this side of the blasted river, leaving downtown to its own chaotic madness. This I have done, so that is that.

But that is still not the truth of why I quite my job. I could (and will) easily adapt to the gutting of downtown. I can (and will) willing unwrap myself from the sweet embrace of my beloved Partner every morning for no other purpose than to do something I do not care a wick for.

No, I quite my job because on Monday, the 24th of September, I woke from a terrible dream I cannot remember in a cold and clammy sweat at four a.m. I coughed and felt the stirrings of the sickness that (by week’s end) would blossom into a respiratory infection. My tonsils were swollen and tinder. By morning they would be the size and consistency of children’s marbles.

But in the night they were only tender, and they were not what motivated me to call in sick. A still, calm voice in my head did that. It was the voice that woke me at four a.m. The voice that moved my hand hours later when I punched the alarm clock and reached for the phone.

Call in sick, it told me. It did not need to speak again.

The next morning I found the ad for my new job amid the refuse of posting in the customer service section of cragislist. I visited the place, filled out my application and passed my typing test with seventy words per minute, two errors.

By week’s end I was snorting and sniffling my way through my interview, head full of snot and cough medicine. By the beginning of next week my lymph nodes felt like twin golf balls straining to meet each other in the center of my throat...and, somehow, I managed to make myself heard over the phone. Yes, I would love a job with your esteemed company. Yes, I would have to give my current employer notice. Yes, I would love to start on the 17th. Seven a.m.? Perfect.

I gave my current employer exactly one day of notice, more than enough to show up, turn in my badge and collect my last paycheck. Thus have I lied my way into a solid week of no external responsibilities. I’ve kicked cigarettes and am well supplied with booze. There is nothing but sheer laziness standing between me and a full week’s worth of honest-to-god-writing.

Not blog writing, obviously, for blog posts are the vain, self-publishing writer’s crack rock. They are the thing I write when I am too lazy to write the movie reviews that stock my website or (and this is key, here) the fiction that will one day pay my bills.

Those are the projects that have consumed me these past weeks and I’ve charged away at them with a rough single-mindedness that would seem insane to those who do not see the creation of prose expressions as an end unto themselves. Hell, I don’t even do that half the time, but when I do I am more than willing to gather strange looks and sharp comments from those I know and love.

I can only imagine what they’d say if I told them, Yes, I quit my job because the voice in my head told me to. After all, we all have voices. But it’s not everyday they wake you up to tell you what to do.

Unless your name happens to be Burkowitz.

Tag it and bag it: Personal: Writing: Fiction: Short Stories: Authorial Bitching: The Job:

National Fuck Your Job Day: 2006

Thursday: Spend hour and a half writing article I will never publish. Last half of first draft interrupted by night time call from my girlfriend. “Do you want to do something crazy?” she asks.

Nothing too crazy. Only a late supper. Or an early breakfast, depending on one’s perspective and considering what we’re having. A date, and a good one at that. We meet at My Fair City’s one-and-only known all-night waffle house. I order a Strawberry Belgian, side of bacon, and a chocolate milk shake. For her, a veggie omelet with hash browns. Milkshake: strawberry. And all is right with the world.

Lat night bus schedule dictates we must eat our break quite fast, or else face the long walk home with full, rolling stomachs. We wrap our left-overs in tin foil and huff it, both sated and drowsy with digestion.

We get home and I smoke my last cigarette. I fall asleep in my lover’s arms and wait.

Friday: Pay day. I open the article I’d left in situ the night before. I find it’s suffered and died during the interim. I’ve lost its thread somewhere, somewhen.

Fuck it, I think, leaving to pick up my pay check.

It’s a ninety minute commute to my place of work. My cube farm in the Silicon Forest. I get there and receive the third degree from my manager. “Were you scheduled today?” he asks.

The scheduling program is open right before his face. I can see myself there, and the blank space that is Friday. For two months I’ve worked four, ten hour days for the explicit purpose of keeping Friday to myself. I’ve not worked a Friday since July. Since my birthday, in fact.

“Well, you were scheduled today, and you’re already late.”

Bullshit. The word rushes up through the breakers of my mind, whole, rabid, wanting nothing more than to build a home in my boss’s ear.

Instead I say something far less articulate. “Nuh-uh,” or somesuch like. “My schedule, it just says, ‘Off’. I’m always off on Friday. I’ve already worked my forty hours.”

Bullshit, indeed, but to say so would not be polite, now would it? And it would certainly not fall into my plan of keeping the mask in place. We all wear our masks in public, do we not? I certainly find I must…to function if nothing else.

“No, look, it says ‘Nine-to-ten-thirty, off.’ Then ‘ten-thirty to noon, off’. So you were scheduled from nine to noon and you’re already late.’”

The hell I am, fool, I think to him. Unless your dumb ass is about to pay me over time, ‘Off’ still means ‘off’ in my part of the English language. “Off,” as in, “I go home, you stay here.” “Off,” as in, “this time is my time.” “Off,” as in, “You will cease to pay me for this amount of time, and I will cease to think a single, blessed thing about you, you managerial monster.”

So for ten minutes my boss and I dance a dance of ignorance. Apparently, a good number of my coworkers misread their own schedules and failed to show up on this fine Friday. I am not one of those workers. Ten minutes, a quick walk to my desk, and a comparison of schedules later and my boss, he says, “Don’t worry about it.”

I smile. Oh, don’t worry, I think to him, but do not say. I won’t.

I don’t say it because his eyes are wild and spinning in their caves. His mind is haggard and thrown to the four winds. He must do the work of twelve now, to make up for the missed work of five. He has no pension, no savings, and no plan beyond the coming weekend which, for him, will be exactly one day long. He is a poor, small, frightened man and I do pity him.

But I’m not about to worry for him. Not one damn bit. His accusation, mistaken though it may be, stung a deep and very Protestant part of my brain. The part that honors its obligations and tells me, Work. And save. The part that drags me from my girlfriend’s side every morning and brings me to that awful place and now realizes it doesn’t matter. That I am, once again, guilty until proven innocent. After all, the call center employee is a useless jack-about, unsuited for even the simplest unsupervised task. They must be watched and called to task at the slightest provocation because the entry-level call center employee is little more than a half-bright animal really. Child-like and sad. Their sloth and laziness really can’t be helped, you see, though it is the (white) Manager’s Burden to eternally try. Through goading, through promising, through careful persuasion. And, if all else fails, through bald-faced accusation.

So I won’t worry about my boss, or “it.” No. Instead I’ll worry about the fact that I call in, by God, when I’m gonna cut work. And how much of a fool does that really make me?

As I leave, another six-hundred forty-four ill-gotten dollars in hand, I think of the long, odd causal chain of association that must flourish inside my bosses head. After all, he assumed (1) that I was scheduled to work, despite the evidence before his face (2) that I then skipped work for God-only-knows what reason, before ignorantly (3) stopping by, and walking right to the man’s desk. What kind of fool cuts work, only to show up with his hand out a few hours later?

The kind of fool foolish enough to voluntarily work my job.

To that end I realized I do not hate my job, but I will soon. It won’t take long and when it comes it will come a’ sneaking under the invisible seams along the side of my face. My mask will slip as surely as Vic Sage’s did when he took up smoking. (Filthy habit, kids. Don’t ever pick it up.) I can feel this happening already, during the long, slow progressions of my ten hour days. It’s the trapped-animal feeling that always comes to me whenever I’m forced to do something I do not wish to do. Do not believe in. Do not care for, with, or about. When I’m doing any job, in other words, that is not this, my real Work, the writing.

What else?

Saturday: I write. I drink. I do not smoke.

Sunday: I do the same, with reading thrown in for good measure. Because those without time to read do not have time to write and that’s a fact, as the video game says.

In between I nurse my girlfriend, who’s come down with what, at first, she thought were allergies. Now her eyes water and her nose runs and its day two of these “allergies.” She and I both know there something else. “Don’t get to close,” she warns me. This I ignore, as I ignore so much good advice.

Monday: I wake at 4:16 a.m. The voice in my head tells me, Call in sick. It is the calm, still voice inside my mind and this is the first time its woken me up in the middle of the night. In the past, I’ve dismissed it as a hallucinogenic fantasy, a paranoid delusion, or something worse. But at four in the morning its words carry more weight…a weight I feel creeping slowly through spaces in my head that are usually empty.

Not their clogged. I can barely breath. Swallowing is a godly effort. My head feels twice as large as I know it should and I think, Maybe the Magic Voice is on to something here. Yep, sure seems that way.

Restless sleep takes me back into itself. In my dream I call in sick and am summarily fired. I call in sick and my manager screams down the line, the Wicked Witch of the South West. “How ‘bout a little fire, Scarecrow?” he asks in his new high keening Wicked voice.

My alarm rings. Its seven a.m. A ninety minute commute stares down into my gullet but I am just asleep enough to remember Friday. And the voice. Separately, the two would be forgotten and dismissed and I would be waiting for a train home now, miles away from my computer. But taken together, the Magic Voice and bitter experience have led me to declare this National Fuck Your Job day.

So I did. I dialed the Sick Line number, handily provided on the back of every employee badge. I negotiated the Byzantine automated phone system that answered my call, story primed and at the ready for the inevitable questions. “Why are you calling in sick, D?” Well, it’s like this: the little voice in my head woke me up at four a.m. to tell me to. Because it hates your guts, and all you stand for. Suck on that, you mistrusting bastard.

“Thank you for calling ——‘s Automated Help Line. No manager is available to take your call. To leave a message, press—”

I press one, speak my piece, and crawl back into bed with my beloved, head pounding, voice cracked and spent.

Hours later I wake to the sun in my eyes and think, I can’t waste this day. Oh, no. The old Protestant part of my brain would never allow that.

So I scan the classifieds, plan out bus routes and chorus lines, and format a short story I plan to send to Asimov’s. Within hours I’ve located another call center, less than thirty minutes from my home. They’re hiring, and on my way from the post office.

I consider myself lucky, despite the way daylight stings my watering, salt encrusted eyes. Despite the way bus fumes and screaming children make my head throb. The receptionist doesn’t seem to mind. She hands me the sheet, times me on the typing test, and within thirty minutes I’m back out the door, spent, but happy.

Fuck work. I’ve lived today. And someday, God’s willing (har har) I’ll make the difference very clear to a certain boss of mine.

Then we’ll see who worries.