The Office

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. It was the time I'd just gotten used to my office, it was the time I was losing my office. Mornings I would huddle over my black mother's milk and cry:

"Employer loves me,
this I know,
because this office
tells me so!"

An office meant one thing: a door, which implied a hinge, which implied closure, which implied privacy. It inspired me sometimes to the point of uttering corporate buzzwords: "Metrics" I ticced, saying it every third word like someone suffering from a corporate Tourette syndrome.

The privacy was visual, not audial, and I sat next to someone who made Eliza Doolittle sound like Ella Fitzgerald. Like a super action figure, her body-made-for-sin would stun men (think Wonderwoman with her magic belt) before she slayed them with words. The perfect obverse of a phone sex operator, even earplugs could not din the cries of this banshee when something went wrong.

I was losing my office and going back to a roofless cube clochán because the guy at the top of the hierarchy eschewed hierarchy and wanted a flatter, more democratic organization on the ground if not on the org chart. He'd also read in a management book that workers were more productive if there was more light, so all offices next to windows were torn down, as well as those which lacked a view, and I lived in hope that some day beer-drinking would be found a productivity aid.

My office functioned as a womb. Hot coffee attended me, her hot breath on my face just before I drank. I usually picked up a cinamon roll from the cafeteria, lacivious with frosting. On special days I'd buy Kellogg's Corn Pops, with its single-serving cylindrical package, and pour the milk in and eat it sans spoon. A picture of my wife and children sat to the left of the computer screen. Earphones were handy for symphonic inspiration while I "added value", as the term went, by creating print advertisements which would hopefully induce more people to buy more product.

Often I'd have to go to meetings at Jason's office where after fifteen minutes his screen-saver of family vacation photos kicked on. In other settings interest in that would quickly flag, but here it became very distracting. Jason's glasses were so crisp and new-fashioned that I'd alternate between eyeing the glasses holding in his bald dome and his children playing with the dog.

Once I was asked to give a presentation on the fall campaign, something I hadn't fleshed out yet, and while groping for words Stan said, "Don't stop."

I had the punchline ready.

"That's what she said!"

The Illusions of Children

Women are like cruise ships with unpredictable itineraries. Moody, they take you where you do not want to go and dress you as you would not dress. One minute you're on your way to Burma, the next Siberia. Guided by moonbeams, it's Scylla by Tuesday and Charybdis by Friday. But it is for our own benefit. Men without women are ignoble savages.

My father had a mistress was named Work. In the German she was called arbeit, pronounced not coincidentally "our bite". She demanded my father dress in a business suit made of polymers and took him to where he did not want to go. He left us for her every morning and the parting was made worse by our mother's cries, which we romantically imagined were due to separation from him but were actually caused by the anticipated persecution from us, her children. We were, to put it mildly, oblivious. We were delightful creatures of God utterly without sin though with the lung-power of ten men.

At church on Sundays I saw men wearing suits made of polymers called "ushers". I did not like or trust ushers. They wore the clothes demanded by father's mistress. But then my father became an usher and they were alright again.

I liked the priest's colorful and free-flowing robes. He called his mistress "Mother Church" and under the influence of the nature philosopher Mogli of The Jungle Book I deemed liturgy, a form of play and yet etymologically "a public work", the only worthwhile work even though it didn't happen outside, in the natural world, where saints like Euell Gibbons lived. But there were the natural ingredients of bread and wine and his mistress only made him work on Sundays. Or so we thought.

Work and its Discontents

Tragically, I’ve experienced large periods of chronic full employment. Corporate re-structurings, mergers, reorganizations, downsizings and rightsizings all left my job intact lo these many years, back from the time I left the collegiate womb at the tender age of 21. (It was an emergency C-section; I didn’t want to come out.) Indeed, we emerge from our mother’s womb squalling and blinking from the light and we emerge from the collegiate womb squalling and dilating from the dimness of the light in the corporation’s hallway.

I spend Sundays looking in the paper for jobs advertising for beer drinkers or part time diarists who write about their dogs. I’ve never seen such an ad, which I attribute to the evils of capitalism. Under the Chesterton/Belloc Distributist model, I ‘d have a high-paying job as a beer-drinking part-time pet diarist.

I decided to write A Natural History of Work, a three volume work to be published on acid-free paper using an obscure 16th century font face developed laboriously by Belgian monks after drinking Trappist ale, but found I didn’t have the work ethic for it. Perhaps too someone had already written it. I checked, and no one had, and so I began thusly:

It’s been said that work is the curse of the drinking class but work has been found in every human culture from the beginning of recorded history. Before there was beer, there was work, because it takes work to make beer.

Examples of early Egyptian hieroglyphics include inscriptions which, roughly translated say: “I go to work so I can send my kids to Cairo Elementary”. Cave drawings recently found outside Newark, New Jersey illustrate an early computer programmer doing a “hard re-boot” – that is, dropping the PC off a cliff.

Most of the bad press work has received over the millennia has come from poets and song lyricists and playwrights, none of whom have ever worked a decent day in their life. “I don’t want to work, I just want to bang on the drum all day,” speaks a modern rock poet, but it’s not clear he’s a disinterested source. Similar too Walt Disney’s “Mary Poppins”, a film in which the husband, a banker, by the end expects to get paid flying a kite. He converts the board of directors to the wonders of kite flying and all is well that ends well but how many times does this happen in real life? If the board of directors of a bank wrote this script, one suspects the outcome would’ve differed...

Choosing Zeffirelli

The moon that Mardi Gras was gauzed by clouds, as if trying to costume itself in the spirit of the occasion. Was it trying to hide in order to observe, or fit in so that it may join the revelers? No one knew for sure but that it had the wide-eyed innocence of a young Olivia Hussey.

One of the revelers was a young man with a mathematical background. The certainty in the life of the Casari family was the need for certainty. Uncertainties were tolerated to the extent they could be assigned probabilities. Joan, Ron Casari’s mother, had delegated weekly household chores based on a complex algorithm that took into account the child’s strengths, weaknesses, biorhythm chart and phase of the moon. She said that with her system chores were 83% more likely to get done.

Ron did well in school though teachers said he approached his classes in a rote, mechanical fashion. In English Lit class he asked his teacher, a Mr. Siddle, why the books laden with symbols carefully hidden even though the insights revealed tended towards common sense. He studied to the test and the test asked: what does the whale in Moby Dick symbolize? It was like a math problem with multiple correct answers.

One of the milder surprises of Ron Casari’s life was discovering that foreign languages were never fully accessible. He’d considered language little different from mathematics: A=B, where “B” was the foreign word for “A”. But a book that bore the imprint of the soul of a foreign culture would throw him off-balance, off-kilter. He was uncomfortable with mystery, or at least uncomfortable with not knowing what he didn’t know. Mysteries, by definition, didn’t have the answers in the back of the book. That languages were essentially unsolvable was an anathema in a culture in which choice was worshipped. He couldn’t get over the fact that his native tongue had been chosen for him and he couldn’t choose another.

He naturally wasn't sure how close his approximation of the foreigner's tongue was, and the native born wouldn't tell him for reasons mysterious. What was humorous was that even when he mickmicked the accents of foreigners speaking English he couldn't tell if that made him more intelligible or less. On overseas trips he felt like he was playacting and yet the exaggerated syllables might sound "natural" to the Venetian, no matter how unnatural it sounded to his ears.

After graduating from Ole Miss he moved to Louisiana. Every Mardi Gras thereafter he donned a costume inspired by a character from a Franco Zeffirelli film and marched in the Krewe of St. Anne. Afterwards he’d get lost in the byways of the Quarter, drunk on mimosas and bourbon.

He knew the exhilarating feeling of dissolving into a crowd of foreigners and of the sheer joy of invisibility, but language offered no such invisibility: on any street in Venice or Berlin or Moscow everyone who spoke the language knew - from his accent - it was not his native tongue. He wished he could fit in so he could join them. Or maybe just so he could observe. Or perhaps to have the choice.

The Silent Alarm

There were no shades of gray in the world of Alan Sharpley, aged 20. Blaguards, they were, soulless collegians who bragged of their weekend conquests at Tuesday's fraternity meetings. It shocked him when one "raised the bloody flag", bragging of having had a menustrating woman leave evidence on his bedsheets, the ultimate affront for which she would pay, he said, and the crowd screeched and whistled its approval. From between his legs he lifted a section of the sheet, still red with the blood of a woman who'd given the gift of her body only to be mocked by a jeering crowd, her dried fluid held up for the contempt of the brethern. Cretins, Sharpley thought, and he knew to avoid them, cocooning himself in the warm spa of self-congratulation and thanking God that he was not like them.

After graduation he took a job as a dental hygenist several states away, in Tempe, Arizona. He soon met an alumni of the same college and they became friends, both having fond memories of alma mater if experiencing her in utterly different ways. Brett Sanford was wild but not unfeeling, immoral but kind. It was an odd experience for Alan, who'd grown up in the atmosphere of traditional morality where white hats and black hats were consistent in their coloring. For the first time he'd met someone apparently kind, considerate, even generous but who had sex with strangers and drank till he dawn. There was a cognitive dissonance.

Brett introduced Alan to buddies considerably coarser than himself and they went to bars nightly in a kind of mutually assured descent. Once, after buckets of beer and IVs of 151, they headed out to the 7/11. Alan had a bad feeling, an intuition. It was pride, he decided in retrospect, that made him ignore the feeling. To go home now, tired and drunk, would be a weakness. But the whispering... Myers, a bad seed for sure, was carrying and was saying something to Brett. Brett was shaking his head, like he was crazy but...what was it? They were going to rob the liquor store. Myers said he'd been in there, he knew the guy, he'd give them the liquor because he was just working there for the summer and wouldn't care.

For years Alan cursed that decision, wishing he'd listened to that inner voice, wishing he hadn't gone along with it and paid the consequence of a year in prison for accessory to armed robbery. It was his personal history's conventional wisdom that pride had led him to ignore his guardian angel's voice. It served him well until...until he wondered what might have been. What he would've become without getting caught, without the sentence that caused him to clean up his life, without finding God anew and losing his pride and stopping the decline of descent with his faithless but not unlovable companions. Was it not the gospel's message, that good comes of evil? Did not God continue to love him even as he punished him? Could it have been the devil who'd whispered, "go home now"? For it was Alan himself who'd busted them, Alan who'd accidentally tripped the silent alarm.

And the poets down here don't write nothin' at all
They just stand back and let it all be
And in the quick of the night they reach for their moment
And try to make an honest stand but they wind up wounded, not even dead
Tonight in Jungleland

The words come back as if in a dream or at least the shadowy staging area between chimera and reality in the time before we understood. There in early King Library the pixie’d book-dust glanced ‘gainst our halos as we busted the city in half with our Tenth Avenue freezeout for we'd no choice but to move, jazz’d by our pecuniary and love poverty. We were assured and the exams within and without the ivy halls kept us on the edge of our personal excellence: “And she’s so pretty she’s lost in the stars...”.

Everything was on the line when the Bard of Jersey sang though we heard him as outsiders: they were born to run, the other, those who lived on the margins. We were born to maintain, conserve, to get a lead and hold it. They gambled it all while we bet the favorite to show and sat out the next ten races. They had the last laugh, losers who proved we're all born to run, born to move or die cuz' "you're not a beauty but hey you're allright...Oh come take my hand, ridin' out tonight to case the Promised Land."

Christological abstraction the Body seemed until stung by her loss we sang the door's open but the ride it ain't free outside a window in northern Virginia where Bonnie'd been living a freeze-dried life and impoverishing the world. We took our stand down in Jungleland, singing so the world could hear:

The highway’s jammed with broken heroes on a last chance power drive. Tramps like us, baby we were born to run.

Fictional Friday: The Vinny Code

Frontipiece:
While this is a work of fiction, everything presented within is true and factual; there is a Greek word for scribes, and there is a Priory of Peoria.

Chapter 1

Having a case of blogger's block, a non-fatal cousin to the more famous writer's block, I recalled admonitions to "write what you know" and thought fondly back to those halcyon days when I hung with a certain writer named Dan Tan, who told me a story of perfidy going back millennia...

He told me of the scriptorium in Peoria, Illinois where a group of hairy, dark-skinned scribes known in the Greek as "monkus", or monks, perpetrated the greatest conspiracy in the history of humankind. Twenty centuries ago they'd begun the Latin order in nearby Decatur only to be squashed by Emperor Bushantine, who'd forced them to go underground until this very day. They called themselves "the work of the goddess" or "Opus Taylorus". Opus Taylorus believed in the divine feminine, to the extent it led to the divine lucre.

Clues left by surviving Tayloruses leave an exciting trail of murder and mayhem, not necessarily in that order. The eldest monk, the wizened Dan Tan, told me of Order members in the 5th century who had discovered a dusty cannister proving that the Vatican had held down the film industry for centuries. He said films we enjoy and pay money to see today had actually been around for centuries and only the Opus Taylorus monks had preserved them. The first find was a dusty cannister which contained a remarkably well-preserved 482 A.D. copy of Kevin Costner's A Field of Dreams. Dreams of great lucre appeared within reach for the Order. That is, until Emperor Bushantine's NSA spies learned of the discovery and had them all put in Guantamino [editor's note: I have no editor].

But from the film they learned: "if you build it, they will come" and it was said by the head monkus in Peoria that women buyers beget lucre since they buy books, CDs, DVDs far more than men. "Ergo," he said, "veee mussen create our own Opus Taylorus book and movie so that vimmen vill buy it and make us all filled with lucre! We'll make it more realistic by acting like it's true!". Evil laughs resounded around the Knights of the Templar table.

"Mr. Ergo!" one impertinent voice said, piercing the aromatic air of crisp Benjamins and fine cigars. All looked at the hairless, white-skinned monk. "Why not just represent it purely as fiction?"

They huddled around, calling him an idiot even though they'd done focus groups and knew the book and movie would be taken factually by a third to half of the readers.

"If a tree falls in the woods and nobody hears it, did it still fall? If a book is taken as factual by half of its readers, is it still fiction?" said the albino monkus.

"I can't be held responsible for other people's stupidity," came the reply.

CHAPTER 2

I followed the action from Peoria to a large metropolis in the northeast. Dan Tan whispered, as if what he were about to tell me could get me killed: "Cloaked under the satyr of night, the heroes of Opus Taylorus traveled to Paris, Tennessee, with the film canister in their hands. They'd heard of an artist named Leo Vinny who'd painted a velvet Elvis that held many clues."

"What sort of clues?" I interrupted.

"I'm getting there. Vinny was commissioned to do a painting of Elvis eating a peanut-butter and banana sandwich with Priscilla at Graceland, only it wasn't Priscilla but bodyguard Sonny West who - as was the custom of the '60s - was wearing his hair long, almost waist-length. Now I'm not implying that the King was gay. In fact to my knowledge he was not. But a lot of folks in the film industry are gay and there were people who saw Sonny at the breakfast table in that painting and made false assumptions. Think about it: everyone is told that Sonny is Priscilla in that velvet masterpiece and you have to ask yourself why? Why lie?"

"But that doesn't prove a conspiracy. And besides, what do Presley or West have to do with the Vatican keeping down the film industry?"

"Elvis wasn't just a great singer but a great movie star, a very credible actor. His Hawaiian pictures make Citizen Kane look like the B-movie of a film academy dropout. And he was the most connected dude of that generation. Elvis knew everybody in the music and film industries. Elvis found out the secret! Found out that Kevin Costner is of divine lineage and that A Field of Dreams had been suppressed for centuries. So the Vatican had Elvis killed in order to cover up Emperor Bushantine's crime. In 1978 Leo Vinny painted that kitchen scene on the very day the King learned the secret and if that is Sonny in the painting then Sonny's a dead man because there was no doubt in anyone's mind that the King would've told Sonny. He told Sonny everything. So after they got Elvis, Sonny talked up Priscilla as the one in the painting and Pricilla went along with it because she wanted to squash any Elvis-is-gay rumors, fearing that it would lessen the value of residuals and syndication monies."

"Why didn't they kill Priscilla?"

"The Vatican figured that Priscilla wasn't credible. No one would believe her. Pure prejudice."

"To be honest, it sounds a little farfetched."

"Look, I said this was a work of fiction didn't I? It's a catch-22. If you take it as fact and research it I'll emphasize it's fiction. If you dismiss it as fiction I'll call you close-minded and emphasize the facts, like the existence of the Priory of Peoria and the Sonny/Priscilla controversy in Vinny's The Last Supper of Elvis Presley. To tell you the truth I'm beginning to believe it myself. And besides, you got ten thousand conspiracy theories and one of them bound to be true. Sort of like a million monkies typing one of 'em's gonna produce Shakespeare. It could be true couldn't it?"