Cube Jazz

When last we left, Cube Warrior had been led from the free range of a spacious office to a cubical reservation. There he was to grow corn, perfect his whine-making ability, and pacifically chew cud while saying deep things, occasionally getting a star turn on television - like producing a tear at the sight of litter thrown next to his cube wall.

Cube Warrior and his band all went willingly, walking the trail of tears down to the burren lands no one wanted. Huge trash bins and old equipment lined the hallway leading to the cubicals and lent a feeling of unease, like that of an overfull closet that won't quite shut right.

Once ensconced in the new cubes and in their old chairs they felt as if underwater, limbs heavy, the simplest tasks requiring a great overturning of inertia. Odd that in so small a space it would feel a great distance to retrieve a farming tool from a desk drawer! But then they were feeling self-conscious, every movement seemed unnaturally loud and having the dynamic of a bathroom stall.

_ _ _

When last we left Cube Hero, he was attempting to find a way to cover the epidermis that was cruelly ripped when the PTB (Powers That Be) "transitioned information workers from office to cubical spaces" in order to "potentiate greater facility at facultative consult".

Cube, or Hero as he didn't mind being called, used to enjoy serial cereal breakfasts in sublime privacy while sipping cheap coffee poured into a Starbucks cup. ("They do cups right," he explained.)

Evolutionary theory, according to Cube, made man the protector of family and explained why men like to take seats in restaurants facing out, with their backs to a wall. Natural selection gave an advantage to those who could see their enemy before their enemy saw them and so the holdover continues "with all the importance of the appendage or male nipples," Cube liked to assert.

Since he didn't like having his back gapingly exposed to the elements, he fashioned with the help of duct tape a patchwork of bulletin boards that ostensibly held vital clippings and reminders - all the viral deterius of office life - even though the true function was such that he could enjoy Coca Puffs while performing "numerical alchemy", the spinning of chaotic numbers into balance sheet gold.

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?"

There was a hint of rain that late March day in nineteen hundred and seventy-three. I was fishing with my grandfather, who had the patience of Job, and the orange bobber which hung over glass waters hardly moved. If this was a game they’d have called it on account of nothing happening. I was hoping for rain so we’d call it a day.

But Grandma was waiting at home to skin a few bluegills for dinner and we had corn on the cob too waiting too, fresh from Kolstead’s market. We had to hold up our end of the bargain even though I told Papa that all she had to do was buy it from the market but we had to have the skill or luck to catch something. But he warn’t worried.

I stared at the orange blob and my mind would play tricks. I’d thought it moved when it hadn’t. I was trigger-happy, ready to reel something in, not patient at all and wanting to error on the side of being too early rather than too late. Fishing was tense because you had to be alert every second.

Papa, who was drinking Budweiser beers, didn’t seem tense at all though.

“They ain’t bitin’” he said and I told him they sure warn’t. I didn’t know what made them bite one day and not the next. I told him that it maybe we wasn’t in the right spot but he said maybe we weren’t out early enough. I didn’t know what to make of that because it seemed like we got up at the crack of dawn.

“Maybe if we had those boots like real fishermen we’d catch something,” I said, referring to the men who wore hip waders and weren’t limited to the bank like landlubbers.

“Don’t yell, you’ll scare the fish,” he said, although I didn't think I'd yelled and thought maybe he just said that to shut me up. I was always “scaring the fish”, it seemed the thing I was best at. Anything you’d do would scare the fish. Splash the water or spit in it or yell or run up and down the bank, everything scared the fish. I thought the fish were scaredy-cats.

Discombobulated. That’s how I felt, a word whose physicality mirrors its meaning. She wrote to say that she can’t write anymore, that the Soviets had gotten around to banning electronic epistles to any but party members and my official status was dissident. That the news should come as a dull surprise was itself a surprise since the banning of personal correspondence seemed, in retrospect, more appropriate than the banning of public correspondence.

Not that I blame the Politburo. Risks are risks, and there is something unseemly about displays of affection between dissidents and party members. Was I not mostly a distraction? Was I not a fool’s gold to her family’s precious loom? Over time I must’ve fallen in her eyes. Did I not now make the Politburo more palatable by my being seen as less?

When the Prussians moved on Bavaria I was just about to go on a hike. It was a sparkling wine sort of day, the sun ebullient and redolent of spring. I wanted to walk in the “good part of the day”, in the broad One Pm that cast no shadows. But I was taken unduly by the news; I composed a reply and felt the discombobulations that change inflicts...

The corporation had the soul of a Russian novelist: there was always the trust that if they just got the name right everything else would follow. The long grey line of CEOs must've longed for something meaty like "Alexandrovna Yegorushka", something around which you could write a narrative.

Because narrative was really the unstated corporate mission. Everybody needed a "story". CEOs needed something to tell the Board, the President needed something to tell the CEO, VPs needed something to tell the President, directors needed something to tell the VPs, managers needed something to tell directors and I needed something to tell my manager. I needed to tell of all the wonderful things I'd done, which was mostly to try
to keep my Alexandrovna from hurting herself since over the past twelve years she'd experienced five name changes, seven reorganizations, one teenaged rebellion, two mid-life crisises, and four mission statements. One memorable drunken outing in lower Manhattan resulted in her buying another company just before the stock market crashed. The company symbol, a bear, was proudly resurrected twice before being rejected, at least for now, as being "too aggressive".

This had caused me considerable effort since I was in charge of the removal and reinsertion of the bear from all computer-generated letters. I had a story to tell here, since I'd caught on to my mistress's capricousness and automated the removal and reinstallment of the bear saving thousands of dollars but also triggering a lengthy and expensive examination into what other processes that were subject to change could be automated. This resulted in my introduction to something called the Business Meeting (hereafter referred to as the BM, not necessarily to be confused with 'bowel movement').

Fictional Friday

It was the summer of ’82 and Jim Malone was protecting an innocence growing increasingly theoretical. He was dating Agape when Eros walked by and afterwards none were ever the same.

Eros had agate blue eyes and Times New Roman hair which lay against the back of a tight red t-shirt. She pile-drived body and brain.

Jim never cared for Eros because she’d never cared for him. He knew his place and he’d seen the likes of her before, thinking her stagecraft, witchcraft, no more real than the gossamer of a salamander’s wig. That spring he pledged his troth to Agape out of abstract loyalty rather than concrete lust.

Most nights he hung out at Eros & Agape’s apartment. Eros hinted of rogue, a scent that increased as Jim failed to pay homage. Rebuff wasn't in her lectionary but he was unaware of her scent and unprepared when she left her underwear with a note outside his door, signed as secret admirer. Addressed to “Jim”, it caused great intrigue and discussion since there were two Jims who lived there.

Eros knew her prey well. The panties, more juvenile than lascivious, were dotted with cartoon hearts. The note struck a tone both sweet and mournful, asking why Jim did not love her. It dotted the i’s between lust and commitment, lighting in Jim a powderkeg of longing no human could supply.

He played it straight, telling Agape & Eros about the odd note & gift to Eros' feigned surprise. He said it must’ve been for the other Jim though neither he nor Agape believed it. Jim began offering smiles to the goddess Eros, growing weak-knee’d in her possibility. Yet even as he grasped she danced.

Eros left a second package pregnant with newfound swagger. To “Jim T.”, it said, adorned with a Mae West-ian summons: “Hey Big Boy why don’t you come up and see me sometime?”

Caught between worlds, Jim succumbed as though he had no choice. He offered Eros commitment and Agape lust, causing Agape to cry and Eros to die. Eros married a bricklayer in New Jersey soon after graduation. He never learned what happened to Agape, even after twenty-three years, even after the ache of lust was replaced by the ache of regret.

Good Type

John Spoerl's favorite part of books – the part he went to like gamblers go for the sports pages – was “About the Type”. He read the reviews rapturously, marveling at the ubiquitous excellence. There was apparently never a bad type, never a font that wasn’t readable or agreeably aged or without a euphonious name. Just once he longed to read: “The type is 'Sandusky', developed in 1953 in Lansing, Michigan. While plain and not pleasant to read, it tries harder due to its mediocrity.”

It was the early 80s, before the Internet made clipping newspaper articles superfluous and replaceable by Google. He clipped articles from the dozens of papers he subscribed to, collecting them like S&H Green Stamps. There was a comfort knowing they were there, even as they yellowed worrisomely. On sick or rainy days he’d haul them from the closet and spread them out before him, catching up on a prior self who’d found such things interesting.

He liked the sophisticated even when he didn’t understand what they were saying, like a child trying on his father’s woolens. Coleridge was a poet whose very name was poetic by virtue of being referred to by writers who talked of summers immersed in books at Cambridge or Oxford, where the ancient buildings and expansive lawns caused deep thoughts to spontaneously combust. There was glamour, there in olde England, there in the summer lit programs. The most memorable of the clippings described a young lady’s account of meeting a young man at an Oxford series covering English literature. She was deep into George Eliot’s Middlemarch while he was a Bardophile. It was a Reese Cups tryst: he got chocolate (Shakespeare) in her peanut butter (Eliot). [insert groan here]

Renewed a correspondence today with an old friend by the name of "Dute". He founded our company's unofficial "Disturbed Loner's Chat Room", which consisted of a Lotus Notes address group of ten of us serving as an outlet, a forum for injecting creativity and color into all things corporate. The emails were as jejune as they were politically incorrect. Dute, though, is one heckuva writer, as you'll shortly see:
_____

An intranet site had a "Question of the Day" about China: "Which direction has China moved since Tiananmen Square 10 years ago (i.e. toward democracy or away)?"

Dute emailed the group: "I think China has been moving northeast since Tiananmen Square in the last 10 years. During the late Cretaceous period (80 - 65 million years ago), the Indian subcontinent drifted away from Madagascar and at a speed of 15 cm/year, its tectonic plate subducted beneath the southern margin of Asia. Around the same time, Australia separated from Antarctica, missed Borneo, and is currently in collision with China. This carom will send China east, toward North America, closer to the heart of democracy as we know it. However, if the continental subduction of the Puerto Rican trench and the Scotia arc become more volatile, North America will also drift east to collide with Western Europe in some 250 million years, leaving China farther away from democracy than ever. That weasel Clinton and our incompetent Congress will no doubt sit idly by doing nothing about this but the usual partisan bickering."
___

Refuting an email that went around titled "Why Beer is Better than Jesus":

Why Jesus is better than a beer:

10. Time isn't marked 'before beer' and 'after beer'

9. Beer never predicted its appearance centuries before.

8. A beer doesn't give a rat's -ss about you.

7. That the perfectly balanced universe is like a sharpened pencil standing on a table is not because of beer.

6. Beer makes you feel good, Jesus makes you good.

5. Beer tells you the world is okay even though everything's f--ked up.
Jesus tells you the world is f-ked up but that everything will be okay.

4. Beer today, gone tomorrow. Jesus today, Jesus tomorrow.

3. Praying and driving isn't against the law.

2. No one ever died for a beer.

1. No one ever gets a "Jesus belly".
____

Dute was assigned to work New Year's Eve from 6pm to 6am to make sure our Y2K implementation was successful...Here is his reaction to learning he would be working that evening:

"I'm inviting everyone to a fin-de-siecle siege party in my cube from 6 pm 12/31/99 to 6 am 01/01/2000. I am going to provide the sandbags, bottled water, weapons, canned goods, paranoia, cheese fondue, ammunition, "cube rage", ham radio crystal set, surly disposition, an itchy as hell trigger finger, sunglasses, and coffee. I am asking for volunteers to bring nachos, paper cups and napkins. We will usher in the new year in true style as entropy kicks in, hotwires the gregorian calendar, and drives the new millenium, full throttle and top down... Watch milk curdle in the dairy case and cereal go all soggy right in the box! Watch airplanes fall out of the sky like a rock! Watch the electric grid fail and plunge the world, one hemisphere at a time, into total darkness! Watch anyone who was a Cobol programmer in the '60s and '70s look at others with shifty sidelong glances! Watch all commerce grind to a standstill as--oh, wait, what am I thinking? Commerce will be on vacation, like everyone else and his sister that f-ing day. Damn."
_____

In December of '99, the corporation offered a forum for Y2K questions. Here was my query:

"I heard a rumor the real scare of Y2k isn't bank failures or electricity outages, it is a takeover of the ENTIRE WORLD by a clandestine operation out of Brussels that has successfully hooked up all computers over the entire world by their entrails and will engineer massive fraud (i.e. quiet government coups will ensue by replacing world leaders with 'twins' who were genetically manufactured, i.e. cloned, off stray DNA that the Brussels group obtained). Most of the massive Y2k expenditures that companies have been spending are not to accomplish Y2k compliance, but to effect the coordination of the Fortune 500's computers into the Brussel's main hub. Use your commonsense - it can't cost a company $100 million to expand to a 4-digit year!! Helll-o! Me and a buddy could've done it for 1 mill and a Guinness to be named later. The world cartel has been salivating for this moment. What can we do to prevent it?"

To which Dute answered at great length, excerpted here:

"I've stockpiled a load of tepee poles and animal hides, because who knows whether our houses, all constructed in a year beginning with 19, will even be standing come 1/1/00. It's worse than you think, Paranoid-Man. No one knows the full story. No one. The Brussels cabal is just a smokescreen, nothing more, nothing less. Brussels won't even take a shit without the say-so of their order givers...."

____

We received this in a corporate email:

"The [Corporation Name] Pride Club is hosting a holiday party on Sunday, Dec. 5 from 3 p.m. - 7 p.m. For further details contact..."

My response:
"Uh, didja notice that the "Gay" is mysteriously missing? When I first saw this entry, I thought "hmmm....a pride club. Pride in what? Pride in our country? A veterans group perhaps? Or just people who were proud of themselves? It slowly dawned on me that this was the gay club. Isn't it kind of oxymoronic to say you belong to a 'gay pride club' but then to leave off the gay? I mean, are you really proud of being gay if you name your club "Pride"?"
____

Our corporation sponsors an annual picnic lunch for the homeless. The email promoting it urged contributions, saying "give the homeless of Columbus a day off!".

Ham of Bone, that wag, said "Ye wizened round-tablers, please explain to me the meaning of the phrase 'to give the homeless of Columbus a day off' found in the note below. I was of the opinion that the homeless have EVERY day off."

To which Dute responded, "To me, a day off means an opportunity to get away from the mundane routines that define and structure my life. So maybe you should take a day off that day, and sit on the curb at Pearl Alley wearing an 8-ball jacket and a 3-day-o'clock shadow while you jangle change in a tin cup. Let one a them scruffy [dudes] sit at your desk for a day, but make sure you write down all your passwords on a post-it note though, so as not to create any confusion."
____

My email:

The big news in nytimes today is that women can cut their cancer risk by cutting off their breasts - no kidding - masectomies are recommended to avoid breast cancer. Have we come to an age when self-mutulation is the way to avoid risk? Will it come to killing ourselves so that some disease won't first? Call me old-fashioned, but I miss the days when no one worried about health risks so much.

Hambone answered:

I believe that increasing the regularity of breast exams would decrease the risk just as well, and I know that there would be alot of volunteers for that important task...
___

From Neil:

From: [Name Withheld], Data Center

Many employees have notified me they have received chain letters and other inappropriate e-mails over the last month. As you may know, our company discourages these sorts of e-mails, as they are hard on the mail system and can bring down our servers. If you would like more information on this, please see the note sent this past fall by John Doe, senior vice president and chief information officer. Please forward this message to 5 of your friends. This message has circled the world five times and if you break the chain you will be cast into the endless void and your hair will fall out.
____

John was born a coalminer's son in godforsaken Pike county in southeast Ohio. His vision was tunnel, his daily food coal dust, his drinking water laced with uranium that leaked like a sieve from the nearby nuclear power plant. He grew a third eye as a result, and was resigned to a life of the circus as a side-show act until he challenged the big employer to the north on the grounds of diversity (i.e. three eyes are better than two). XYZ Corp hates the smell of lawsuit in the morning, so they hired him as a 'vision consultant' but in practice he just sends out mind-numbing communications.
___

On finding out the very liberal "Community Fest" aka CommunistFest, would not be allowing alcohol or pets for the first time in twenty years:

To the CommunistFest Kommittee Members:

I'm outraged that your webcite sez the following:
NO ALCOHOL NOT BOUGHT FROM THE FEST!!!
NO PETS AT THE FEST!!!

As a member of the human potential movement, E.S.T, and Rastfarians for Bush, I do not feel it is in keeping with the spirit of these organizations, or in the best interests of the karma of the organizers to make dogmatic, militaristic, and plain ol' mean statements like that. But if you must, then I like imported beers, preferably specialty ales. I don't like lines, they're bourgeois. Ann Archy Rulz!

Pravda baby,
-T
___

From Bone:

At the company meeting last week we received saltine goldfish crackers and a plastique bucket & shovel. Why not empower ourselves, take it a step further and bring the sea theme into the everyday workplace? I'll get a couple, five, bags of sand to provide a nice sandy beach in the cubical. A few heat lamps, pair of shades, a couple margarita's and we'll be set.....we'll be called the sea men, or semen for short...but wait! hey that's not a Cap'n Dick Seaworthy Combination Telescope and Periscope Kit! That's a hidden microphon-- (And that's when we lost transmission)
____

Dr. Joe was allergic to clichés. He was a Midwestern chap, middle-aged, of average looks, of average talent and lived in an average town. The one thing he had was an above average vocabulary. Yet, as a General Practitioner he was forced by circumstances to have to say the same thing many times --- the dreaded "open up and say 'ahhhh'".

He said it without a problem the first couple times. After all, he was young and needed the money. The first time was to a West Jefferson resident who'd complained of a sore throat. The second time to someone from Poughkeepsie. He began getting self-conscious about it. By the tenth time it was getting stuck in his throat.

He began variations. "Open your mouth and say 'Laaaaa!'". "Gape your mouth and say 'Baaaa!'". Inevitably, things went downhill as things often do. After saying "please widen your aperture" to a young woman, he was slapped with a sexual harrassment lawsuit. Alas, creativity has its price.

Irish Fathers

Another morning made stale by
work’s dissipation;
he made sluggish use
of a dull razor
and from his face
did Guinness bleed.
He dabbed at it
tasted his ancestor’s elixir
and laughed at the mad poets
and the drunk Foggy Dews
and drove to work
to bask in the flourescence.

Returning home his children cried,
“Tell us again, Daddy,
about the Children of Lir!”
And he said:
“You are children of the Irish Sea
shape-shifters one and all
wearing your skin fitfully.
A tight fit you find it?
It’s because you are of the sea
restless as the waves,
having your father’s father’s
father's brine in you!”

The next morning, tired-eyed,
he returned to his shaving mirror
but missed the reflections
of the Kings of Meath,
Armagh and Tara.
Hungry for want of fathers,
he missed a sea of them.

_______________________

References:
Children of Lir
Foggy Dew

I’d always been attracted to the notion of profligate waste, the more profligate the better. Waste appealed not only because of my naturally parsimonious ways but because it mirrored the profligacy of the natural world. A million fireflys and butterflys die on arrival, long-lasting as fireworks.

Eccentric characters and underachievers held my affection. I saved newspaper and magazine clippings of plumbers or mailmen who could quote long sections of Moby Dick or who’d read 10,000 books. “Dropping out” was attractive in all its delicious permutations. A pretty nun was a figure of wonderment; here was untapped potential in all its inconceivableness. The sum total of happiness she could give a man over a lifetime could not be calculated by the adolescent mind.

Keeping a low profile as a child was a survival tactic but redeeming in its own way. I read May Sarton devotionally, growing terrariums and tending aquariums and missing the clues of her sexual orientation. I looked covetously upon the shores of Walden Pond as depicted on my copy of Thoreau’s work. He was Robinson Crusoe come to life, acting like it were actually possible, laying out the cost for seeds and wood but then he quit and went back to Boston and it felt hollow. A year and a half out of fifty? He called it an experiment but it seemed a failed experiment, else he wouldn’t have high-tailed it back to civilization. Only the permanent is romantic.

Uncle Bud used to take me fishing. He had the leather, reptilian skin of someone who’d been out in the sun every day of his life and didn’t know SPF from the ATF. A born fisherman, he’d look out over the water and after ten or twenty minutes I’d be getting ants in my pants but he’d sit there like Mount Rushmore. I’d walk around the lake and grab at the cattails and look for dead fish near the bank and inhale the intoxicating dank smell, and then come back around and see if Uncle Bud caught anything. There weren’t near enough action I thought. I’d bait my bamboo pole and put it in the water and pull out a wormless hook.

I'd sit and stare at the water and wonder if there really were any fish under all that water. They said it was stocked but maybe the other fisherman already caught all the fish. The water looked the same as soil, only with the relentless ripples.

Uncle Bud was actually my uncle's father, so he was getting on in years. Ever-bachelor, he lived by his own rules and died by his own rules. Got cancer but wouldn't have anything to do with doctors. Holed himself up in his house like an outlaw with the law outside yellin’ for him to come out, so the hunter shot himself. There was shock in the horrible coupling, good uncle Bud and Judas’s final sin.

I ache for him to be in heaven because the thrill of waste ends at Hell’s gate.

Belloc’s sweet prose stiches somulence over me. I can't read him without falling asleep because he has charms to soothe the savage breast. I fall into the rhthym of the sentences and it satisfies what I didn’t know needed satisfying. He inspires me to try.

I am a mad scientist longing to string words together in new and strange and potentially explosive situations. I want to know where the powder lies and where the fuse is and I want to light it. Roth’s prose is too painfully current, he brings all our sores to the fore and would heal wounds by probing them. Belloc and Bellow and Dineson heal by pointing elsewhere. The gashes are healed by cunning indirection.

Mary Slaney blamed it all on “Torn Between Two Lovers”. Her dissipation that is. MacGregor’s hit song came at a time when Mary was distrusting the old verities and here was another sweet-warbling Mary with a voice so pure that she sympathetically thought, “torn between two lovers…that can happen.”

Pop songs made love beyond the borders of marriage okay. There were no shortage of angelic-voiced innocents singing of shedded inhibitions. It was as if the radio were filling a need for Mary and Juice Newton was singing her song:

“I see no need to take me home,
I'm old enough to face the dawn.
Just call me angel of the morning, angel”

This was what she needed, reassurance that what she wasn’t doing anything wrong. And not from a guy, not some cad who’d say anything to get into her jeans. No, she wanted to hear it from a girlfriend, a girlfriend experienced but innocent.

College was easy, her sorority sisters comfortable in their skin and sin. “There’s nothing wrong with it Mary!” they said. Cross-wearing fornicators, they’d ask her to find another place to stay so they could entertain their men, even as the silver jewelry made fashionable by Madonna dangled from their necks. They said they loved Jesus and their life. They seemed to have married justice and mercy, their will and God’s.

And so began the long struggle for Mary, who took the long road to and from the wilderness, arriving at last back to her true home only to find a surprise waiting.

The surprise was to find that Christians are all cross-wearing fornicators in one way or another, and that all, in big ways or small, try to marry their will and God’s. And it struck her as she donned a cross necklace: "Can I wear this silver jewelry?"

Gunner Kearney walked each morning to Kate Kearney’s Cottage and drank a single shot of Paddy’s Old Irish Whiskey before computer programming under the fluorescent lights of a large multi-national. The walk to Kate’s was metaphorical, only in his mind, a pre-work ritual to briefly color his world ethnic. The morning coffee would suffice for entertainment, the liquid of the damned. Caffeine was invented was to make dull jobs tolerable.

He walked in a world filled with vague resentments and veiled anxieties. His friend Arness dreamed dreams of lofty vision. He had elaborate plans of marketing “essence of scorpion”, a distillation of dried scorpion cartilage that could be applied as a powder or spray. The scent would be ‘musky yet smooth, with a pinch’.

One Tuesday for lunch, Arness and Gunner left the large multi-national and got in Gunner’s Taurus and traveled wordlessly for miles, reaching Kentucky by two and Georgia by five. They drove till the soil bled clay-red, replacing the exhaust-riddled February snow. They entered a two-bit bar on a one-lane road, a saloon picked at random, and stayed when they learned the barkeep had Paddy’s Old Irish Whiskey.

After the third shot of Paddy the joint began to look like Heemskerck painting. The bottles lined up behind the bar like a collection of future promises.

“How can a fella get in trouble around here?” Arness asked.

“Now why would you want to get in trouble? You look like Yankee accountants to me.” said the owner, a puffy-faced man with craggy hands.

“Not accountants but close. We were at work this morning in Michigan and now we’re here. We’ve discovered the elbow of the desperation curve. Arness, you 'splain.”

“Yeah, we used to talk about the elbow of the curve financially, that point at which we had amassed a nest egg that would basically double on its own in a few years and make our retirement a fait accompli. Instead we discovered that there is a point on the graph where desperation tends to scale off the charts, basically at that point where youthful enthusiasm ends and only ten thousand, three-hundred twenty-six working days stand between you and retirement.”