In the Virtual Bank Line

I have no idea where this came from, but it's a little scary.

So, I'm at work, working hard on this manual that I've got to get done. At the same time, there are two bumbling idiots running around in a place that looks like Golden Gate park, trying to avoid a large gang of terrorists that are trying to kill them.

I can see these two idiots because I'm sort of flying above them, every once in a while stopping and clinging to a tree and checking out the amazing colonies of insects that live high up in trees.

And then I'm back at work, and while I was gone, they have removed all the cubicles and re-arranged the space. Everyone now has small desks arranged in a U shape around the room. The rest of the company is at a meeting, but there are about five people sitting at desks talking together. The nameplates that used to adorn the outside of our cubes are now on the top of the desks so that we can find our place, and I'm looking around for my desk because I had been in the middle of an important project. I ask the few people in the room if they know which one is my desk, and they ignore me. I walk around the U, looking for my nameplate. I finally come upon it attached to a desk with a person sitting at it. I am deeply annoyed.

In another room, there is a guy who looks like the guy from Office Space (who in turn closely resembles my best friend). He has a scam in mind wherein he's going to tell the women in accounts payable that he needs these checks made out to a bunch of vendors. He's got the pile of blank checks in his hand. He walks into accounts payable, which consists of three desks at weird angles to each other, so that the women behind them are no more than 4 feet from one another.

He addresses the middle one, asking if she can do a rush job making out these checks to the vendors. She looks at him, picks up her phone and dials. The phone of the woman to her right rings, and that woman picks it up. Neither of the women look at each other or at the guy, and the women are talking in stage whispers as though he can't hear them perfectly well.

"I think we should get this guy to come and work for us," the first woman says.

"That's fine. He can have Marcy's old desk," the other woman says.

"Okay. I'll get him started right away," the first woman says, and hangs up the phone. Then she looks at the other woman and mouths the words "Thank you."

She directs the guy to another desk directly behind the group, and tells him that there is an account ledger and to just get started. He sits down, baffled about what just happened.

I go back to my desk, and I'm fishing through the very large bottom drawer, which is full of junk. Saddam Hussein is sitting to my left wearing a maroon beret. We are arguing about who currently has control of Libya. He maintains that the beret he's wearing proves that he controls Libya, but I insist that there is a set of filing cabinet keys in my drawer that proves that I have control of Libya. I'm annoyed because he won't stop taunting me as I'm fishing through this large drawer for these very small keys.

I look up and he's grinning like an idiot at me from behind his desk. "You can't find them, can you?" he says in an irritating, cheerful tone. "That's because I control Libya and Ghaddafi." I give him a nasty look and keep searching for those keys.

And in the dream, for some reason, none of this was even remotely funny.

Desperation Food Critic

I would like to take a few minutes to provide a public service to those of you who, like me, find yourselves waking up at bitch o'clock, going in to work, working until fuckthirty, going home, falling into bed and then repeating the process over and over until you forget what day it is.

The first cherished habit to fall victim to this schedule is that of sitting down to an actual meal. Let's face it, a handful of Skittles and three diet Cherry Cokes may get you through, but you will pay in the long run. My personal coping mechanism is this: eating cold soup directly from the tin with a plastic spoon. The beauty of this particular fare is that it leaves no dirty dishes covered with the tiny crumbs of congealed grease that say "This soup was never heated" (as opposed to the long smears of grease on a bowl that say "This soup was heated, eaten and the dishes thrown into the sink a week ago Thursday").

My personal favorite is Progresso's Southwestern-Style chicken. The roasted chicken has that Liquid Smoke flavor that, if you close the one eye that you're not keeping on your work, you can almost believe was hot not very long ago. The rice acts as a homogenizing agent, keeping the grease well mixed in the soup so that it doesn't end up coating your spoon after the second bite making you lose your appetite after the third bite.
The the best part? The slightly spicy flavor is a fabulous complement to the bitter taste of the self-recrimination that comes of neglecting your personal life.

Bon apetit!

Hairy Stress Hateku

What's my damn problem?
Why can't I just be happy?
Or stop my whining?

Child Support Hateku

You're such a cheapskate
This is your kid you're shorting
She'll hate you later

22:25

Renata put her hands against the steering wheel and flexed them hard, trying to work out the soreness. Then she turned her left foot in circles and, after gunning the engine hard for a second, quickly did the same with her right. She arched her back as far as her seatbelt would allow, then scootched around in her seat, trying to find a spot that didn't feel like she was stuck to it.

She squinted at the road ahead, but it was no use. There was nothing but the illuminated gray of the mist coming up from the road, caught in her headlights and the black of the night beyond it. No lights on this stretch of the 10, no cars, no stars. Nothing. And there would be nothing until Desert Center, if you could call Desert Center "something."

She punched the buttons of the radio, cursing under her breath at the frazzled bit of cord that used to be the cd adapter until she'd shut it in the car door at Indio where she'd stopped to get gas. Of course there was nothing on FM. She pressed Search, and the LEDs whizzed crazily around, stopping occasionally at a bit of static that was on the border of making sense, but not crossing it.

She turned over to AM, and hit search again. Search. The numbers marched purposefully forward, stopping at 70s elevator music, the cigarette voice of some right-wing talk-show host, the always-unexpected volume of a station playing Mexican country music. Her finger hovered over the button, ready to jab it if anything sounded promising. Search.

"...waiting for you to come home."

There was a brief pause after that bit of a sentence, long enough for Renata to want to know who was waiting, and who was coming home.

"Jesus knows you're coming," the voice went on.

"Aw, shit," Renata said, her finger jabbing for Search again and missing, breaking a nail against the faceplate of the radio. But she didn't hit the button again. The voice wasn't strident. Not berating or unkind. The voice wasn't admonishing her to admit that she was a bad person.
"Jesus is waiting for you, and weeping. Weeping for you like the mother who weeps for her lost child, because you are the lost children of Jesus, who loves you as no mother has ever loved her children with a love that is perfect and pure and blessed and will wash the stain of your sins away from your face and you will shine as the sun and sit at the table with Jesus who will feed you with his very hand."

She began to feel light-headed. She turned off the radio and thought about pulling over. She didn't remember what the last milepost had said, but she couldn't have been more than a few miles outside Banning, which meant that (excepting the bustling metropolis of Desert Center) there really wouldn't be much until Blythe.

Goddamn it. Why did I go to that party? They knew I was leaving tonight. I told them a million times. The truck was packed, everything was ready.

She peered through the rain, then down at the dashboard clock. She had left at eleven, fully four hours after she'd meant to. If she had just left right from home at seven, she'd be past Quartzite right now, and almost there. If it hadn't started raining, she'd be going more than sixty, cutting her travel time with every mile.

When she was a kid, driving this stretch with her father, she would look at every milepost and figure up how long it would take to get home. At sixty miles an hour, it would take one minute per mile, and with 285 miles left, it would take...If her father went a little faster, she was always delighted to see that they were ahead of her imagined schedule, and she was deeply put out by having to make gas stops. Stopping just to use the bathroom or, heaven forbid, sightsee was just out of the question. There was nothing to see here anyway. Nothing.

Watched a Movie

The Pirate and I finally got around to seeing the movie "Before Night Falls," the story of Cuban novelist and poet Reinaldo Arenas.
The movie was very rich and colorful and interesting to look at, but I was disappointed.

Arenas was born in Cuba in 1949, and before his death from AIDS in 1990 wrote 9 novels and won many literary awards. Unfortunately, rather than focus on Arenas the writer, "Before Night Falls" focused on Arenas the persecuted homosexual. At the time of the revolution, homosexuals were sent to concentration camps in Cuba to be "rehabilitated," and it didn't take much to be arrested as a homosexual.
The movie showed more scenes of Arenas at the beach than of him writing. We see two scenes of him giving people manuscripts to others who will have them published, but we don't see any of him working at his art.

It reminded me of a couple I know - one was an artist, the other a dancer. They were watching a movie that had dancing in it, and the dancer complained that they never show the people's feet. The artist pointed out that 99% of the movie watching public isn't interested in the technicalities of dance, and therefore the feet aren't the important part. The dancer pouted anyway.

The Pirate thought that the movie was great, and it was only after I expressed my discontent that he realized that it was true - there was not really much "writerliness" in the movie.

Oh well.

Traffic Hateku

I didn't see you
I'm sorry I cut you off
Stop honking, asshole

Everyone makes mistakes. But it takes someone really special to stick with you for ten or fifteen miles reminding you and everyone in the lanes adjacent to you of them.

Hateku

You really suck
Nobody really likes you
At least I sure don't

No, it's not a comment on anybody or anything. I'm just buried under a mountain of work, my entire body is sore, my weekend plans have been massively re-routed, and I'm feeling as bitter as 7-11 coffee.

In the Virtual Bank Line

It's my wedding day. I'm marrying The Wannabe - a guy who, in real life, I dated for four years at the end of high school and the beginning of college. For some reason the plan was that The Wannabe and I would have a civil ceremony, and then an hour later have a big ceremony at my brother's house.

For the civil ceremony I wore an elaborate dress made entirely of pearls. It was heavy and uncomfortable, but looked spectacular. Right after the ceremony we went outside and while The Wannabe went and got the car, I stood on a lawn. A friend had his son's school band drive by on a big truck, playing for us. I was really happy and thought it was really sweet and thoughtful of my friend.

Then we're at my brother's house. My understanding was that we'd get there, have the ceremony, and then have dinner and the reception. But somebody else had decided differently and everyone was already sitting down to dinner when we got there. The house seemed really tiny and cramped and the people were loud. I sat down, feeling panicky because things weren't going according to plan and I wasn't sure what to do. The Wannabe had disappeared, so I couldn't ask him what was going on.

It was getting later and later, and I had a headache I couldn't shake, so I told whoever was sitting next to me that I was going into another room to lie down. I went into a room that looked like an office with a couch in it. I lay down on the couch and picked up a magazine. I paged through it and then fell asleep. The next thing I knew, my mother was kissing me good-bye. I asked her why she was leaving and she said that it was getting late and she had to be at work the next day. I was really disappointed that she wouldn't be at the wedding, but lay back down on the couch.

I woke up again and I was in bed with The Wannabe. We were both asleep, and I shook his shoulder and asked him what had happened. He said that everyone had decided just to call off the wedding.

Then I was walking down the street from an apartment building. I had moved into his apartment with him, and he was supposed to come and pick me up. His car came down the street and passed me, turning the corner in front of me. I thought that he was going to go around the corner and wait, so I ran to the corner and got there in time to see his car turning the next corner. I thought that perhaps he had just accidentally passed me and was going to go around the block and catch up with me to pick me up, so I ran all the way around the block back to the front of my apartment building. I waited and he didn't show up.

I went inside and up to the apartment which was so full of furniture that it was a wreck. I picked up my cell phone and put it into my pocket so that it would be near me in case he called. The phone rang and it was an old boyfriend. I snapped that I didn't want to talk to him but then allowed myself to be drawn into a conversation. There was a knock at the door. It was my children who had come to live with me, as my honeymoon had been cancelled. I brought them inside while still talking on the phone, following them around the apartment and trying to steer them clear of things they weren't supposed to touch. The second line on my phone rang, and I clicked over. A voice said hello, and when I said hello the voice said that I sounded stressed. I didn't recognize the voice, so I stayed noncommittal. The voice then said, "Yeah, I know how you feel. I was feeling really stressed too, until I bought this amazing new product..." I shouted into the phone that I didn't have time for this crap and clicked the phone off.

It immediately rang again and it was The Wannabe. He said that he had gone to a club where his friend's band was playing, and then he was going to a party at someone's house, and then he'd call me afterward and see if I wanted to get together. I didn't say anything, but I was just really disappointed.

And then the alarm went off, leaving me feeling very disquieted and with a pounding headache.