It seemed so promising at the time. That’s the problem with writerly inspiration: you never know whether it’s legitimate or not until later. Will it stand the test of a couple days? Unfortunately it turned out to be overlong, over edited, with too many I-can-force-this-in's. But the jump-the-shark moment, in hindsight, was the mention of Cotton Mather. It’s just not gonna be good fiction since you can’t mention Cotton without jarring the reader. If you’re writing historical fiction it’s okay, otherwise exnay on dead Puritans.
I j'accuse Thursday's fiction as being written without benefit of beer. In the wake of that harrowing experience I've officially downsized my hunger to write the Great American Novel to writing the Great American Post. Writing is not too dissimilar to 10K road races in that you always want to test yourself. You fight against the tide of middle age not so much out of ambition so much as to just to stay where you are. You at least want to please yourself, to create a souvenir.
And so I found myself in a cartoon world this week. The new cube location makes everything feel just a bit off, like looking at the work world through a fun house mirror. The new news is that our garbage will be collected only twice a week. As someone who faithfully eats at his desk, this results in overflow garbage cans relatively quickly. But it'll save one million dollars a year (say like Austin Powers) so how can I be agin it?
I’m sort of surprised I never went to the old floor out of habit. Maybe that’s a hopeful sign contra Alzheimer’s. But I feel a bit discombobulated mostly by the gimlet eye of my bosses’ boss who is not gay (he’s married with kids) but who feels the same sort of compulsion to look at me that I feel towards a buxom girl. He travels by my cube at least five times a day and has clever and self-aware eyes that he holds in a perpetual half-squint as if out of vanity. I can see him out of the corner of my eye looking at me as he passes by. Don't think I don't know you're looking, I think, aware that my awareness suggests buxom girls are similarly aware. Darn. Fortunately when he passes I’m typically in a very thoughtful pose. At least I’m not picking my nose or surfing the 'net or something when he passes by. Yet.
Speaking of vanity, and we were a few sentences ago I believe (what's the statute of limitations as far as segues go? Can you say, 'speaking of...' when you mentioned something three lines ago? Six? Nine?) I think it’s crucial in blogging is to establish your unseriousness early and reinforce it at regular intervals because that leads one to take chances, to post bad poetry or self-indulgent posts or what have you. There’s a joy in being at the bottom. While I care little about SiteMeter, being so steady in its mediocrity, I've fallen into the bad habit of monitoring the number of Bloglines subscribers as a score-keeping device, and I lost two this week. Subscribers, after all, are committed. They're not one-night stands, like searchers who land here on the back of "video" + "sex".
It’s funny how we can feel a need to “maintain” numbers so low, but it seems symbolic of something larger – how we don’t take enough chances lest we lose our current members. It's like I mentioned in that previous post about Rev. Wright and how most Christian leaders are not brave enough to espouse something unpopular (i.e. the Cross) such that we lose adherents. We all care too much of the opinions of others instead of the one opinion that does matter - God's.
A low profile is never helped by having "art" in one's cube. The standard cube is positively tundric in terms of decoration. People in Cube-Land are simultaneously starved for novelty while not providing it, and to the extent I provide it I will reasonably draw attention. Earlier this week the big guy’s right-hand man was suddenly staring over my shoulder. He said he was looking at my large tiger painting, the one chock-full of sentimental value (Mom bought it for me in the mid 80s - it’s like a Linus blanket now).
I’m hardly without sin – I look inside cubicles when I’m walking by them. But I have the decency to avert my eyes if I’m caught, which is also the proper response if you pass gas in a formal setting. It’s amazing you have to teach people these things!
Due to the pseudo-stress of work I signed up for my first “chair massage” at the office. Forgot to spring my obligatory joke about saying what right has my chair to get a massage when I don’t get them. She was reading a book, something with the word “glass” in it I think, perhaps The Glass Castle by Jeannette Wells. It looked like something Oprah would recommend and I felt naturally wary. Based on her book and her age and her occupation I figured she was likely a vegan Obama voter who wanted to ban guns and fuel-inefficient vehicles. In short, ban me.
I was surprised to see that the “chair” was actually a padded contraption, a sort of comfortable iron maiden, in which you ended up in a half-kneel with your butt hanging out rather vulnerably (although maybe I was doing it wrong). She indicated I should put my face down in a circular pad with a mouth opening. My Adam’s apple was pinched against the iron part of this “iron maiden” such that I was struggling for breath nearly from the get-go. Luckily I would have little need for breath, as this gig wasn’t exactly an exercise in heavy lifting, though when she was massaging my neck I figured she was only a half-centimeter from strangling me.
She worked the shoulders painfully. Likely she determined I was a Republican and taking out her frustrations. Any possibility of nodding off was abrogated by the sharp pinches in that area. The back, hands and arms were truly relaxing but she spent most of her time on my shoulders. I asked her where I was tight and she said in the lower back and shoulders, just like most office workers ("typical office worker" I was). Unfortunately she spent more time on the shoulders than the lower back.
I could tell it was a job for her, like mine is for me, and not a "calling”. It reminded me of when I get my haircut: the yawning chasm between my relaxation and the doer’s activism is disquieting because it’s too zero-sum: what is building me up is tearing them down. Work wearies the spirit and the flesh and I feel too much sympathy for them such that I can't truly enjoy it. Why would I add to her workload? I determined I likely wouldn't do this again.
After the massage it was back to my work and then a few hours later quitting time. (Cue Flintstone's whistle). I headed down to the workout room for a bit of Ian Ker’s biography (the current topic justification, which gives me a headache, especially on a Friday) while doing a 25-minute workout on the Stairmaster. Then I walked out of work and headed to the parking garage when who do I see walking dead straight-ahead of me? The massage therapist. The timing was such that just as she pressed the elevator button and turned towards me, I passed; we made eye contact but it didn’t register that a few hours earlier she’d given me a massage. I was in shorts and a windbreaker instead of dockers and a dress shirt, and I look like everyman anyway. Her demeanour and eyes and body language spoke of flatness and deadness and it occurred to me that despite myself, I might have more to give to her than she had to give me. I said a quick prayer.
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