a day job
4:31 am tuesday morning…
i’m awake and no one cares. so, i’ll get up. i’ll take my shower, brush my teeth and scratch my ass. three little blue and white gelcaps, two more than i should have, and a sip of yesterdays coffee. i think about brushing my teeth again, but i worry about my gums bleeding. up for fifteen minutes and i already have morbid thoughts about my teeth.
teeth. it’s not like i’ve ever had perfect teeth in my life, but i dream about them each night. each night they get looser and looser. they move more and more in my head as i tongue them. each one turns a different color as i have a putrid rainbow of a smile. diseaseing my gums and the rest of my mouth while my tounge looses the abuility to taste all but my own blood and rotting bacteria making cheese out of my enamel.
past the images of rotting teeth falling out of my head i look out the window as the shadows shrink and see that my day hasn’t ended yet. slacks, shirt, tie and socks. my mirror shows me a picture i can only be happy with if i squint enough not to recognize my self. my tie and my socks don’t match. my teeth hurt. if i leave now, i will get to work two hours early. however, if i don’t go i’ll get depressed and never go again.
the bus ride just might be the best part of my day. everyone tells me that they see the craziest people on the bus every day. they tell me the best stories of fanatical passangers barking maddness at the driver, pissing on other riders, sleeping in their own vomit and fucking on the bench seats in the back while others watch on in thier own sick way as they masturbate to sooth whats left of thier soul. that is some crazy shit. then they look to me for my own twisted stories of bus life. but i have none. not even a miffed buisinessman who missed his stop.
not that i mind. it’s the only time i have to actually relax during my day. for me its even safer than my own apartment. my ride is soothing. i share a nice silence with my fellow journeyers. i realize that it is strange, my calm bus is an aborition in the city. even on different times this bus will get rough again. but exclusivly during my ride everything becomes serene. even the bus driver lossens his grip in the revolver underneath his bulletproof parka. the bus slows and stops bringing my serenity to an end. as the confused looking people file off of the bus and into the grey city rain, i am full of dread at the prospects of the coming day. this is the part i hate the most. its like getting out frome under those cumfy fluffy warm blankets in the morning and putting your feet down onto a floor of ice cold broken glass. i find that it has no real motivational value. this bus is my mothers womb. the street only leads me to pain and agony call career. my boss who can’t remember my name, my officemates who act less human than our own corperate ceo and me self-exiled to a corner cube back where no one can find me. these are the exact points that my bus is protecting me from. its warm air, with a scent of bodies and disel, could be my bubble. i stand at the door with my hand on the rail i take a deep breath, filling my lungs with a last helping of its nutrisious vapor and run.
with my cheeks puffed out turning red, i flail through the crowd. jostling the besuited men and women of the upper-middle class, i throw off a wake of angry and confused looks. after a block my cheeks begin to burn and i still have three to go. desperatly i charge even faster through the crowd. with a strange detached duplicate self floating beside me, coaching me, i remember the divers aid to let a few bubble of the now used air out fom between my lips jest to make it last a bit longer. just a block and a half. someone yells from behind me, his briefcase i knocked open as i rush past. i imagine the strewn papers soaking up the gray water of the walkway as a bitter reminder why i refuse to breath this air. blue faced and sweating i pass through the revolving door to my office building.
on one of the benches in the over decorated lobby, i take a huge gulping breath and immediatly begin to choke. this canned air isn’t much better.
slowly, i once again become acustomed to the dead refrigorator air of the building and move towards the line for the golden elevator. i muse, standing in this line with face i recognize but people i don’t know, that the architect must have hated me. why would someone build this several thousand occupant structure and only put one elevator to service it. granted there are three other elevators besides this one. the freight elevator in the rear of the building and the service elevator in the back corner are somewhat understandable in a unioneers sort of way. its the executive elivator that gets me. three years ago, the company moved it’s executive offices to the more posh section of the city, abandoning it’s office in this building. since then, the offices have been empty and the elivators inert both of which could be greatfully used by the remaining workers.
i remember going onto one of those floors a few months ago on my way to an executive meeting without executives. everything was polished and dusted. clean, like a shrine to our corperate tiki idols. i swore i could even smell the incense hanging in the air. a ghost town without any real ghosts.
amazingly enough i made it to the head of this line without any morbid thoughts. japanese subway ride up to the twenty second floor. cube all the way in the back. joe is such a nice guy, he brought me over a cup of coffee. ten minutes later, haveing stared blankly at the dark monitor and exchanged plesentries with my neighbor, joe, i begin my work day.
suprisingly on not, i am paid quite well to do nothing. no, not goof off, that would be against company policy, but the complete absence of productivity. i can’t play video games of surf for porn because the cube design puts my back and the screen prone towards the door. any head shots or cum shots noticed on my screen spotted by an errant manager would add another demerit to my growing pile. no, my trick is to find ways to engage in the most difficult computational task leaving dialog boxes with excrutiatingly slow fuel bars. this frees me up to fall back into my own mind for minutes if not hours at a time. for a while, finding these kind of complex tasks proved to be more work than my actual work. fortunatly, i found a program that does the most amazing thing. all it can do is create fuel bar laden dialog boxes with cosotmizable text and times.
superglue