They say I’ve moved into the cursed office. I’m not given to superstition, gentle reader, but this is a label I’ve tucked carefully in the back of my mind. It isn’t a bad office by any stretch of the imagination. I’ve got a spacious desk, a few filing cabinets, a pleasant view, and a whole bunch of skeletons crammed into my figurative closet.
These skeletons belong to four people. Four. Four employees have worked in this office and met an ignoble end, by which I mean they got shitcanned. Fired. Pink-slipped without the pink. No hugging, horribly contrived farewell parties, or even the “get a box and pack up your things” shtick. They left without notice, and their belongings followed shortly after in the mail.
I’ve had a long, long day complete with a complementary headache. You know the kind, I’d wager. It wasn’t a Monday, that’s for sure, just a very busy Tuesday, a keen reminder of why I sleep eight hours each night. My ultimate goal is to slough off the pervasive dread cast by these ghosts from the past. I plan on doing this by mid-February. Cursed as this room may be, it will not claim me.
The only thing better than trudging through salty slush in the aftermath of a blizzard, gentle reader, is avoiding giant icicles. The only thing better than trudging through salty slush and avoiding giant icicles, if we go a step further, is doing these things while not making eye contact with one of the village psychos.
I don’t know how people manage to stay in the same place for decades. When you settle down, factors such as employment and children have a large say in the matter, but what about the city itself? Is enjoyment a prerequisite or an afterthought? I suppose it won’t really matter in the end, because I’ll likely be impaled by ice or jabbered to death by a crazy.
Now, these icicles, we’re not talking about the half-inch dealies. We’re talking about the one-and-a-half-foot variety, the kind that could shiv a man in the skull without warning. Nothing else so ably combines lethality and phallic imagery, with the possible exception of a gigantic column of lava. Intuition tells you to watch out for Old Man Winter, who’s lounging on his throne somewhere in Ontario and watching you like a hawk, but your intuition will eventually fail and he’ll be there. He’s waiting for you to lower your guard so he can screw you in the cerebrum eight ways to December.
“That’s right, come to papa,” he intones. “Why don’t you take off your hat? Or maybe you could just look up and open your left eye. Wide.”
The second half of this wintry mix is the human element. Legend has it a recent President did something or another and effectively set all the mental patients free, flooding the streets with people who only know reason at the business end of safety scissors. While I don’t remember which President did this, Reagan seems to ring a very faint bell, though I doubt he’d remember letting all the nutballs loose in the first place.
If you make eye contact with one of these folks, that’ll be the end of you. You’ve made a friend for life. There was a man today, average build, thirty-ish, and he was yammering to himself about Russians and Bush. Most of the pedestrians ignored him or promptly crossed the street, which is why he settled on conversing with the Rotary building. No, that’s an exaggeration. He was talking to the directory of the Rotary building, an eight-foot structure (similar to a mall directory) that might resemble a ridiculously tall person in a certain light.
The way the world used to work, you looked at a woman and thought, “Holy mother of Verizon, she’s talking to herself!” You were proven wrong, of course, after you saw her cellphone kit, earbuds and all. These days, you look at a guy sitting at the bus stop and ask the critical question.
“Where are the earbuds?”
There are none, buddy, because the guy’s talking to his imaginary friend on an imaginary cellphone with imaginary earbuds. How I long for the old days. Can’t stop myself. It’s a Monday thing.
The game is afoot, gentle reader, and if you make a mistake you’ll have nothing left but a chalk outline of your computer. See you on Monday.