(no subject)
The creative ideas valve righty-tighty, my left hand loosely over your fist. Organs shudder in procrastinative rage, it's a back-and-forth motion, an old metronome or airport hypnotist, and I am reclining at a 160-degree angle in mother's back-model La-Z-Boy as silence plows through beeping PBX systems and flustered employees darting from cubicle to cubicle. (Note: It is not actually silence but a 1000-printer concerto, an anesthetic inkjet hum that drowns out thoughts and sometimes even your soul [but now I'm just being silly]).
Later: I am sitting, scratch that, I am crouching awkwardly in the 2nd floor bathroom with Philip from project management, window open and door shut -- because the fumes, he says, the fumes might trigger the smoke detectors and the last fire, and he says this with very crisp finger quotations, wasn't really a real one and you of all people should know I honestly didn't mean to -- and Philip, who is by no means a king (and by no means a friend, either), pulls out a golden shoebox encrusted with plastic jewels and broken bits of macaroni from inside the tank of the only 1.6-gal. gravity-driven porcelain beast left in the building (everywhere else is now a wall-mount, a vacuumhandlelessflush, saturnine and cold and corporate) and I am in total awe because I have no idea why it isn't an already bloated mush of cardboard and spraypaint and toilet water and maybe he is to? But the water slides right off the sides like your heart once did through my stupid clumsy hands, and he lifts the lid as a magician would the drape on a lion cage but of course as I almost expected the box is empty. It's the essence of life, he tells me, the math equation for everything, tee-oh-ee. I tell him there's nothing there and he nods heartily in agreement.
Later: I am sitting, scratch that, I am crouching awkwardly in the 2nd floor bathroom with Philip from project management, window open and door shut -- because the fumes, he says, the fumes might trigger the smoke detectors and the last fire, and he says this with very crisp finger quotations, wasn't really a real one and you of all people should know I honestly didn't mean to -- and Philip, who is by no means a king (and by no means a friend, either), pulls out a golden shoebox encrusted with plastic jewels and broken bits of macaroni from inside the tank of the only 1.6-gal. gravity-driven porcelain beast left in the building (everywhere else is now a wall-mount, a vacuumhandlelessflush, saturnine and cold and corporate) and I am in total awe because I have no idea why it isn't an already bloated mush of cardboard and spraypaint and toilet water and maybe he is to? But the water slides right off the sides like your heart once did through my stupid clumsy hands, and he lifts the lid as a magician would the drape on a lion cage but of course as I almost expected the box is empty. It's the essence of life, he tells me, the math equation for everything, tee-oh-ee. I tell him there's nothing there and he nods heartily in agreement.