Got this new day job. I dress up real nice most days, sit in a cubicle like I swore I never would. and. stare …
I hear things will change once I go through training, but for now, it’s just screenface all day. There are people who say you can get a lot done at a job that requires you (for the moment) to do little more than sit there, but I am not so sure. Of course I am able to accomplish things. Send emails, read stuff. I even wrote a few stories while I sat at my desk sucking clock. But I don’t think it’s sustainable without a clear routine, some sort of call and response between the desk and my dreams floating outside. It’s easy to get lost on Reddit or Facebook while at a cubicle. If there is no work to be done directly related to the job, then shifting to the “other” job demands brainwork above and beyond what would be demanded of you at home. How can you compose while standing in a half-dug ditch, workpants on, waiting for the shovel that never arrives?
Easy. Harness your mind and suspend reality. Imagine yourself elsewhere.
Eyes open and suddenly I’m in a backstreet in China, hot and winding, where the rich city folk have their hideouts. On the far side of the low wall, through the circular opening, a riot runs wild with batons and sabers. An old friend bleeds, his arm hanging in chunks, but the heat of the sun has me glancing to the side at an Arab selling juice and cakes and hot dogs made to order.
Farmland guarded by hard witches.
Antique tea bus with a shattered nose and rustsheened bumperpads.
Hashish dens with sobbing men, tearsoaked beards and olive ponchos outstretched like garuda wings.
There are three big fat essays out there with my name on them waiting to see the light of day. Caught up in editor’s inboxes and suffering the fate of the lazy man’s schedule. The schedule of the man who is lazy about big things unrelated to today’s meals. The lazy man’s fate is to let a schedule drift away until time is taken from him in a rush, like firehoses from children delirious with a a full day’s use of the hydrant unattended. They wanted to be punished, long ago, but when no one came they slipped into the limbo between joy and hate and they couldn’t let go of the hose until the tears ran red and the screams turned beastly.
Such is the lazy man’s fate, drift drift drift until BAM and the brick wall brings all of the schedules of yesterday slamming into the backend like a giant caterpillar or a motorcycle into the back of a halted semi.
Do the work asshole. Your excuses were old when the world’s first nedali brought the world’s first nedali grandma to the cave beneath the mountain. How the tunnels must have stank.
Just edit the fucking thing and post it for God’s sake.
