Thursday, July 13, 2006

sinking ship report

"Sir, I believe the ship is not steady horizontally, if you'll pardon my being so bold as to say so, in such a direct and sudden manner" I said.

I was hired unexpectedly, one might say maniacally, and for three days straight, I did next to nothing but stare at a door that refused to swing. A carpet sans footsteps. The business was dead, and I had no idea why I was being paid to watch it rot.

That door just stood there, that carpet just ached for feet to tread upon it. I heard it scream once in forlorn agony of empty uselessness.

Can you guess how exhausting it is to do nothing all day long? It's not easy to stare at one thing, then another, then read a little of a book, then drink from a water bottle, then find something else to stare at. Hour after deadly dull hour. You run out of reveries and places to scratch yourself.

The sheer lunacy of the situation was refreshing, in an oppressive way. The weight of nothingness pressed down on me so heavily I could hardly breathe or think.

I went home with brain dead written all over my face. I looked at others and all things with vacant, frigid eyes.

It was eating my mind right out of my head, sucking it out my eye sockets, this periscopic drowning pool.

I felt myself swirling down some unknowable, unimaginably desolate drain, to be set adrift, eventually, in the waves I saw as they were sluggishly washing and whirling away, outwardly expanding toward the rapidly spinning vortex of dizzy and unseemly sewage, a bored and tested effluvial disdain.

5 comments:

carrie said...

such a beautiful way with words you can have.

this is what i love! and aspire to someday achieve-- always a whisper away but you keep my eye on the prize.

carrie said...

i have felt this way, before. it is true that doing nothing all day IS exhausting! you describe my experience so well.

steven edward streight said...

I have come to the conclusion that, seeing that I have worked at nothing but sinking ships recently, you'd think they'd have the decency to keep their wits and customers about them, just so as I can get my geek neck exercising done as I putter about the place with a concerned look on my embittered face...

this: I am a business prophet, firing one last warning shot.

I know how to fix their business. They want me to help them, not fix anything, but explain why they can continue doing what they've always done, and still succeed.

They're insane. A new kind of merchant insanity, a Psychocapitalistic Delusional State of Denial.

Am bitter against capitalist pigs, not theoretically, not as a Marxist or a Freudian, but as a Disgruntled Everything Salesman.

steven edward streight said...

Our bantering back and forth via VPN email and blog comment "slow chat room" conversation is where the action really is, not just the original posts.

I've never seen any blogger mention this: that the real, deep, interesting text is in the responses to the post text.

carrie said...

yes, you are right. that is important. looking deeper into a blog. i found an awesome blog today that hardly has any comments@! i'm astounded!