Today in the Strife

I come in the door and past security then hang a left. There is a big sign on the wall that says: “You Are Here” with a HUGE “1” above it and a clear plastic screen below that should have a floor plan of the building in it but it doesn’t. It holds nothing. You Are Here. You Are Nowhere. And this is where you are going to spend more time this week than you will with your family.

The rows upon rows of sodium lamps hanging from the corrugated roof turn night into day inside the plant as they cast low, circular, non-distinct shadows and ghosts of shadows across the concrete and tiled floor.

Short and Squat With Pigtails is waddling along in front of me slowly, ever so slowly, and I can’t pass because of the human traffic on the left and the stacks of matte black anti-static boxes on my right stacked as high as a man. Clip clop goes the sound of her toe-caps. Then she stops to chit and chat with a pair of lovely, young, Chinese ladies. One has a short bob of dark hair and a GIGANTIC rock on her ring finger, the other a cascade of wavy, mocha ringlets that I just want to run my fingers through and say where have you been all my life you beautiful head of hair? I don’t, because it would be wrong.

It’s only about 06:49 and I don’t even remember the drive to work but I remember the dream from last night or early this morning. I’m at my Wednesday Night Hockey game and the gym is getting new walls for some reason and people are showing up. Scads of people to the point where we have enough people for two full teams of twenty-one players. Than as I wait for my shift I eat some South African turtle soup that is blackish-gray in colour and filled with all sorts of unpleasant looking floaty things that I just cannot eat so I pass it to someone else and just before I take the opening face-off I wake up to the sound of some guy talking on the radio about steroid use by football players in the eighties.

I’m at work, sitting at my test bench, it’s almost seven AM and this is my strife as the Doomsday Clock ticks inexorably away, second by second, closer and closer to midnight.