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.

Cardboard Cut-ups Part One

She’s looking at you.

She’s barely able to contain her excitement. She’s obviously quite taken by your youthful good looks. Your azure eyes and longish, sandy blond hair have always been winners with the ladies.

“Go ahead,” she says, “Take my car. I don’t get off work until eleven.”

At first you protest.

“I couldn’t,” you say, “I mean, I don’t even really know you.”

You do, however work with her, have done for some time now, but you never really would have considered the two of you close.

She insists, “Yeah, no, go ahead. I know you don’t have a car, and you live so very far away,” you wonder how the hell she knows where you live, “from here so go ahead. Just try to get back here by eleven. We can go out for drinks or something.”

You nod, take the keys and head down to the fifth level of the parking structure where the black RX-7 is parked.

You think it’s a nice car. It is. It’s a stick shift, but you don’t care, even though you’re used to driving an automatic. What self respecting man can’t drive a manual? The only thing you’ve never understood is why in this day and age a manual transmission is still produced. You always thought they should have become obsolete five seconds after the electronically tuned computer controlled automatic transmission was invented. Oh, well. . . it’s a debate for another time.

You drive the car home to your apartment up on 19th avenue in Mount Royal where you microwave two roast beef sandwiches for yourself. Beef being your favourite of course, manly man that you are. Red meat. Yeah.

Nothing like MEAT! You think to yourself. We all are carnivores after all. One can tell by the incisors. Warm roast beast and Miracle Whip™: the food of the gods, manna from the heavens, or Mount Olympus, or whatever. You cannot help but notice that these are the finest meaty sands you have ever had the pleasure to microwave and consume.

You switch on the TV and watch a Batman™ cartoon. You never outgrew cartoons for some reason. You are often heard remarking to your friends that you will be immature forever because you can only be young once. Your friends believe you.

“Hot damn but that’s fine roast beast!” You say good and loud because you can. No one is home but you. There is nothing odd about this because you live alone. This bothers you not at all as you happily gobble back the Final Bite®. That is the last of it. And that is a shame you think.

“Fuck!”

You are still hungry of course. That figures. You are so hungry you believe you could easily polish off two or six more.