17 Tons

My new office is a big open floor with lots of cubes. We sit back to back and side to side. I hear you on the phone; I smell your lunch. In fact, all my senses are engaged with the actuality of my co-workers.

It feels like summer camp -- though since I never actually went to summer camp, this statement is even more subjective than if it had any basis in reality. Or rather, one man's summer camp is another man's boot camp. And you know what they say about boots... Makes your legs shapely.

I forgot how honest works makes me tired. It's a different kind of tired too, depending on the day and the mercury levels in one's morality thermometer. At my desk, under the bright, fluorescent lights, I think of all the things I'll do when I get home and all the ways that I'll enjoy my four hours before bed. Instead I eat too much or too badly and the television gets turned on or a book goes slowly and before I know what's what, I'm tucking myself into sleep and hurling projectiles at the light switch. And then I dream. Sometimes I disturb myself and sometimes I fly on roller coasters and sometimes I loop the day and look for typos.

Sounds like somebody needs a double-feature of "Joe Versus the Volcano" and "Brazil." I'll pencil it in for the weekend. And I can do that now, you know why? Because I've got a calendar, silly.

I can't be funny all the time.