From Mundanity to Metafiction: An adventure in Meat Space (Part II)

If you missed it, check out Part I

***

Enough of this traveling shit. I am happy to shake the pins and needles down my khaki's as I pull into job #2. Five seconds in the door and I have identified my first problem, the office manager

It's not something personal, furthest thing from it, she's just playing an archetype. Hell, they all are. Having a big personal stake in something that's inherently problematic and without a heavy lid to keep the outbursts down always leads to trouble. Trying to manage an office either leads to futility or tyranny when dealing with employees. I do not envy anyone charged to this responsibility.

In this case the OM wasn't the root of the problem, the problem's true name was Carl.

Carl is not clever. Carl is just a dumb fucking voice attached to some pitiful short timer shackled to a desk in a big room full of cubicles doing thankless tech support for a single shoddy product over and over until his own fiends and subcon convince him to leave or blow his brains out the side door.

Misinformation abounds in my line of work. This retard made the mistake of selling a one-time configuration change as something the office would have to do every time they wanted to look at an x-ray. It was total bullshit, we just needed to activate some license keys. Five minutes later and I am done with problem one. Fuck Carl, he can suck the devil's cock in hell.

Problem #2 is the occupational equivalent of misinformation. We'll call it Sleaze. Consider your desktop's Ethernet cable. Whether you know it or not the exterior cladding conceals exactly 4 pairs of twisted wires. 10/100 Ethernet only uses 2 of these pairs for data transmission. Gigabit Ethernet uses all 4 pairs.

Now here's a dilemma for the guys who ran the office cable. One of the network drops needed to accommodate an additional computer. The normal protocol demands running an additional wire from the upstairs patch panel, down to the existing drop, and adding a 2-port plate instead of a 1 port. This is necessary so that both devices have their own jack, their own wire and their own connection to the patch panel, and from there the switch, router, modem and finally the Internet.

It's a pain to run the cable so you might be tempted to cut a corner and just slice open the existing cable and split the wires so each new jack uses two twisted pairs instead of the full four. You COULD do that but if you actually DID do that then you'd be employing Sleaze and guess what.

A little screwdriver work confirmed it. I showed the OM what was up and got to listen to a shrill and piercing phone conversation. Joyful.

Problem #3 was the Big One and it depended on a Switch that was, as yet, undelivered. While the OM worked on filing I retired to the upstairs lounge computer and remoted into the server to do some maintenance and check on the general network status. Packets were colliding like proton streams in the LHC for no sensible reason.

Hammering on the network turned up little hope. I would need the switch. That meant waiting. It seemed like a perfectly acceptable time to drop one on the deuce bowl.

I often reflect, when excreting waste of the solid or liquid variety, how strangely humans react to this sort of endeavor. Despite it being a normal part of everyday life the simple process of entering a bathroom to drop trow to relieve some biological burdens changes things. If someone watched my life all day and all night this part of my day would have gone from G-rated (barring internal dialog) to X-rated in two shakes. Literally.

I attribute this, perhaps too generously, to simple physics. After all exhalation is a form of waste management not so different from urination or defecation. However exhaled air, as with burps or flatulence is easily dispersed. I wonder if we were an aquatic species if taking a leak around others would cause any sort of offense or discomfort.

Too many imponderables to consider.

It wasn't that big of a shit, only 3 main pieces and all floaters. I absentmindedly reached out to flush and . . . (click)

Imagine you've spent your whole life tracking down the guy that killed your dad, raped your mom and burned your whole town into smoking cinders. You grow up consumed with hate, training your body and mind into killing implements and hunt your prey over the seas and across the mountains. And then, villain's head planted firmly in the iron sights, you pull the trigger . . . (click)

Panic doesn't come naturally to me. I deal with bits and electrons and something so crude as water and pressure, despite being infinitely simpler, still baffled me. I applied troubleshooting methods to see what I could do. The water was turned on but not refilling the empty tank.

Something ticked off in my brain from a previous install. Most dental offices shut down their air, water and vacuum lines when the office isn't in use for safety reasons. I stepped cautiously back and strolled downstairs as casual as can be.

"Say, do you mind if I turn the water on I need to use your restroom," I say to the OM. Easy money, just turn the water on and problem sol . . .

"We can't," she tells me. "They are working on the pipes this weekend and we can't turn the water or air lines on. You can try next door if you want."

"Oh," I say. My poker face cracks a little as my left eye begins to twitch. "No big deal, I can wait until lunch." Inside my mind alarms and sprinklers are spraying wildly. The Fiend reminds me of a nearby gas station and its well advertised cigarette prices. I trod upstairs thinking wild thoughts of how to fix this problem.

There's a couch so I sit. The upper floor is a lounge/attic/storage space/meeting area. I do a mental inventory and spy a sink. Taps turn out nothing but a slight creak. There's a stove nearby, some kitchen miscellanea and an unopened case of bottled water. That's a start, I think to myself. I just need to get a hold of about a gallon of water.

Therein lies the problem. I can't very well go breaking into the bottled stuff, the doctor's tight enough to know that would cause trouble. I notice a side door that leads to an outside stairwell. Peaking out my head I see that the snow's really picked up. There was a light dusting when I rolled in and now about three inches of the pure white shit are all over everything. Water is running down the hood of my car, feeding the icicles around the base.

Bingo. I step back inside and find a few useful implements then get to work. I yank the bag out of a small plastic trash can and head out into the flurry. Shoveling the loose, powdery snow brings me to the brink of frostbite in seconds. I alternate hands trying to fill as much of the can as possible. It takes about 3 steps and some fist packing to add some solidness to the trash can. Once inside I can look for further help.

There's a big glass bowl full of moldering chocolates on the table. I empty it and beeline for the microwave. I know that I need to make the snow as compact as possible before I add it. Some more digit-chilling work yields about a dozen small snowballs, each as close to solid ice as I can make it.

It takes two trips and some leftover snow to fill the tank. Finally I have enough tepid slush to do some damage. Finger twitching on the trigger I depress and . . . (whoosh)

Fucking aces, I think. The poo is gone and I have one less problem to worry about. Now once the damned switch arrives I can put this place in the rear view. Twenty minutes later and I can't stand the waiting a second longer. I hit the Chinese buffet down the road, I don't even need the GPS to find it.

Now Boone's a pretty small town and less than a linear mile separates the office and the eatery. Along the way I witness one of those 'if only I had brought a video camera I could have taped this shit and it would have gotten 9 million hits on Youtube.' Alas, I have but memory to replay the event.

Some dip shit kid, maybe 16, is sitting in the passenger side of his friend's car. At a stoplight this wonder boy waves to an acquaintance across the intersection and then reaches up to the rooftop to harvest some snow for a snowball. The crafting of the spherical ice missile goes well and dandy, the execution falters a bit.

As wonder boy launches his snowball he has to lean out the open window. Some aspect of the throwing process causes him to lose balance and he slides out the window up to his waist. As this is happening the friend behind the wheel notices that the light is green and the car jumps forward. Wonder boy, still out the window, screams and tries to climb back in. His driver stops and the smart, smart boy decides he'll just climb out the window and then get back in.

I watch wonder boy fumble for the exterior door handle, he pops it and the door swings out enough for his feet to come crashing down onto the road. As he shimmies backwards out the window he slips and fall backwards into the road which is covered in an inch think slurry of dirty-as-shit snow, dirt, salt and buddha only knows what else. I laugh at the retard all through my lunch. Kung Pao chicken, excellent.

Back on scene we have a 24 port gigabit switch still warm from the truck!

Another run in with sleaze, the cunts who installed the existing network hardware used the cheapest shit on the market and it shows. That's the main reason why I am here. Also I don't have any screws that I can attach to the plywood sheet holding all the other stuff. I have to do some harvesting.

Ten minutes later I am done and out the door. There's just the question of the shipping box.

"You got a dumpster around here?" I ask.

"Oh you can leave that for the maid," says the OM. Right, like the maid's life isn't sad enough without a fucking IT guy that can't take a box out to the trash. I press her for info. "It's out back," she finally says.

Around the building I dump the box. Everything is lousy with snow, real fine and loose shit that flies off at the slightest gust. I am thinking of taking a picture with my phone when a real blast takes about 8 pounds of particulate ice off the roof. I catch a shower right at the neck and face. Sweet bleeding christ its like getting hit with a spray from a sea of liquid nitrogen.

"Should have left the shit for the maid," I grumble.

I say goodbye and ask the requisite 'last' question.

"Is there anything else I can do for you today?" I hate this question because 99% of the time there is something and it's always painful. I would rather suck botulism through a lead straw but in the interest of job security and not being one of the fuckheads that makes life difficult I feel compelled.

My lucky day, she says no. I get to leave, sleaze free and ahead of schedule.

On the way back I take a little more care through my shady spot where I decided to write all this down. Lucky for me a quarter of the cars on the road are trucks sporting ice blades and there's enough salt on the roads to pickle everyone driving on it.

The drive home begins pleasantly enough. I pass Tweetsie Rail Road, it doesn't reopen until May. That's probably for the best, no one wants to see cowboys and indians shooting blanks in sub 20's weather.

Another ten miles and I realize I need to stop for gas. If I had been smart I would have topped off during my cigarette run. Singular purposes fail sometimes. This is one of those times and the Fiend moves to capitalize on it.

Every gas station on earth sells cigarettes. The Fiend knows this and he's already scratching at my cranial bumps. I have to stop, but I don't have to go inside. That's what I tell myself. Right on cue the Fiend reminds me that I have to take a mad leak. So I do have to go inside.

Fucking nagger!

The refill and defill go pretty smoothly, I decide to grab a drink while I am in the store. Maybe having something to suck on (fuck off, Freud) will keep the Fiend docile. The place is a wreck. They only have the weirdly narrow necked 20oz bottles of Diet Sundrop. Figures.

The guy in front of me is even more of a wreck. He's got to be somewhere in his 80's, a tiny old man wearing a fur lined leather bomber's jacket. It's so flaked off and crusty that he must have worn it every day since the end of World War II. I feel a stab of pity as he transacts his business.

The bombadier shakily hands the clerk a lotto ticket with a bar code. She scans it, nothing pops, he buys a few more tickets and shambles out the door. I buy my drink with no fuss. The clerk gets a real big smile from me. It wasn't that she was nice or pretty or anything so pedestrian. She's got to be 70 years old, face looking like the old man's jacket but her name tag says it all.

Jill.

Every time I try to rankle the wife with a story of hanging out with another girl I mention Jill. Jill's not a real person just a recurring name to let the wife know I'm kidding. It's not an uncommon name but I only run into real Jills rarely. I don't like to dwell, there's too much road left for pleasantry so I resume the trip.

Twenty minutes from home and I am besieged with misery. This has been a long slow buildup stemming from the Fiend's ever increasing agitation and a bad road habit. I have a huge bladder, think mini-keg sized so I go long periods, normally. However when I remarked about getting a drink I really meant getting 2 drinks because I am a fucking diet soda addict. There is probably a Fiend for that but I don't even fuck around when it comes to the caffeine supply.

So I have to piss, my eyes are practically watering, and the Fiend won't shut his squawking beak. But I am only twenty minutes away and that makes it too close for me to stop. Just a few more miles on 77 and it'll all be over soon.

The last five minutes are excruciating but I manage to hold it together without feeding the Fiend or wetting my pants. It's a pretty close race but I manage to get inside and unzipped without incident. For about three minutes even the Fiend shuts up and just savors the sweet feeling of release. Two shakes and he's out to get me again, fuck. I walk upstairs, not running or jogging, just pacing deliberately towards my nicotine gum. The Fiend whispers about how its not the same every single step of the way.

I bite through the absurdly fruity tasting shell right down into the peppery meat of the gum. Only a minute later I feel the Nicofiend starting to get drowsy and sluggish. He pulls up a foot and dozes, not asleep but at least contented for now.

It's been a long day and knowing that the Fiend is finally off my back I can relax.

"Better get used to it, bitch." I tell him.

"No surrender," the Fiend mumbles back. He's right of course, but tomorrow is another day. Saturdays mean a lot of time with the wife and the little one. Familial disapproval is a powerful ally against the Fiend.

Going it alone through unfamiliar territory is when the Fiend wins. I sigh and sit down at my computer. There's writing to be done.

From Mundanity to Metafiction: An Adventure in Meat Space (Part I)

This is it. This is the moment when I kick start my writing career into greatness. Right now, this very moment as I launch into this whole 'Presingularity' thing is when it took a turn for greatness. Hell, I'm not even going to edit this. (Correction: I decided to edit it later)

My feet hit the ground before the sun bothered to roll over the horizon. It was cool and quiet. The wind cut like paper, linear bee stings that brought untraceable pain. My little Civic cranked up and took me out. All I have for company this morning is the fucking Nicofiend.

Every smoker knows this little beasty. Strike that. Every smoker who's bothered to try and quit knows this cock sucker inside and out. I used to think of mine as a snarling werewolf that loved nothing more than clawing at the inside of my skull. Oh but it’s much worse than that.

Just imagine having a sociopathic parrot stapled to your shoulder. All it does is pick and prod at the interstices of your brain. All day, all night it cries the same sullen dirge.

Polly wanna smoke, polly wanna smoke.

I'm five miles out, haven't even made a dent in the trip when the Fiend wakes up. Fuck, it's too early for this shit.

Polly wanna smoke, polly wanna smoke.

Addiction is a bitch of a slut of a filthy ex that just can't leave you alone. Sure no one forces you to answer the phone at 3am. Sure you could say no when she slides into bed all booze and flooze. You could say no but you don't. It's only been 48 hours since I fed the Fiend and already the bastard’s becoming unbearable.

Smoke, time to smoke. Why aren't you smoking?

Knuckles turn so white they almost glow. The steering wheel doesn't complain as I try to eviscerate it with every fingernail I own. It's too cold and too early for me to put up with the fucking monster. The day’s already got me on a 4 hour drive time handicap.

I put some music on. It helps.

There's this recurring fantasy I have. I've always had the basic idea but it evolves and contorts as I get older. It's about time travel, kind of. Sometimes I think about what I would change in history. Mostly I think about dragging a shit load of post humanity back in time so I can steal the body of my younger self and relive life with some distinctly unfair advantages.

Sometimes I think about averting disaster. Most of the time I think about taking some brain implant to keep me from ever picking up a cigarette without 10,000 volts of subcutaneous agony to discourage the habit. Also whenever I rock out in the car, and only in the car, I think about something like the data downloads from The Matrix.

”Can you rock out harder than anyone on every instrument and speak every language on earth?”

”Not yet.”

I don't know why but ever since a middle school talent show I have thought about going back in time to start a band. There’s a whole infrastructure to the formation and physics of the fantasy. Any time I sing in the car I am really singing on that non-existant stage.

Half an album later and I start to feel ok. Thirty miles down and the Fiend is just staring holes in the back of my head, shitting all over his cage.

The GPS turns into a gibbering idiot just a few miles outside Hickory, NC. I've made this trip 4 times now. Every single time it provides a new convoluted route. Today's course demonstrates that my useless navigator can't make sense of one way streets. It keeps trying to route me the wrong way. I end up making a big jagged spiral around the office until I find a landmark and track it down the good ol' fashioned way.

How the fuck did we survive without Google? Seriously.

That was me thinking just now, not the Fiend.

Everyone at the hickory office knows me, there are only 4 employees. It's nothing but warm smiles and first name greetings all the way to the back. One of the doctor's laptops is on the fritz. Before I can even look at it he's asking me about hypothetical solutions to potential errors. I don't even know the symptoms yes. HQ just said it was a dead Network card.

"Why don't you just tell me what happened, starting from the last time it worked correctly," I say.

"Well," he begins with an impossibly long indrawn breath. I'm already muttering fuck, fuck, fuck, as I smile and nod. My poker face is perfect, high carbon steel bonded with volcanic glass. I don't wince or scream or snap a single inanimate object.

He's standing there talking to me about his phone tether and how he downloaded some third party app to speed things up. I don't pay any attention. I can already see the tether's a USB cable and this program's done something invasive and scary to the TCP/IP settings. As soon as he leaves I'm gonna dump the driver but I sit through 3 more minutes of this shit.

Polly wanna...

"Shut it!" I scream inside my skull. The slightest, faintest quiver comes over me as I do. Maybe the face isn't as perfect as I thought. He's still talking, the doctor is still talking. What a pisser. As polite as I appear all I want to do is grab the newspaper he’s holding and shoo him away. It’s nothing personal I just can’t work while I’m in customer service mode.

One thing I have noticed is that network grunts can commiserate with psychologists for a very sad reason. By definition we both work with systems and components made up of other systems and components comprised of more complexity than any one person can understand. At least we have the luxury of spare parts, white papers and tech forums.

The human brain is way more of a cluster-fucked kludge than the shoddiest networks concocted in my deepest darkest work-related nightmares.

Oh good, I notice he's gone. My ass hits the chair and I go to work. 1 minute to give up on the shitty touchpad and switch to a mouse, 2 minutes to purge the driver, another 1 to reinstall and test. Probability waves collapse as I test my theory. Internet and network work. That's just fucking aces. I bet the doctor hasn't finished the front page of his newspaper.

For now I'm done with the easy part of my job. Trying to exfill without follow up questions is impossible, it’s fundamental as gravity. I jump into space, waiting for the tug which hits me before I even brush against vacuum.

"I've also noticed my email doesn't always work in hotels and stuff. I can receive it but not send. Isn't that weird?"

"Nope," I say calmly. I might as well have poked him in the eye. Stupid phrasing, I think. Now I have to explain more than I want to. "Your ISP probably doesn't allow SMTP traffic to be relayed to other ISP's.” Before he can ask why I interject. “They do it to cut down on spam."

Christ on stilts I hope that shuts him up. It doesn't. I explain, nearly making the always dangerous mention of Net Neutrality. Luckily I catch myself. The last time I made that mistake I lost 20 minutes of my life before giving up and saying 'Google it sometime.'

Before I know it I am out the door and back on the road. To the mountains! Hickory's an hour from home, Boone's an hour from Hickory. Long fucking day.

Halfway there and the sky starts shedding some flimsy ephemeral crap that barely registers as visual data. There's no substance to it, nothing but incidental refraction even lets me know that it's real. I know this distortion, snow. When I left it was dry and sunny. Only 55 miles from home and I am skirmishing with the vanguard of a blizzard.

This is when I crack. It's not like smashing into a big pile of glass, more like the relentless grind of a glacier that shears and devours me. I know its wrong as I make a quick stop, throw the little civic in park, hop out, walk to the door, grab a token beverage, head to the front behind some dude and his adorable 3 year old, arrive empty handed but for my debit card and diet Sundrop and ask for 'one hard pack, Marlboro menthol lights please.'

I know its wrong as the clerk, some no face, hands me the goods. I know that it’s wrong as I swipe the card and hastily fling the pack into my left jacket pocket. The second I touch the receipt I drop it into the right pocket. Some sleight of hand inside, I pull out a lighter with inhuman quickness. Fourteen taps, each one a solid audible caution begging me to throw that fucking pack of death into the hills and still I have menthol in my teeth before I even get back in the car.

Sweet metastatic bliss that first drag is the warm kiss of an angel breathing fire down my neck. The Fiend is ejaculating all over me as I breathe deep and savor the poison.

Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit.

I take another drag as I turn back on the road. The Fiend passes out in a pool of his own carcinogenic spew. A few moments of peace blanket the world in quiet fuzz. I flick my angel out the window and she sparkles as the frigid wind turns her into another anonymous piece of roadside shit.

Just then the boss calls. He wants to know what's going on, how the trip is and if I am aware of the situation I am rolling into.

I am, I say coldly. It's always the same shit. Something broke or someone fucking broke it. That's life, everyday and everywhere, people like me are always there to fight it. I don't tell my boss this, he knows we are nothing but stop gaps against entropy until the robots take over.

Five minutes in and the call drops. I keep talking for a few seconds until my phone announces that it's gone blind and mute. Feeble thing. I'm driving past a sheer slab of tortured rock. Chilly construction crews are widening the road here. The telltale signs of drill marks and dynamite are everywhere.

Some other poor bastards did good work. I guess we don't all just resist entropy. Some of us proactively go out and break the world's teeth, blunting nature's edges wherever they may be.

The Fiend stirs. I beg it to leave me alone but it is already shaking off its stupor. Fucker!

I try to focus on the road but the Fiend is awake again. No longer placated, the nicotine mantra returns with a vengeance.

Polly got a smoke. Polly want another smoke.

Fuck off, I just fed you! It's a cry in vain. The Fiend never listens. Only fifteen minutes ago I had withstood 48 hours or more of abstinence. Now the cunt can't wait a second longer, again, it has no memory, no tolerance.

Polly wanna smoke, polly wanna smoooooooke!!!

Sweet stinking Buddha, I reach for another. What the fuck, I have a whole pack and I have already killed my streak. I light it up as I am making the final approach to Boone. It's a long downhill stretch of road, 4 lanes wide. I'm riding the innermost, hugging tightest to rock walls glossy with windblown ice.

As I drag on the cigarette I have one of those heart-stopping moments where reality transmogrifies into bad dream molasses. I drift a few feet into the lane to my left. That isn't what scares me. I turn the wheel, feel it move in my hand but still keep drifting towards oncoming traffic and a very fragile looking guard rail at the edge of a cliff. That is what scares me.

The Fiend turns invisible and most of my concerns go mute. Any second I could be dead. All because of this fucking miserable day, I think. My teeth tighten into enamel mills. Everything is slow and terrible. The wheels catch a second later and I regain control.

"I can't fucking believe it," I say to myself. "If someone had been in that lane then my whole life could have been fucked to pieces." The spark of fear lands on dry tinder.

"I'm going to fucking write this down when I get home," I say out loud. "And I'm going to write about this part right now and it'll be just aces. Fuck, you gotta love metafiction." Here's the irony about moments where time seems to slow down like that. It doesn't, you experience the moment in real time just like all the other events in your life.

Your brain records more frames than usual so playback comes in slow mo. Your perception does not increase at the moment of stress, there's no hyperactive frenzy of brain activity. You just remember it that way an instant after it happens. And that, dear reader, is why science rules.

Only minutes remain on the trip. An old buried habit goes zombie and crawls out so that I will smoke one last cig before I arrive. I haven’t even finished my second.

I won't lie I finish the smoke and start to reach for another. I have the third smoke between incisors when my subconscious mind borrows the body for a moment.

A word about the other person that lives inside your skull. He/she doesn't like you, doesn't care for emotion or conscious thought and thinks you're a dumb drunken ape sitting at the controls of a quantum supercomputer. Check that. He doesn't need to think he just knows because he's running the part of your brain that doesn't report to the conscious mind. And his indifference to you is well founded.

This other person is an armor clad assassin and when he talks 99% of the time you have already obeyed before you realize there was a choice in the matter. Subcon moves two fingers deftly to the left.

The cigarette flies out the window, the rest of the pack skids along the icy road. I feel a little guilty for littering. Next, Subcon takes out my lighter and performs a Gesture of Significance. I have carried a lighter in my pocket for as long as I can remember, long before I smoked. The little red plastic firemaker joins the cigs on the open road, soon to be crushed or buried in ice.

Fiend goes apeshit over this. Subcon sends him a tight little memo.

Subcon: Silence, Fiend. Get cognizant. No more.

Huzzah! I could practically salute the scary bastard. There would be no point. I don't salute computers for doing their job. Subcon would care as much as my Linux box.

Enough of this traveling shit. I am happy to shake the pins and needles down my khaki's as I pull into job #2. Five seconds in the door and I have identified my first problem, the office manager.

# # #

This ends Part I, Check out Part II