In the morning I scrub myself clean with a quick, efficient shower. Ten minutes, no more, no less. Soap, shampoo, scrub and rinse. No repeat.
To build a monster, you must begin with clean skin.
From there it’s a matter of covering up the right vents and ducts. Leave no portals unobstructed. Build upward with layers of the appropriate energy patterns and attitudinal currents.
This is not as difficult as it sounds. Once you get used to the required adjustments, it becomes second nature.
Each night I leave the day’s layers hanging in the closet next to my suits, so they are easy to find in the morning. Once dressed, I apply a coat of dog-headed obstinacy as a sealant. The unwillingness to see anything other than consensus reality is a key layer of the monster’s outer skin.
The final touch before I begin dressing is to paint myself in rationalizations, half-truths and easy charm, or at least what passes for charm in the world of business and entertainment.
I regard myself in the mirror. The look I am after is to appear to be quite sane from the perspective of an innocent bystander or a potential witness, while keeping my feral desires close enough to remain dangerous. I shift through my repertoire of smiles and facial expressions like running an old Italian sports car through its gears.
In order to participate in this insanity I must bury the sane part of me at great depths. Like a diaphanous deep-sea creature, I keep close to the bottom of the darkest ocean trench. You must understand the importance of this point. At no time should you reveal the squalling nakedness of your unexpressed humanity.
Failure to follow these procedures correctly leaves the soft inner thigh of the soul exposed to poisonous endeavors beneath the jaundice lights of the modern workplace. The caustic properties of the daily grind can eat through any carapace and bring about emotional disturbances and debilitating psychic disequilibria.
When I am thus exposed, I become cranky, petulant and downright mean. I detect problems in those around me, whether at work or at home with my family and friends. My inner critic becomes a bitch gun pointed outwards. Warning: active shooter in the building!
It is not important what I do, that is, what job I hold, and which firm employs me. I am as commodified as the next faceless minion. What you must know is that our business is death. That is, death is a product or byproduct of the business’s activities.
And you shall know us by the trail of bodies left in our third quarter reports.
Don’t be alarmed! This only sounds as bad as it is. There are very few companies in the world today that don’t produce some amount of disease and decease. Even hospitals occasionally sue the patients they have cured. Indifference and complicity are the foundation of a truly gross domestic product.
There are the straight up death machines, your weapons manufacturers and the agents and contractors of the security state. They produce bombs and bombers, drones and targeting systems, and cold sweat paranoia.
Also, the polluters that churn out sources of air and water pollution, the bringers of climate change, unattributed tumors and mystery diseases.
Food conglomerates have transformed the process of food production into incessant human and animal misery, ruined landscapes and toxic soup dumped in ponds and rivers, bloodstreams and brainstems.
Our economy depends on its incidental killers, the links in the supply chain that fill oceans and bodies with microscopic plastic, and the efficiency experts who recommend throwing people out of work. So on and so forth.
There is an ever expanding palette of violences to commit: You can take violence fast or slow, depending on your mood. We can make it explosive and percussive, or ballistic and sadistic, financial or psychological. When you hear me say innovation, you better duck beneath your desk.
The beauty of the current system is that it bathes us all in the haze of complicity, cruelty and various levels of guilt. We can never become as angry with it as we need to, because we will starve without this mother-loving job.
Repeat after me: This is just a job. This is just a job.
You may find this mantra useful throughout the day.
Appropriately dressed and properly hyped up with caffeine drinks and the dying rage of the American Dream, I blow into work like yesterday’s breeze. I signal my arrival with well-rehearsed phrases from the banterlands: How’s it? What’s up? What’s the story? You see the game last night? Epic! No worries, no complaints, slice of heaven. Bro, I am living the dream.
My desk is exactly as I left it, a self-contained platform from which to strive for excellence. Or ambivalence. Or at least another whack at the piñata. Everything has a place, and everything is in its place. The workspace is constructed from wood, plastic, metal and exploited labor, and is leavened with desperation, confusion and the steady slippage of time. The ghosts of previous occupants are thumbtacked to the vision board on my office wall. A memento mori, if you will. The shrine of the universally expendable.
The workday ahead of me is my bitch! I control my calendar as I do my destiny. Freedom is a blood product that flows through my veins. There will be meetings with agendas, and many without. Some of these meetings will veer wildly off track. I will say that “I want to shoot some people.” Do not worry, this is just a term of art. More banter to lubricate the stuck points in the day. I keep my cruelties to valences that leave no bruises or exit wounds. A good monster never kills with their own hands.
I will devote my energies to acquired asset functionalities and advanced granular banking strategies, leveraging deconstructed sticky supply chain modalities and architecting strategic functionalities to enhance digital efficiencies of fuck all.
The truth is I don’t know what it is we do here, not in any operational sense. None of us do. Yes, I have the elevator pitch down and can tap dance my way through the bullshit fields, but if aliens kidnapped the frontline staff, I wouldn’t know the first thing about which buttons to push, which slots need to rub up against other slots, or however the thing works.
The only saving grace is that my co-workers and management, including the geniuses in the C-Suite, have even less knowledge in this competency, if that’s possible.
We are like a room full of misfit toys bouncing about in our bright colors and googly eyes, condemned to repeat the simple, meaningless algorithms we have been forced to internalize.
Every two weeks, more money appears in my account. That’s the important part. That’s the part I surrender the majority of my life for.
There will always be moments during the day when some small amount of the real person bleeds out through the layers of armor and distraction I wear. When this happens, the wild, unconstrained soul of me looks around at the life-sucking office environment, the pantomime bullshit wizardry and poorly concealed hierarchical role playing and wants to scream. But it doesn’t want to die of starvation, so it crawls back inside the hole from whence it came and pretends it doesn’t exist.
It could be worse, I tell myself. It could always be worse.
Back home at the domicile, I drop my clothes on the floor for later deep cleaning and enter the bathroom. Scrubbing myself in the shower, I remove the layers of bullshit, banter, half-truths and lies, petty jealousies and professional rivalries, and hang them to dry. The pathos, the desperation and nihilistic dread, I spoon into the incinerator along with my underwear and burn in hopes of keeping the infection from spreading.
If today failed me, there is another tomorrow. There will always be more tomorrow. Work generates an inexhaustible supply of it.
Yes, I do think about escape from time to time, or rather every goddamn night. Like you I am trapped here. All my exit routes have been blocked off in defiance of local fire codes.
In my dreams I grow Kaiju-sized, and wear a protective armor of thick leathery skin. I make my exit through the city to the bay, my battleship-sized feet crushing buses and tourists as I walk, my tail cutting down commercial buildings and condo blocks behind me.
Slowly, I sink into the water as I walk out to sea, streaming a trail of air bubbles on the surface behind me in a line pointed toward the setting sun.
Chris Carrel writes from beneath the canopy of a majestic Western red cedar in the Pacific Northwest. Chris has worked in environmental restoration and local government and prefers a good wetland to a government office. He has work forthcoming in Flash Fiction Magazine.
Idle Ink 