Sour.
Thursday June 20, 2002
At the (current) day job, where the company’s values are hung on the wall as giant Successories posters—honesty and trust and other shining ineffables we can all agree are decent things to say we like to do when it’s not too much trouble—and it’s the sort of place where you have to recite the company mission statement which has something to do with families and happiness if you’re late to a meeting, or pony up a buck (not me, though; I’m contract labor, so I can snarl and sneer and put my head down and get my work done without all this summer camp crap, the visitor badge on its long blue neckchain like cheap Mardis Grad beads clenched defiantly in my left hand, because damned if I’m going to actually put it around my neck), but—with all this honesty and trust and these ineffables shining out of everyone’s face, you still have to drop coins in the slot for cold water or friggin’ coffee (you have to pay for the crap coffee) and the office supplies are locked up, you have to find the mailroom guy with the key, hey, you know, I need, like a pad? Of paper? —Imagine that, and anyway, I’m right here right now listening to some of the young Turks who do things with Java and animation compression behind me yammering on about how they’d never get involved in a long-term commitment, marriage is just something they don’t see the point of anymore, it’s a restriction, a trap bought into by other guys, like how you have to have people out fixing potholes to keep society moving, right, but he doesn’t want to fix any dam’ potholes, so someone else has to, well, marriage is like that, keeps the potholes fixed and makes sure everybody has a pair of pants to climb into in the morning (thinking about it, I maybe misheard that last bit) and anyway, they’re all sexists, all of ’em, oh, yeah, yup yup yup; it’s hard-wired into their genes from back in the day out there on the savannah—this is what they’re saying behind me, what they’re saying about themselves; me, I’m just sitting here typing and minding my own dam’ business (well, okay, no, not really) and I can’t help but grin a little and shake my head, oh, you poor dumb sorry-ass bastards, could you be any more frightened of a bunch of grapes just out of reach?
—But that is perhaps uncharitable, and now I’m feeling old; old indeed. But hey—the money’s (very) good.