You know what you deserve? A bonus piece. This fell through the cracks in March, but still makes me smirk. Enjoy it, you nobles of the Earth.
Note that this insanity is fiction: my mother was a star, and subtweeting is for cowards. I also fled office life two years ago, and now live off of grubs and bark.
As always, sharing keeps me smiling. And indoors.
“I don’t think we’re getting the whole story, do you?”
“I think of the demonic black rectangle in my pocket—that’s not innuendo, unless you have a serious deformity—and I genuinely hope that the radiation gently emanating from it like warmth from a campfire kills me so that I don’t have to mannequin-smile through another ten minutes of half-remembered conspiracy theories hidden behind the thin grass skirt of “asking questions” as if you don’t ask the same questions every time hoping for the same answers like Socrates with a bad opium hangover and a Twitter account subscribed exclusively to anime profile pictures and men with Richard Spencer’s haircut, but then because death won’t come and I want another promotion before the sun finally answers my prayers and flash-fries my apartment building I’ll smile, nod, and check that I'm actually smiling as I accept that foreign policy is my art partner’s new hobby and will remain so until the next drift-race turn in history that erases my savings and locks me into another five years on our ad agency’s “team,” or as our creative director puts it “family,” a notion I can only approach understanding because my mother and I used to scream abuse at each other until something more interesting came on the television, not that I’m starved of entertainment now, or anything else, at the meager cost of all the hours and vitality of a youth I imagined I’d spend climbing the tallest mountains of the world—or dating a girl from Trinidad—and instead spend writing minor variations of “Our Gum Tastes Better Than Other Gum” for about one-tenth of what Mad Men promised, granted I don’t deserve peace, love, or pleasant coworkers after seeing a show about a egoistic philandering fraud and saying “serve me two cups of that, double strength,” but that’s the kind of choice I make, just like the choice not to find something better during the blessed two years I spent freed from this open office plan and any obligation to see your face or anyone else’s—including my aforementioned mother—and God what a Wonderland I enjoyed at the small, bargain-bin cost of the nation sinking into a bubonic plague reenactment (sans the willingness to acknowledge that something might be wrong with all the rats), I’d do it all again for another chance to escape—either this office or this conversation—and take a real tilt at the dreams that animated my life until the first time I ran out of money and blew my credit on an ill-fitting suit, advertising classes, and an anniversary gift for a relationship that lasted three more weeks, not that any of that matters, or anything we’ll do once this elevator finally, finally opens and lets us drift to opposite sides of the office; until then, all I ask is that you please, please, for the love of our shared fake God, be quiet for the next six seconds and let me stay out of federal prison.”
“Yeah, Uncle Joe has no idea what he’s doing. Hopefully our guy wins the next one.”
“See you later.”
Enjoy it? Send it to an ally. Hate it? Poison an enemy.
thank you thank you and also for freeing me from the temptation to finally take on Faulkner's Absalom Absalom following the the hilarity of the numbnuts crackers in The Trees and the nouveau roman The Trolley which also had herculean sentences. now I can re-read this and feel complete, knowing you share the burden
Dennard,
Your endless run-on sentence had to be like someone adding weights once you've already pressed. I hope you rewarded yourself with a nice bourbon, spliff, shrooms or whatever. It reminded me (if I might be forgiven for brazen selling) of something similar I wrote here: https://jcbourque.substack.com/p/after-decades-of-stoic-silence-grandpa
Keep up the great work.