Eight Hours And Closer To Death

8:32 a.m.

I've been here half an hour and my brain is still steeped in static. All the programs and windows are open for me to do my work yet here I sit, staring at the screen like a catatonic. I've been searching the Music folder for something to suit me. Dead Can Dance is too meditative. Velvet Underground is too…. Heroin. Nothing is working to shake or soothe the fog in my mind and it's Wednesday morning.

10:48 a.m.

I just got back from my cigarette break. I don't know anyone here so I took a walk around the building to kill the time. The sidewalks are wet but it's not raining. The sky is gray but it's hardly threatening. Men in Orwellian colored uniforms are blowing and sucking orange and yellow leaves with machinery in the parking lots.

All day I sit in this chair and enter resumes of applicants to a massive corporation into their database. These aren't the resumes of those looking for jobs; they want careers. They've been padding their resumes before they had one, before they knew how to shave. At their age, I was doing everything I could to avoid the corporate treadmill and here I am now, helping shovel those who pack it tighter than a Tokyo subway.

These are the people who react to the alarm clock in a remarkable fashion. They don't hit the snooze, burying themselves under the covers, praying like Christ on the cross for the next minute to die a violent death. They actually get up. They wipe the sand from their eyes and head to class or internships at IBM and Chase Manhattan.

For them, the alarm clock is a daily indicator of where they are going.