Monday, October 26, 2009

This Guy is Eight Ball

"Well, I'm confused." Of course I am, I'm talking to a loony. This guy is eight ball. It's always people like George. It's not the quite ones. It's the one's that yell and scream and kick and bitch and everyone excepts it. Then, one day they decide that kicking and yelling just doesn't release the anger efficiently, and they decide to smear fecal matter on their faces and come into work with Samurai swords yelling about how their wife burned the Wonder bread that morning and how the government is planning to steal their homes.

"And you should be. We've been trying to confuse you, but you-just-don't-learn!" He twists the fist around and pulls while grimacing hard. A long, metal rod comes out of his arm along with the fist. Blood and some sort of umbilicus come with it and it's messy, not like in the movies when...what? Robots lose a limb? I mean, George must be a robot. No one has long swords stuck in their arms.

I jump off the table and run to the door. I open it and run out, slamming it behind me.

I'm down the hall, near...I have no idea where I am. There are cubicles all over, with people busily working on monkeys or interplanetary confusion, or whatever they do here. I don't know anymore. For the life of me, I can't figure out what all these people are doing. There's one with a headset on talking about grapefruit to someone, there's another reading email with binoculars, and another that appears to putting a pair of panties over her head and...sniffing? Was it always like this? Was all of this going on in this other wing? Are they sniffing panties in my wing? Is this why I can shoot junk and get drunk at work and not get questioned? Everyone knows, why haven't I been fired? I'll tell you why – there's a guy in a cube that's pink lighting his computer on fire and his manager is helping him by putting print outs on it to stoke the fire.

Everyone is nuts.

I look back and George is nowhere.
People are coming out of cubes, looking at me funny, like I have just awoken the Oompa Loompas. I realize George is the only one who can explain why I'm there. Rather than having to explain myself, I opt to find the homicidal mad thing that brought me here.

I walk back to the conference room and peer in the windows.

George is impaled on his arm thing, laid out on the conference table.

His head is facing me and I realize that

"Are you awake?" It's Sally. I'm in a conference room or doctor's office or Burger King. I'm tired of trying to figure this all out.

"What is happening to me!" I realize I'm losing it, like George.

Sally smiles down at me and pushes back her feathered blonde hair. She's 50ish and thinks she's 18. I once saw her on a weekend at Costco without her makeup and she looked like a ghoul.

Now, makeup'd to the gills and looking 42, rather than 68, she's almost resembles someone who might be nice to me.

I sober up and keep my eyes on the prize: I'm getting the fuck away from her.

I push her away, she goes down on her back. I look around and the doctor's office is pretty much a butcher's back room.

There's meat hooks hanging from the ceiling, what looks like three different types of industrial bone saws, and several sinks stained with blood and rust.

The floor is metal, the sinks are metal, the ceiling and walls are metal, everything is metal done up in rust.

It's like a horror movie, except for the doctor, who's leaning on a sink looking terrified in my direction.

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