cubicle crack: september-october 2006

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server not responding

everyone else goes home early on friday. squinting at the fluorescent lights overhead, i tip the bucket of safeway tapioca pudding upside down. this khaki sludge is my distraction. there are two and a half hours till i can leave. i'm going to use the stair climber then. i'm going to use the stair climber in the basement. my tongue traces the plastic corners of the pudding container. the tech guy's key crunches in the lock, he's going home. climb into my ipod and try for sweat. i want to hurry up and sweat and push fast-forward the whole way home on bart with frizzy hair and faster thoughts. climb into my ipod, into every time capsule dot mp3 every chord a memory and a person and a moment and sit and try not to analyze the stranger in front of me. try not to analyze the stranger in front of me. ring, no ring. bags under eyes closed blackberry mini motorola tight skin beige jacket dior mascara bluetooth technology report scuffed shoe bottle blond tired, average eyebrows. perhaps wiser, a mother or an addict, or suburban with three children to my sound of green court stomping stomping bass or evan and jaron when that feeling of being eighteen and smitten and awake those nights we talked in his dorm in bowles till sunrise, more and more awkward and ridiculous trying to explain a massive to the uptight bassoonist who won't let go of morten lauridsen and his midi arrangements of broadway musicals until the summer came and there was no point anymore but the chaos of the next weekend. after those nights there was no fire burning so bright as the one lighting the path to the next weekend.

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non-exempt

is it true that everyone sits, anxiously waiting for the end? the last forty-five minutes are a gasp for oxygen, as the previous eight hours of life-asphyxiation numbed the brain cells down to incoherent stubs, and the chaos of synapses firing into, around, behind and beyond the screen makes your non-presence blink too fast. bend your neck to the left for a desperate glance at the same pictures and another sip of lukewarm. the coffee or the green or the black tea once warm made the lights too bright and the last tasks are the hardest to complete because they are all little buttons in the right places in front of you, and your fingers fly the keys again like you're motherfucking liszt and this cubicle is carnegie hall or a cockpit or something where you're perfect and

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