2: on Bureaucrats. 07.10.2009

Mostly, I feel sorry for their plants. Just because I have one too - one of those sorry, ever-green desk plants – that doesn’t make me one of them. I’ve never claimed to have a green thumb, but I do at least sense when plants are languishing, lonely, or are horribly misplaced. Inevitably, months after the plant’s arrival on my desk, one of them, the quiet, friendly, narcoleptic one, approached me to let me know my plant pleased him ‘because it was very symmetrical’. Oh, why yes. It is, I checked after that. Circular, six-leaved fronds, indeed. I probably furrowed my brows for a second after he notified me, just to be sure the plant was as elegantly designed as he’d suggested, and that the interaction had in fact, actually happened. Sometimes conversations, or signs of life in this atmosphere can just be mirages.

All his shirts are thin, but never wrinkled. No doubt they’ve thinned over time, their print-free cotton tenderly laundered, perhaps every Monday and Thursday evening between the hours of 9PM and 6AM. These may or may not be the times between which other people are usually found asleep, or carousing, or cooking, or eating things that are not turkey sandwiches, or any number of other activities. I’ve noticed that these thin cotton shirts can be paired with anything; anything being a blue sweater which must have been born at least 10 years ago, or the beige jacket. Yes, armed with the same medium-blue sweater which somehow never fades, and the beige cotton zipper jacket which cannot fade, you can be anything, or anyone. Maybe the fellow has more than one of the medium-blue sweaters. Maybe that’s the secret to its seemingly everlasting middle-age. It must have several twins, or else he somehow discovered a sole-source contracted supplier of subtly overworn, shapeless blue sweaters.

“Bureaucrat” is just another word for people with bad hair. Or maybe it’s just unnervingly thin hair, or hair that somehow, other than the inevitable graying, never changes over a four-plus decade-long period. Bureaucrats are people who lovingly say the same phrases over and over, week after week, and year after year. Whether it’s a resounding, “For those who just came in, instructions are on the bulletin board to the right”, or, “We can be more restrictive but not less restrictive”, these are the people who relish repetition and the comforts of timeless predictability. They have mastered the withering glare and the disturbing habit of nonchalantly bursting into of fits of righteous anger, the roots of which remain a mystery to me. Because certain signs never move, and certain information must always be disseminated, these people must exist to alternately serve and then hinder us. Bureaucrats are the stoic guardians of the immutable, the world’s necessary kings and queens of the mystical realm of Eversame.

I think they glow under florescent lighting, while I pale. They bask in beiges and dusty cream hues and are the world’s greatest connoisseurs of plain artworks, like idyllic, pastel prints of nothing, or country landscapes, or oil paintings of coffee cups. They secretly cherish the dust bunnies that collect behind and underneath multiple-line telephones, and smile at the thought of resisting the implementation of new ‘procedures’. They walk amongst us unnoticed, glaring at new things and misinterpreting colors for threats. They collect calendars of wildlife prints from Greenpeace, own fabulous arrays of polyester shirts, drink coffee like it’s been stolen from grandma’s liquor cabinet and talk about ‘taco Tuesdays’ with an intensity unrivalled by most Olympians. Some of them don’t even venture out to taco Tuesdays – they just work through lunch every day and most weekends, drinking four, five sixseveneight cups of straight black coffee until their veins run brown and visible beneath their pale, spongy skin. Timeless, and Tabasco and turkey at 1:15 PM. Every day.