circuit

My city is changing again. Every so often I turn down a street and discover a new building or an empty lot that I'd never noticed before, and it occurs to me that a whole cycle of construction and destruction has wheeled around without me noticing, and now there's a puke-ugly car dealership lording it over the block where a row of old brick warehouses once stood. Or a crumbling old movie theatre disappears behind its facade and a grocery store unfolds in its place.

I'm sorry, I can't continue this. I have no internet right now at home. My ISP is staffed by bureaucratic assholes who like to make us wait for a week before sending out a technician to "hook up" our computer to the "internet". I use my oh-so ironic quotation marks in order to highlight the fact that he hooked up nothing to nothing, and that the internet is not being piped in to our new place. Now we wait for tech support to call us. That's right: we don't call tech support. Tech support takes our calls, fumbles around and then tells us when someone who knows something about IT calls back. Our ISP: run out of a guano-covered tarpaper shed in an abandoned lot.

Yes, I have the internet at work. That's where I am. But as I type I can hear the business manager and the legal affairs guy chatting away in the next room about contracts and sales and markets. And I have realized something: as decent folk as they are, as decent as all these employees and middle- and upper managers may be, as much as they smile and drink water from paper cups and ask me what I'm doing for the long weekend, I just hate them. Really. I can't think because the sound of their murmured voices in the next room squishes my brain until all the metaphors dribble out. I have jokes to crack and stories to relate and thoughts that I've been collecting for the last week at least, but the email announcing free Avril Lavigne tickets for management first and then employees if any tickets are left over swishes down like a giant broom and all is swept away.

On the plus side, our new place kicks so much ass that, um, there's sore asses for blocks around. Now that I think about it, our new place may not kick ass so much as commit a lot of sodomy.