Static Part I

A hopeless loser gets fired. (This is the first chapter to a longer story, so it is incomplete)

Remember: you, who are your mother’s son and once your mother’s child whose life surely means the world to her, should love yourself as dearly as your mother loves you, for your mother’s love is not misplaced. So if today you can’t seem to find at least one reason to love yourself, then help yourself to this one: “I love me because Mom loves me.”

�"Bernard S. Seller

excerpt from The Confidence Man: Helping You Help Yourself to Higher Self-Worth

by: Bernard S. Seller

 

A column of vertically stacked pixels appeared then disappeared and then appeared again, blinking against the blank white backdrop of the monitor�"blink blank blink blank blink blank…  The centimeter tall pixilated line came and went on its infinite two-count cycle as monotonously as binary�"zero, one, zero, one, zero, one, zero, one, valley, peak, miss, hit, dead, alive, chaos, artistic design, not to be, to be, down, up, gone, here, now you don’t, now you see it, nothing, all�"all nothing. The cursor sped to the right materializing this arbitrary sequence of letters in its wake.

asdfjkliilkjfdsa

Terry Kant read what he had just keyed randomly written, and read it a second time as if perhaps the sequence held some meaning that he may have missed.  He scoffed, home row keys, forward and backwards, typer turrets,  a silent mantra of a mindless misfit, the blocked writer, a “blockhead” so to speak, a writer with absolutely nothing to say…pathetic.  He stabbed the “backspace” key with his pointer finger and a shot of sharp pain jolted up to its knuckle, yet he paid the pain little mind and pressed even harder. The cursor swept back to the left margin voiding each character as it went.  The cursor giveth and the cursor taketh away. But not evenhandedly, no.  The giving required nearly every key on the home row, twice over, yet on the other hand the taking took only one executive push and some sustained pressure of a single key (the key that undoes) and then it’s SIANORA NAGASAKI! “What is done cannot be undone”. What is undone cannot be undone, either.  Who can undo undoing?  No one, that’s who…

Blank, blink, blank, blink, blank, blink….

Terry stared at the screen and the damned cursor, his mind as blank and thoughtless as the blank page, a spot-on representation of what a tour through Terry Kant’s mind would look like.  (“Ladies and gentlemen welcome to the tour of Terry Kant’s mind.  If you look in any conceivable direction you’ll see endless nothing through infinite negative space. And that concludes our tour. Isn’t it marvelous that this fully functional mind is the zenith of static inactivity?”

A spark. He then wondered if God had had a cursor back in the gap, during the time before time when everything was nothing, before He became fed up with boredom.  Listlessness and boredom must afflict a supreme omnipotent being with an ineffable magnitude. Before God Big Banged Pizzazz into the universe, he must have been staring at something similar to a blank word document…

Blank, blink, blank, blink, blank, blink….

The cursor marks potential, staking out uncharted territory from its marginal outposts, scoping out the space where “nothing” is, and driven by the conceit of the artist or the designer or the creator, what may become may. Without it, existence could never be more than an eight-by-ten oblivion.

“BOO-YAH, B***H!” Terry’s boss Mr. Leyman shouted from his office down the hall (terry’s ex-boss, really, since ten o’clock that morning). He did that a lot and Terry hated it because it broke his concentration. It was especially annoying on the days Terry was lucky enough to actually be able to concentrate. It was usual for Mr. Leyman to sound off a loud and proud congratulatory yawp whenever he executed some small personal victory, sometimes work-related but most of the time not. Chances were strong that after an entire caffeine-fueled morning of losing hand after hand of solitaire, he finally triumphed. Terry could almost imagine him with the cold countenance of conqueror painted on his red face and standing before his computer menacingly humping the air. And to think Mr. Leyman fired Terry only an hour ago and he is still a dickhead.

Unfortunately, punctuality was not a virtue Terry possessed, and excessive tardiness had ruined him time and time over. It hadn’t been so much the arriving on time that daunted him but rather the leaving. If Terry lived at the office and slept at his desk then he probably would never be late…probably. It had always been the leaving that caused him so much trouble, the drastic change in scenery, the commute, going from the comfortable and blessedly controlled atmosphere of the imperceptible familiarity of a home out into the chaotic outdoor as a newborn violently shoved from the womb into the cold light of the world, the transformation from parasite into a self-sustaining being catalyzed by the simple snip of a tether, the bond between mother and child no longer tangible and existing from then on solely in the abstract of unconditional love. Terry was due on January 13^th, born December 31^st.

Due dates and dead lines, dos and don’ts, late is late, and dead is dead, debt pays what debt owes.

Terry was told that he had to be out of the building by noon sharp. He had been waiting at his desk since then. For at least four months now his termination has been a matter of “when.” Before becoming a matter of “when,” it had been a matter of “if,” as in he might get fired yet he might not. Before today over the past four months, the plight of his firing loomed in his future like certain death, and death is nothing else if not certain, so he kept his desk barren of personal belongings and boxing the knickknacks this morning took hardly any time at all. He had kept the box handy in his cubicle for this occasion, like reserving a coffin.

It was 11:45 AM now. He woke up an hour before, recognizing immediately that something was amiss�"misery or severe depression or the inclination to hack off pieces of his oh-so comfy, tucked-in body in exchange for as many extra zees as a severed body part could afford, these attributes that unfalteringly accompany Terry’s waking downtrodden spirit all were curiously absent. He did not feel the need to curse God or the rising sun or the crowing c***s or the sewing farmers or the early birds chirp-chirping at dawn and pecking obnoxiously at the sleepy nightcrawlers. “O Sun to tell thee how I hate thy beams!”

Instead he awoke feeling blissfully rejuvenated. How sweet it is to rise from slumber by the cue of circadian rhythm, gentle and considerated to your needs, waking you only after you have slept a spell sufficient that the experience of rejoining the waking world is one to be reveled. The slight seconds worth of enjoyment toward the welcomed feeling of well-rest was beheaded as quickly as a mole from its burrow that peeks but a mere glimpse of lovely radiance just before the fast-fast fanning sharp metal shard chew-grinds the little digger’s furry mousy skull brain and spits the pureed red mist and powdered calcium carbonate all over the 13^th hole green.

Waking naturally wasn’t normal. The disconcerting buzz-buzz trumpeting from the digital alarm clock was his daily welcoming back to the waking world every workday morning. Every workday morning that raucous sound mauled spikes into his eardrum until his eyelids tore themselves free from their respective bloodshot orbs likes hot wax strips from a hair back. Only that didn’t happened this time. He looked toward the clock with a fading smile and its face in flashing, angry red digits stared blinkingly back at him�"       ,12:00,     ,12:00,      12:00…blank, blink, blank, blink, blank, blink…

His alarm clocked did not fire in time to wake him up, and when he woke up he was already late, late is late and dead is dead and debt pays what debt owes. Mr. Leyman had told him if after his last tardy that if you’re going to be late than don’t come in at all. But Terry did go in although he knew he would be canned¸ perhaps out of spite, perhaps not. Mostly he had left his copy of The Confidence Man, and he didn’t want to lose it. He could have bought another copy, but his was annotated and doggy eared, and possessed sentimental value. He needed it. So he went to work.

And so there he was.

It was 11:45 AM, now… “You have until Noon to box your s**t up and get the f**k out of the building, and if your a*s isn’t out the front door by then, I’ll have security escort you out. And believe you me, padnuh, a big fat pay bonus goes to the guard who lodges a boot up your a*s the deepest. Copy that?” Mr. Leyman had said. So it was time to leave. At his desk, Terry moved his mouse around a bit, left-clicked a few times, pressed a combination of keys, typed for a short burst, picked up his box of knickknacks, and the left without bothering to shut off his computer. And in the center of the word document was this:

 

DOUCHEBAG

 

And to the very right of the uppercase “G,” of course, was the cursor. Blank, Blink, Blank, blink, blank, blink…

Author's Note

A potential first chapter to a much longer story.

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[Terry Kant]

Afterword: The character Terry Kant is not me. Terry Kant is a psudonym that I picked from this story. I also have many other works that are of a much higher caliber than what I've been posting, but they were posted under my ex girlfriend's account. Having just broken up, I can't get her to return the work to me. So should you happen to want to view more of my writing, than search "lady rosaline" (I think). Sorry, for the unrelated note, but it's frustrating not being able to share my early work or take credit for it, which are pieces that I am proudest of.