During the meeting, the department head, Florian, was looking over at Mike and Jenny and furrowing his brow. Mike scribbled and doodled like they all did, because meetings in the afterlife were even more rambling and pointless than they are in the here and now. At one point, when Bryan from accounting was talking about issues concerning the new shekel and how figures from past accounting would have to be migrated to the tables indicating...blah..blah...blah, he caught Florian doing it again. He and Jenny glanced at each other quizzically.
"Ask him" she mouthed the words.
"no, YOU" he mouthed back.
She kicked him under the conference table..
"Wanker...."
"jackass" he replied softly.
Florian, realizing what was going on hmmmphed, and wagged his finger at the both of them, just as he would have during his old old monastic days.
Finally, something from the mayors office. The demonic bureacrats would occassionally teleconference if there was reason to. The battered plastic thingy on the table started talking about current events. Now, demonic voices are almost impossible to discern at first since they use static the way we use whatever the heck it is we use to talk.
"kkkkkkk eeeeee iiii uahooo.........Thank you all for your kind attention" it went on to squawk and hiss.
"Lately, you might have noticed that the damned have been wandering around a lot more than usual. In fact, some of them seem intent on settling down by the old Roman afterlife area. As I'm sure you'll agree, they are a nuisance because they often prove intrusive and they also draw our minions....uh, orcs...(We rather like that one, yes). Truth to tell there are just so damned many of them, no pun intended, and life up top as it were is so awful and pointless and grim that, they just aren't suffering enough. By the time they get here, they are so thoroughly mean and nasty....well, I don't mean to bore you with shop talk..."
Actually, Mike was quite interested. He'd been here so long and there were always nuances and loopholes to look into.
"I just want to make sure you understand that management..and I mean local and UNIVERSAL management are going to make some changes soon and I think you may appreciate those changes....at least we all hope you will. Umm, have a nice day, everybody, Thanks so much.
Then he was out..
.Bryan used a clipboard to swat at the flames coming from the conference speaker.
Mike was just about to swivel out of his chair and make dash for his office. He was suddenly very interested in his field phone and his 13....12 files. Jenny had the same idea and, since she was smarter and faster than he was, she was almost to the door.
"Mike...Jenny..a word with you both please." Florian spoke quietly and calmly and just a bit amused. The way he said their names, it might just as well have been "come here tweedle dee and tweedle dumbass"
" You two are my best workers, I want you to know that, which is why, when management asked me to pick mentors for two new hires...I just had to pick you. That and the fact is that you are so good that you are getting lazy and we can't have that."
Florian always had to mix sincere praise with humourous criticism.
Mike spoke up first, " I thought we were in trouble..."
"Well, I'm not doing you any favors, that's for sure."
"When are they getting here, chief?"
"About fifteen minutes. Neither one of you have ever had a new hire so I suggest
you actually read your employee handbook you ignored on your first day here about
forever ago"
"Damn, I never read that thing. It's propping up my monitor"
"Me neither, " said Mike,
"And, unlike you, I never had a mentor"
"Why not?" he asked.
" I'm an old fashioned Etruscan girl.In My day, you woke up by a river after you died
and started walking, either that or you got to turn into an olive tree.
Sitting behind his desk, trying to concentrate on the parchment and leather employee handbook, he remembered how he first felt in his first moments of afterlife. He was confused and kept telling himself he was in a coma or asleep in the hospital or he was just dozing on his sofa next to the radio and horror of horrors, he was dead and naked on a wooden bench like they have in train stations.
Florian's voice interrupted his reverie. "Mike, it's time. Don't keep her waiting"
He got up and grabbed the book almost spilling its loos pages on the ground.
"Oh, and Mike, don't forget my coat"
He grabbed the coat off the rack in the corner of his office by the doorway. It was luxurious, chocolate brown leather with a smooth silk lining black and loving. It was the same coat Florian had put over him when he went down to tell him all about afterlife.
Monday, September 29, 2008
Thursday, September 25, 2008
Pissville
Now, he's at work. The building is modern and clean. He walks in past the security desk. There is a short elevator ride and then he leaves the lift and goes straight ahead into his office. The desk is a shiny slab of black wood like an expensive piece of chocolate. There are modern chairs in front of it and a black filing cabinet. On the surface of the desk is his laptop and, in contrast to everything else, a battered, grey and black german army field telephone, its black and stiff wires run into the sleek shining baseboard of the office. There is a small shiny red box with a little gold perforated speaker disk in the middle of it. right by his left elbow.
There was a soft knock on his doorway. He never closed his door at work. In walks Jenny Enyone. Today, she had bright red hair and freckles on her pale skin. Yesterday, she was black haired and blue eyed. She went through a phase last week where she was about six feet tall and black as licorice with corn rows.
"Hey, Jenny, that's a good look for you. How's it going?"
"Well, it's going. Do you have the Manson file?
He scoots over to the cabinet and pulls out a manilla folder about five inches thick and hands it to her.
"Glad to get rid of it. Are you taking it over for now?
"I guess so, everyone gets this damn thing eventually."
He was glad to be rid of it even though it was one of only thirteen he was actively working on.
A voice comes over the little red box,
"Ok everyone, staff meeting in five minutes..."
"Guess we better mosey, huh?" says Jenny.
There was a soft knock on his doorway. He never closed his door at work. In walks Jenny Enyone. Today, she had bright red hair and freckles on her pale skin. Yesterday, she was black haired and blue eyed. She went through a phase last week where she was about six feet tall and black as licorice with corn rows.
"Hey, Jenny, that's a good look for you. How's it going?"
"Well, it's going. Do you have the Manson file?
He scoots over to the cabinet and pulls out a manilla folder about five inches thick and hands it to her.
"Glad to get rid of it. Are you taking it over for now?
"I guess so, everyone gets this damn thing eventually."
He was glad to be rid of it even though it was one of only thirteen he was actively working on.
A voice comes over the little red box,
"Ok everyone, staff meeting in five minutes..."
"Guess we better mosey, huh?" says Jenny.
Monday, September 22, 2008
Pissville
Mike lived in hell. Actually, he lived in a suburb of hell between purgatory and south central hell. The town he lived in constantly changed names as it grew and shrank due to lava flows and insanity. Currently, his town was named pissville.
Before that it was named assneck after the famous televangelist Jerry Falwell. They had a parade for him when he died and a couple of orcs continually shoved his bawling head up his own ass while they forced him barefoot along the jagged streets into hell. He had to toss his own salad just to get enough breath to scream.
Oh yes, another thing about hell is that the current slang for demons is Orcs. "Demon" sounds so medieval. Orc is kind of cool and contemporary. You would think that a place of eternal torment and damnation would be rooted in tradition, but it's not. Everything keeps changing arbitrarily at a maddening pace. It's one of the more subtle punishments especially since so many souls here are old and peevish and they hate change. Besides, like the rule book says, "if you do anything long enough you'll get used to it..and we can't have that".
Mike was running late for work as always. He didn't have time for breakfast so he grabbed a moldy poptart and bolted out the door. He lived on the bottom floor of a two story brick house. There was an industrial noise band that lived upstairs. This guaranteed that he only got four or five hours of sleep a night. Last night, they were using a desert eagle .357 magnum pistol and an oil drum to lay down a rhythm track on their new album. The house had white picket fence and he walked down the sidewalk strewn with fast food wrappers and mickey's big mouth bottles. This was a sure sign that orcs had been hanging out last night. Sure enough, there were greasy hand prints on his windshield and a ropy turd on the hood. He caught a flash of movement out of the corner of his eye and moved aside just in time to avoid two orcs throwing what looked like Donald Trump on the hood of his car laughing and shouting, "You're FIRED!! now eat that shit, beeyatch!" They were frog marching him around and his trousers were down around his ankles. They moved on.Eventually, Trump would get sucked in to hell where the real torture would start.
Mike was not slated for extreme damnation. He was an atheist who was never fully evangelized. In fact, he never heard about God and Jesus until he was in his thirties and that was mostly in a litrature class he was taking at the local community college. It never really piqued his curiosity. He led a quiet, decent life with more ups than downs and ended up getting hit by a bus while walking to the store to get his girlfriend a hershey bar and some tampons. See, a pretty nice guy.
This morning, though, he was running late for his job at the Infernal Review Service. He worked as a claims reviewer at the IRS. You see, there is a special phone deep in the bowels of hell which the damned struggle to find, and after much hardship, they reach it in hopes that their pleas for leniency will be successful. Usually they are put on hold where they are forced to listen to the most horrible music ever for ....a very..long...time. Then, they are told to leave a voice mail with a call back number and their Soul Index Number. Not one of them has a phone with any bars and no one has ever really been given their Soul Index Number. Mike is there for the ones who actually get through. He begins to tell the frantic callers how they can in fact, get their Soul Index Number and file a form to have their iniquities reviewed. It is usually at this point that the phone cuts out and the caller hs to try again and again. Of all the souls who have tried, only a handfull have gotten reviews and had their sentences reduced. This seems to be a punishment reserved for bureaucrats and health insurance executives who put people through bureucratic nightmares while they suffered and died waiting for help that the company just needed a little more time to get the right forms filed.
Mike hated his afterlive, but he had to admit it wasn't all bad.
Before that it was named assneck after the famous televangelist Jerry Falwell. They had a parade for him when he died and a couple of orcs continually shoved his bawling head up his own ass while they forced him barefoot along the jagged streets into hell. He had to toss his own salad just to get enough breath to scream.
Oh yes, another thing about hell is that the current slang for demons is Orcs. "Demon" sounds so medieval. Orc is kind of cool and contemporary. You would think that a place of eternal torment and damnation would be rooted in tradition, but it's not. Everything keeps changing arbitrarily at a maddening pace. It's one of the more subtle punishments especially since so many souls here are old and peevish and they hate change. Besides, like the rule book says, "if you do anything long enough you'll get used to it..and we can't have that".
Mike was running late for work as always. He didn't have time for breakfast so he grabbed a moldy poptart and bolted out the door. He lived on the bottom floor of a two story brick house. There was an industrial noise band that lived upstairs. This guaranteed that he only got four or five hours of sleep a night. Last night, they were using a desert eagle .357 magnum pistol and an oil drum to lay down a rhythm track on their new album. The house had white picket fence and he walked down the sidewalk strewn with fast food wrappers and mickey's big mouth bottles. This was a sure sign that orcs had been hanging out last night. Sure enough, there were greasy hand prints on his windshield and a ropy turd on the hood. He caught a flash of movement out of the corner of his eye and moved aside just in time to avoid two orcs throwing what looked like Donald Trump on the hood of his car laughing and shouting, "You're FIRED!! now eat that shit, beeyatch!" They were frog marching him around and his trousers were down around his ankles. They moved on.Eventually, Trump would get sucked in to hell where the real torture would start.
Mike was not slated for extreme damnation. He was an atheist who was never fully evangelized. In fact, he never heard about God and Jesus until he was in his thirties and that was mostly in a litrature class he was taking at the local community college. It never really piqued his curiosity. He led a quiet, decent life with more ups than downs and ended up getting hit by a bus while walking to the store to get his girlfriend a hershey bar and some tampons. See, a pretty nice guy.
This morning, though, he was running late for his job at the Infernal Review Service. He worked as a claims reviewer at the IRS. You see, there is a special phone deep in the bowels of hell which the damned struggle to find, and after much hardship, they reach it in hopes that their pleas for leniency will be successful. Usually they are put on hold where they are forced to listen to the most horrible music ever for ....a very..long...time. Then, they are told to leave a voice mail with a call back number and their Soul Index Number. Not one of them has a phone with any bars and no one has ever really been given their Soul Index Number. Mike is there for the ones who actually get through. He begins to tell the frantic callers how they can in fact, get their Soul Index Number and file a form to have their iniquities reviewed. It is usually at this point that the phone cuts out and the caller hs to try again and again. Of all the souls who have tried, only a handfull have gotten reviews and had their sentences reduced. This seems to be a punishment reserved for bureaucrats and health insurance executives who put people through bureucratic nightmares while they suffered and died waiting for help that the company just needed a little more time to get the right forms filed.
Mike hated his afterlive, but he had to admit it wasn't all bad.
Thursday, September 11, 2008
Is wrestling fake?
Today marks 7 years since the terrible day. Now, a lot of people are putting two fingers up their asses and waving their plastic flags for the government and that's just sad. A lot of other people are squawking about how it was an inside job and the ________________, (insert wacky culprits here..ie. Jews, Masons, Bildebergers, renegade CIA agents, Bonesmen, iraqis, iranians, whatever) are responsible because they have taken over the government and that's just fucking stupid. But so much bullshit prevails about that and everything else we've gotten into like....
1. THEY HATE US FOR OUR FREEDOM-- Call Bullshit on that. They hate us because we have been supporting repressive regimes all over the region in order to keep a lid on their weird populist religious political parties. The leaders of these movements are not as mallleable as the current ones. Therefore, we help keep a lid on them and they can't do shit about it....until they spend about three quarters of a million bucks and send some assholes to drop the towers and do something with the pentagon , maybe. I still don't know what they meant to accomplish..oh yeah, dragging a super power into their own turf and radicalizing the populace against them, kinda like they did with the Soviets.
2. U.S. TROOPS ARE FIGHTING FOR OUR FREEDOM-- Again, "Ca-Ca del Toro". U.S. troops are out there doing it because they are professionals and they are the best. They raised their hands and took an oath. They are for the most part extremely honorable and dedicated to protecting the weak from the strong. Defending my freedom is MY job..and I took the same oath they did a long time ago. I still haven't UN-taken it.
3. WE MUST ACHEIVE "VICTORY" IN IRAQ-- Our troops won the campaign way back in 03. What we have here is an occupation..or reconstruction, if you will.There is no victory. We are not occupiers. This whole exercise has been tried in Iraq before. Look it up in the history books to see how well that worked.
Don't get me started on that whole fake Republican Vs. Democrat thing. At least in wrestling you might get to see some trailer trash chicks between matches.
1. THEY HATE US FOR OUR FREEDOM-- Call Bullshit on that. They hate us because we have been supporting repressive regimes all over the region in order to keep a lid on their weird populist religious political parties. The leaders of these movements are not as mallleable as the current ones. Therefore, we help keep a lid on them and they can't do shit about it....until they spend about three quarters of a million bucks and send some assholes to drop the towers and do something with the pentagon , maybe. I still don't know what they meant to accomplish..oh yeah, dragging a super power into their own turf and radicalizing the populace against them, kinda like they did with the Soviets.
2. U.S. TROOPS ARE FIGHTING FOR OUR FREEDOM-- Again, "Ca-Ca del Toro". U.S. troops are out there doing it because they are professionals and they are the best. They raised their hands and took an oath. They are for the most part extremely honorable and dedicated to protecting the weak from the strong. Defending my freedom is MY job..and I took the same oath they did a long time ago. I still haven't UN-taken it.
3. WE MUST ACHEIVE "VICTORY" IN IRAQ-- Our troops won the campaign way back in 03. What we have here is an occupation..or reconstruction, if you will.There is no victory. We are not occupiers. This whole exercise has been tried in Iraq before. Look it up in the history books to see how well that worked.
Don't get me started on that whole fake Republican Vs. Democrat thing. At least in wrestling you might get to see some trailer trash chicks between matches.
Saturday, September 6, 2008
hard times..
Worked a little lick today. Met some interesting people. Quote of the day was....
"you gotta work seven days a week to get your nuts outta the mud"
yeah, damn right.
I am amazed by how many of the men I work with are talking hatefully about the political situation. Even the most mild mannered ones I talk to are saying that we need to overthrow the government or that the government should be afraid of us and not the other way around. It makes me wonder if there is going to be a secret police set up just to keep these kinds of sentiments from acheiving some kind of critical mass.
There's only so much talk radio bullshit people are willing to listen to. You can only raise the threat level to orange so many times or talk about victory when there is no real war just an occupation and a desperate effort to keep a lid on everything that could come back and bite us in the ass after all stupid things the ivy league "deciders" have done.
There's only so many reports on how strong the economy is and how things are just about to turn the corner that people can register.
push a man and he pushes back.
"you gotta work seven days a week to get your nuts outta the mud"
yeah, damn right.
I am amazed by how many of the men I work with are talking hatefully about the political situation. Even the most mild mannered ones I talk to are saying that we need to overthrow the government or that the government should be afraid of us and not the other way around. It makes me wonder if there is going to be a secret police set up just to keep these kinds of sentiments from acheiving some kind of critical mass.
There's only so much talk radio bullshit people are willing to listen to. You can only raise the threat level to orange so many times or talk about victory when there is no real war just an occupation and a desperate effort to keep a lid on everything that could come back and bite us in the ass after all stupid things the ivy league "deciders" have done.
There's only so many reports on how strong the economy is and how things are just about to turn the corner that people can register.
push a man and he pushes back.
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