Workplace Anxiety

The Nehalem Pyramid

At first the pyramid over Nehalem was a little black chip in the sky. It had probably been there for weeks before anyone noticed, but once it was spotted it was only a matter of hours before everyone in the town knew about it. Which isn’t saying so much— only two hundred some people live in Nehalem. And, just being a speck floating up in the sky, it was forgotten before long, around the time the local paper ran their story on it.

“Is it getting bigger?”, people started asking a few days later, necks craned, squinting into the sky. Someone in town with a telescope made a time-lapse of it, and indeed it was gradually getting bigger. The local paper wrote a follow-up to their earlier story, which included the time-lapse video. The story quickly went viral. Journalists and tourists and ufologists started flooding into the town.

The pyramid got bigger over the summer and took on a definite shape to the naked eye. By September it was big enough that for two hours at midday the town was wholly in its shadow. The population of Nehalem grew along with the pyramid. People came from all over the world to see the it, this impossible thing. All these people came with their money in hand, and a lot of folks in Nehalem—not a wealthy town by any means—found themselves suddenly flush with cash. The military also came to town, with their scientists, to understand the pyramid and mitigate the risk it might pose, but the scientists managed only to learn that the pyramid was made of iron and the military, with no understanding of the pyramid, had no plausible means of mitigating anything.

For lack of any better idea, the town was evacuated. No one was allowed within a mile of it. There was a lot of grumbling about it, but only few people ignored the order to stay out, a group of tourists from California, and they all got caught and spent the night in jail. For a month the pyramid didn’t grow, didn’t do anything. A rich Silicon Valley venture capitalist, who had taken a keen interest in the pyramid and was used to bulldozing with money anything in his way, bankrolled a lawsuit against the government to get the ban lifted, and in mid-October it was.

People came flooding back into Nehalem, eager to have what they had been denied. There was some worry that the pyramid would start growing again with all the people returning, like one had something to do with the other, but the pyramid went on floating there as it had since the start of Autumn.

For the remainder of October the skies stayed clear, but the rain had to come eventually, and when it did the cloud cover meant no one could see the pyramid anymore. Sometimes a dark square could be seen through the clouds and remind the townsfolk the pyramid was still there. The tourists had left—taking their cash with them—and the military had become such a fixture that they went unseen. Everyday life in Nehalem resumed.

The 25 Bus

It was a clear, warm, summer morning. Jim was doubled over at the bus stop catching his breath. His alarm hadn’t gone off—or he had turned it off in his sleep—so to make his bus he had to rush out the door and run all the way. Now he wasn’t sure, had he missed the bus, or was it coming any minute? He took out his phone to check the time, but—shit!—in his hurry he’d left it back at home.

Five and then ten minutes passed, or at least what Jim thought was ten minutes, and still the 25 bus didn’t come round the bend. It’d be another hour before the next one. Might as well go home, Jim thought. Call into work and tell them he’d be late. But just as he was about to leave, the 25 came toddling into view. Jim was relieved for a moment, and then not: There was something wrong with the bus. It was crawling down the road, limping, dragging itself. A broken-down bus wouldn’t get him to work on time, wouldn’t get him anywhere, so before it had even reached his stop Jim had given up on it and was headed back home.

The bus’s engine suddenly roared and it billowed a cloud of black exhaust and lurched forward, jumping the curb, flattening the bus stop sign—the one Jim had just been standing by—and running down the embankment along the highway. After a moment of stunned inaction, Jim followed the bus, running down the embankment muttering, “Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit”, as he went. The bus was still running, the engine still roaring and the exhaust still belching black smoke, but its tires were only spinning in place and digging into the earth now. A fir tree at the bottom of the hill had caught the bus and was holding it in place.

Jim couldn’t see inside the bus, the windows were tinted. He approached several times to try to pry open the doors, but the bus was growling and trembling like a wounded animal, and Jim was scared back. Eventually he did get hands on the door, but he couldn’t pull it open. Water was trickling out of the seams. His hands were left wet, and they smelled, a strange smell, like the ocean, and vinegar, and road kill that’s been left too long and popped.

Unable to do anything to help, Jim stepped back and could only watch. If he’d had his phone then he would’ve called for help, but he didn’t have his phone. Maybe he could flag down a car. He tromped back up the embankment. He looked up and down the street, but there wasn’t a single car. It’d been quite that morning, he recalled. He would’ve noticed if the streets were deserted, wouldn’t he?

Back down the hill, the bus started coughing and choking, and then it shuddered and died. The doors flung open and the water emptied out. The windows, it turned out, weren’t tinted, the bus was just filled with water so murky it looked black— or would a bus full of clean water look just as black? In any event the water that had filled the bus wasn’t clean. Seaweed spilled out with it, and sea stars, driftwood, barnacles… and body parts, human body parts, gooey and partially dissolved. The smell coming out with the water didn’t have the undertones of acidity or brine like the little bit Jim had gotten on his arms. Even from several yards away and up on the sidewalk, Jim started gagging on the smell of death and decomposition almost as soon as the doors were opened.

And still not a car to be seen, until, at last, limping round the bend, came the 25 bus—another 25 bus—with windows tinted black, and water trickling from every seam.

The It

If you see it, you’ll always see it. You’ll try to ignore it, knowing as you do how much easier it is to get along if you don’t see it, but ignoring is seeing, and it will be so much harder to get along.

Based on a True Story

A clump of popsicle sticks and rubber bands somehow became animate and set out to free solo El Capitan. It did well until two thirds of the way up, when It was caught in an ice storm. The cold made its rubber bands brittle and they snapped and the clump was undone and the broken bits of rubber and wood were scattered. Someone would’ve gone out to recover the body, such as it was, but only one person knew anything about it, and he couldn’t be bothered.

American, Full Stop

That scene in American Beauty—the neighbor boy’s video of the plastic bag blowing in the wind—was computer generated because, really, there isn’t any beauty in the world.

The Good Samaritan

“What’s your birthday?”

“May 9th, 1969.”

A dental assistant is going through the usual routine with a new patient, a forty-eight year old man, clean shaven with a buzz cut, red hair flecked with white, a bald spot on the crown of his head, and dressed nicely with a pastel blue button up shirt, black slacks, a leather belt and shiny black leather dress shoes. He’s sitting in the dentist’s chair, reclined— the cuffs of his pants are hiked up, and the dental assistant can see even his socks are nice dress socks, dark blue argyle. But the man isn’t nice, she can see that clearly enough. Not to say that he’s mean, but he isn’t nice as in nicely dressed. This dentist’s office mostly gets poor people, people on state insurance. The man may be nicely dressed but he’s actually a bum, one that’s been taken in by some religious do-gooder who’s gotten him cleaned up, dressed up, and on state insurance, amongst other things. Their hope for him is that, if they can get him on his feet, he’ll be able to walk, so to speak, but unfortunately they’re wrong, in this case. The man may be kind, and gentle, and clean, as in not a drug addict, but he’s been on his feet before and each time winded up indigent. He’s dressed nicely but his face is weathered and he has the mannerisms of a prey animal, so nobody would be fooled.

“Are you taking any prescription medications?”

The man shakes his head no.

“Are you currently experiencing any tooth pain?”

The man again shakes his head no.

She fastens a cuff around his left wrist to measure his blood pressure. She instructs him to uncross his ankles, which he does, then she places his hand over his right shoulder and starts the machine. His blood pressure is on the high end of the normal range. She raises his chair, and he jumps. She apologizes for startling him, and explains she’s going to take some x-rays. She leaves the room for a moment and returns with a lead vest that she drapes over his torso and shoulders. She prepares a film for the first x-ray, wrapping it in plastic.

“Open”, she says, and the man does. He has no teeth. In place of teeth he has bits of gravel, shards of glass, screws and springs embedded in his gums, which are oozing bright red, fresh blood.

The sky got darker, but not like at sunset. The sun wasn't setting, it was shrinking, smaller and smaller but always still definitely the sun, until all at once there was night, Venus was out, the streetlights were lit, and only a wispy, hollowed out skeleton remained. It hanged there for about a minute, and people set off fireworks because people are obnoxious. Then a new sun grew out of the bones of the old one, and everything was possible again.

The Whole Point of the Cult

The whole point of the cult was to scratch together a little money, enough to stay afloat and give me the time to write, and then, hopefully, make a name for myself as a writer and, if I were lucky, get to a place where I could do it for a living. After that I’d tell my disciples that they’ve made it, that they didn’t need me anymore, that the faith was in their hands now. But almost from the start it took over my life, pushing everything else out. Now, even if I could find the time, I could never be a writer. The only people that would read anything I wrote would be my disciples, and to them it would be the infallible word of god. If anyone else even chanced upon my writing, the first thing they’d know about it is that it was written by that crazy cult leader they sort of recall hearing about once before. In either case, who wrote it overshadows what’s written.

You know, I never wanted a job. I never wanted to be employed, to be someone’s instrument, to be someone’s object. All I wanted was to carve out just a little space, a little time, where I could do what I pleased. Where I could write. That’s why I started the cult.

Remember the last time the FCC nearly killed net neutrality?

Tumblr had this nice big banner at the top of your dashboard alerting any active user about the problem. Guess what has changed since then? Verizon, one of the companies gunning for the death of net neutrality owns yahoo who in turn own Tumblr. Spread the word, tell everyone you can: battleforthenet.com tag posts you see about net neutrality with popular tags so the news spreads.

Novice Wizard

Harry Potter’s a lie. Magic doesn’t require wands, and there aren’t different sorts of magic, and it doesn’t have any rules. Magic is simply commanding reality, saying the sky is red, and then it’s red, or that the river is ice, and then it’s ice, or that the young woman manning the tacky little hat shop is an old woman, and then she’s an old woman. It’s as simple as that, if you have magic, and impossible of you don’t.

Here we have a novice wizard. “Don’t lock the door”, his dad had said, because his dad didn’t have the key to get back in. But our novice wizard saw in this an opportunity to develop his magic, so he locked the door and shut it. If his magic was strong enough he would just tell the door to open, and the door would be open.

His magic wasn’t strong enough. Now his dad was angry with him. It was hot outside, and boring, and they were already late for lunch before they got locked out of the house. But these are small things. If our wizard is ever to develop his magic, then he has to lock doors that he has no key to, over and over again, until he finds his magic. And if he never does, then he’s found that he lacks magic, which is almost as good, for it’s a much better thing to find by trying that you have no magic than it is to never find—by never trying—that you do.