6 months earlier
Elizabeth: I’m going to be a call-centre supervisor someday.
Me: High ambitions, no doubt…
Elizabeth: I know when you’re mocking me, you know… Better option than you, isn’t it?
Me: You mean more successful? Sure
Elizabeth: And you still don’t care?
Me: Nope
Elizabeth: God Almighty…
Me: There’s a disgruntled dude right there…
Elizabeth: Where?
Me: You just mentioned him…
Elizabeth: Don’t start now…
Me: Alright
Elizabeth: Did you hear about Matt?
Me: What about him?
Elizabeth: He’s going to be fired today.
Me: What for?
Elizabeth: Downsizing
Me: In a call-centre? Hmm… uh… really?
Elizabeth: There he comes… should we say something?
Matt stumbles through the disorganized organization of groups of people pretending to grieve with him
And pieces of retractable furniture in the office
Almost like he’s disoriented
Or on a methamphetamine high
He moves through the mass of consoling ex-co-workers
Having no other thought in his head
Other than the words “You’re fired”
Played on a weird looping mechanism, with distortion ever so slightly
In his head
We all take turns patting his back
Throwing extra bits of stationary we don’t want anymore
Into his moving-out box
As a gesture of goodwill, as a going-away present
As he finally manages to reach the door
And steps outside
The rest of the office exhales a breath of remarkable restraint
As they calculate that the time since Matt left the Manager’s Office to the Office’s Exit
A meager three minutes
To have been the most boring, dragged out & depressing three minutes of their extraordinary lives.
Not me.
I watch as Matt walks out
Staring over my cubicle
At the sight of pure defeat
Pure Sorrow. Pure Psychotic Cerebral Sadness.
Unlike most of us
He enjoyed working here
I wonder what options go through his head now
A trip to the supermarket to buy five feet of rope
Maybe a visit to the pharmacists to get some form of Sertraline
Maybe a warm bath with moisturizing oils
A rubber duck
And a small knife
Having the best smoke of his life
On the exhaust of a car
Accentuated Bleakness
We’re part of a system
That allows something like this to happen
It isn’t about who works the hardest anymore
It’s about who dies soon enough
Allowing the company
To employ someone else
Who’s cheaper to afford
Thereby increasing profits
I hope that’s as blandly-simple as possible
For the rest of these delusional morons working here
To comprehend
Someday.
Do I care? No.
Would I care? Probably not.
I seem to remember myself
Being the only one
To watch Matt walk to the door entirely
And think about what he would do
In the near future
The rest of them assumed productivity
As soon as that door closed
Or as soon as Matt’s back was turned to them
It’s always the ones who avert their gaze
That show least concern
About any particular incident
I don’t care about something like this
Why didn’t I turn away?
Hold on
I’m the insensitive one in society
Aren’t I?
Odd behavior for me, surely.
Maybe, just maybe
We’re dealing with an insensitive society
Who latch onto morally-superior elements
And let go
Of the Humane and the Sensible.
…………………..
………………………
………………………
………. BLINK…….
Crap, I’m awake?
Irregular sleep does this to you
Odd dreams, punctuated by twisted rationality.
This one was pointless
Probably had something to do with this analogy I was working on for a few days
For a specific piece of dialogue
Living life
Doing anything you want, and don’t want
By treating every single thing you do
Like a part-time job
Somehow
It gets you through, well enough
If you live alone
By treating everything
As a learning experience
Not something grudgingly done to survive
Sans the luxuries
Most of us claim to need.
In a calculated move
Surprising even me
My brain overworked itself when I was asleep this time
(They call this disease REM Sleep, apparently
Or Rapid-Eye-Movement Sleep)
On the intricacies of a part-time job
And arriving at a frame-of-thought
Or ideology
I wasn’t previously thinking of.
******************************************************************
Present Time and Relevant Reminisces*
Key of Characters:
The Dialogue Writer
The Director
The Talent Agent
*The narrator addresses each character by their professional attributes, not by names or character traits, because of self-induced detachment.
I am Despondent
I have no faith in anything
I believe in nothing
I care for nothing
Boredom is my enemy
Knowledge is my holy grail
I’m harsh in my choices, and my criticism
I have as much conviction to success
As cheap chewed-up gum has
To Improving Breath
I live a temporary existence
Lately, it’s been pretty depressing
To think I was a voice for millions to hear
To think I was the reason
Why people liked catchphrases in movies.
I wrote catchphrases
And people cheered
On hearing their Stars delivering them on-screen
I always thought dialogues
Were a crude form of poetry
But poetry, nonetheless
If it weren't written that way
Dialogues were less poignant
My present condition is a result
Of some haphazardly-placed events
It started with three principal characters
A budding new director and a dialogue writer - that’s my roommate and myself
A talent agent and...
But then, anything on them is futile at the moment
So let's move on...
I met this broke talent agent
Who was prepared to go to any lengths
To get rich and famous
She told me this herself
Now, I no longer have to assume it’s true.
I met her on the set
Of a movie called Wild Baboons
She seemed to be looking for a vacancy for a second heroine
It seemed odd, a talent agent looking for a vacancy
Odder though, she didn’t have any clients yet
Life seems so simple to handle
When you have nothing at all
I shared this character trait with her
While she exhibited something I was a polar opposite to
Caring about something obsessively
In her case, Success
So I wanted to know how that happened
How two similar people could have two very different mind-sets
We got along well
And our tender moments
Consisted of her bitching about life
While I observed progressive behavioral nature at work.
It seemed only fair to befriend her to a friend as well
And my budding-director-roommate didn’t mind
When the talent agent and I
Were stoned out of our minds
He would explain his breakthrough script
With precise detail
Along with sharp jolts of shock in description
To denote the sharp-disturbing nature
Of his material
I’m still not sure how good the material was
But I do remember
How trippy we’d get…
“Three sides of a city
Are cordoned off with electric fences
One side’s left open
That’s where the cops enter through
Armed with shock-proof vests, batons
And pulse guns
This was shortly after the Private Citizen Firearm Ownership Abolishment Act”, the director read.
“When did this happen?”, enquired the talent agent.
“This story’s set in the future
It’s a Dystopian Society
This event was called The Civil Servant City Raid of 2030 A.D
Pay attention, will you?”, asserted our budding, yet impatient, director.
“Oh”, I say
I’m too surprised and delighted
To utter anything even remotely concise.
“The city hears a distant roar”, the director began to describe
“Like a thunderous maelstrom
Of clip-clopping hooves”, he continued…
“Like the sound of an immense ancient army
Until people realize
It was the power of the State
Making itself known
In shock vests and pulse guns
Inviting degenerates and misfits
And the civil-disobedient
To create trouble and havoc
If they dared
Until the throw of a harmless rock later
Causes and enforces the Law-abiders
Into action
Onward
Soldiers of Power and Oppression
With raised batons
And loaded armaments
To take care of those
Who haven’t resorted
To mandatory suicide
On the electrified fences yet.
Like a massive viral organism
Approaching suddenly, abruptly
The apocalyptic clip-clopping gets louder now
Intensified by screams of terror and anguish
Of the disenfranchised in society
To create, in it’s own respect,
A theatrical style
Of genuinely terrifying human horror
Like an abruptly placed opera in a Zombie movie...
Singed human cattle pile up in huddles
Near the foot of the fences
Casualties and Causalities alike
Until one of them has an idea
An idea
That could save some of them
Everyone’s probably going to die soon
So jump onto the fence, he says, kamikaze style
If the fences collapse
Because of the weight of dead bodies
Two fences erected at right angles to each other
Would eventually collapse
Forming a cleared thoroughfare to pass through
A path
Formed bordering the equal sides
Of an incomplete isosceles triangle."
“You’re still a nerd, aren’t you?”, I interrupted, laughing
“No”, he says, and continued with…
“Eventually, it works
From a limited city population of 400 people
Remain 18 Survivors
They try to live outside the law
Form a community
Escape the law
Create a new form of social existence
Not utopian in nature, perhaps
But Collective in consciences and goals
And Individualistic
In Thought. “
We were stumped
By this sudden gush
Of plethoric information
Until he explained
Why he’s going to use the said material
And in what context.
“The rest of the story”, he said, “describes the lives of those survivors
Their short lives similar
To Reality TV’s Escaped Convicts
Creating an alternate society
How they’re ultimately captured
And killed.”
To be fair
It started off innocent enough
Well
Maybe I was the only one convinced
The director’s idea might’ve been
About the world of Narnia
Or something out of a children‘s book
At least
This was what I gathered
From the stampede analogy
At the start of his descriptive pitch
I’ve got to start reading something else
Other than children’s fantasy
I remember thinking then
This was warping up my imagination.
Even to well-described passages.
Cut to three months later
Us roomies were invited
To the Jive Club
The talent agent had a client
Who landed a major deal
We got to the place
And heard whispers
Of the director’s unveiled script
Soon enough
We knew the dream project
Descended
Into the Nightmare Zone
Of getting made
By someone else
He confronted me
Of all people
Of stealing his script
For a personal financial share
He said nothing to the one
Who supplied his script to a Producer
I knew nothing about it at the time
But I discovered later on
That the talent agent and the director
Were perhaps more casual with each other
Than I imagined
Or knew about
So much for relationship-induced-general-awkwardness
After the director
Endured a very drunk night
Slumping, eventually, into frustrated exhaustion
I walk back home, alone
As I walked by the seaside
I heard a badly-driven car
Moving towards me
It slowed down to a halt somewhere near me
The headlights turned off
I stopped and turned
And watched the director looking at me intently
While I considered waving to him
He stepped on the gas
Running me over into unconsciousness
When I’m resuscitated
In an ambulance
I heard the story of a budding director
Attempting to murder me
and driving, inebriated
Losing control
Steering the driver and the car
Into the sea
Drowning
Without entirely understanding how
The Director couldn’t swim
I could
... would’ve tried to save him
If I wasn’t almost-terminally injured
And unconscious
Now
I exist in a coma
My body paralyzed for life
For some reason
Doctors don’t know I can understand and hear everything
Just can’t move
Or express anything with subtle lopsided facial twitches or speech or writing
To showcase my awareness
I’m wheeled around in a wheelchair some days
By volunteering college kids
Who want to prove their love of people
To whoever’s listening
By obsessing and shedding the odd tear
In the memory of hopeless cases
Like Me
In hospitals
How amazingly full of shit
No genuine observance
No genuine understanding
No genuine compassion
Just an exercise in hypocritical morals
I’m wheeled to the place where I watch the news
As if to make me watch something so annoying to my sensibility
That’ll enable me to jump out of a coma
To comment on things
That can’t be fixed
Unless people, in general, are fixed first.
I watch as the talent agent talks about the stolen script
On a breaking news story
- Live coverage of a conference somewhere -
Where she describes the story of the script
In detailed accuracy
You know...
The whole Mortified based-on-real-events garbage
Her actions affected two people diversely
One’s thought to be brain-dead by medical experts
The other’s something resembling a ship-wreck by now
I smile to myself
At the glaring inconsequence of setting things right
In this one instance
The truth might’ve finally been heard
But it doesn’t matter
As much it should’ve
Anymore…
END
Elizabeth: I’m going to be a call-centre supervisor someday.
Me: High ambitions, no doubt…
Elizabeth: I know when you’re mocking me, you know… Better option than you, isn’t it?
Me: You mean more successful? Sure
Elizabeth: And you still don’t care?
Me: Nope
Elizabeth: God Almighty…
Me: There’s a disgruntled dude right there…
Elizabeth: Where?
Me: You just mentioned him…
Elizabeth: Don’t start now…
Me: Alright
Elizabeth: Did you hear about Matt?
Me: What about him?
Elizabeth: He’s going to be fired today.
Me: What for?
Elizabeth: Downsizing
Me: In a call-centre? Hmm… uh… really?
Elizabeth: There he comes… should we say something?
Matt stumbles through the disorganized organization of groups of people pretending to grieve with him
And pieces of retractable furniture in the office
Almost like he’s disoriented
Or on a methamphetamine high
He moves through the mass of consoling ex-co-workers
Having no other thought in his head
Other than the words “You’re fired”
Played on a weird looping mechanism, with distortion ever so slightly
In his head
We all take turns patting his back
Throwing extra bits of stationary we don’t want anymore
Into his moving-out box
As a gesture of goodwill, as a going-away present
As he finally manages to reach the door
And steps outside
The rest of the office exhales a breath of remarkable restraint
As they calculate that the time since Matt left the Manager’s Office to the Office’s Exit
A meager three minutes
To have been the most boring, dragged out & depressing three minutes of their extraordinary lives.
Not me.
I watch as Matt walks out
Staring over my cubicle
At the sight of pure defeat
Pure Sorrow. Pure Psychotic Cerebral Sadness.
Unlike most of us
He enjoyed working here
I wonder what options go through his head now
A trip to the supermarket to buy five feet of rope
Maybe a visit to the pharmacists to get some form of Sertraline
Maybe a warm bath with moisturizing oils
A rubber duck
And a small knife
Having the best smoke of his life
On the exhaust of a car
Accentuated Bleakness
We’re part of a system
That allows something like this to happen
It isn’t about who works the hardest anymore
It’s about who dies soon enough
Allowing the company
To employ someone else
Who’s cheaper to afford
Thereby increasing profits
I hope that’s as blandly-simple as possible
For the rest of these delusional morons working here
To comprehend
Someday.
Do I care? No.
Would I care? Probably not.
I seem to remember myself
Being the only one
To watch Matt walk to the door entirely
And think about what he would do
In the near future
The rest of them assumed productivity
As soon as that door closed
Or as soon as Matt’s back was turned to them
It’s always the ones who avert their gaze
That show least concern
About any particular incident
I don’t care about something like this
Why didn’t I turn away?
Hold on
I’m the insensitive one in society
Aren’t I?
Odd behavior for me, surely.
Maybe, just maybe
We’re dealing with an insensitive society
Who latch onto morally-superior elements
And let go
Of the Humane and the Sensible.
…………………..
………………………
………………………
………. BLINK…….
Crap, I’m awake?
Irregular sleep does this to you
Odd dreams, punctuated by twisted rationality.
This one was pointless
Probably had something to do with this analogy I was working on for a few days
For a specific piece of dialogue
Living life
Doing anything you want, and don’t want
By treating every single thing you do
Like a part-time job
Somehow
It gets you through, well enough
If you live alone
By treating everything
As a learning experience
Not something grudgingly done to survive
Sans the luxuries
Most of us claim to need.
In a calculated move
Surprising even me
My brain overworked itself when I was asleep this time
(They call this disease REM Sleep, apparently
Or Rapid-Eye-Movement Sleep)
On the intricacies of a part-time job
And arriving at a frame-of-thought
Or ideology
I wasn’t previously thinking of.
******************************************************************
Present Time and Relevant Reminisces*
Key of Characters:
The Dialogue Writer
The Director
The Talent Agent
*The narrator addresses each character by their professional attributes, not by names or character traits, because of self-induced detachment.
I am Despondent
I have no faith in anything
I believe in nothing
I care for nothing
Boredom is my enemy
Knowledge is my holy grail
I’m harsh in my choices, and my criticism
I have as much conviction to success
As cheap chewed-up gum has
To Improving Breath
I live a temporary existence
Lately, it’s been pretty depressing
To think I was a voice for millions to hear
To think I was the reason
Why people liked catchphrases in movies.
I wrote catchphrases
And people cheered
On hearing their Stars delivering them on-screen
I always thought dialogues
Were a crude form of poetry
But poetry, nonetheless
If it weren't written that way
Dialogues were less poignant
My present condition is a result
Of some haphazardly-placed events
It started with three principal characters
A budding new director and a dialogue writer - that’s my roommate and myself
A talent agent and...
But then, anything on them is futile at the moment
So let's move on...
I met this broke talent agent
Who was prepared to go to any lengths
To get rich and famous
She told me this herself
Now, I no longer have to assume it’s true.
I met her on the set
Of a movie called Wild Baboons
She seemed to be looking for a vacancy for a second heroine
It seemed odd, a talent agent looking for a vacancy
Odder though, she didn’t have any clients yet
Life seems so simple to handle
When you have nothing at all
I shared this character trait with her
While she exhibited something I was a polar opposite to
Caring about something obsessively
In her case, Success
So I wanted to know how that happened
How two similar people could have two very different mind-sets
We got along well
And our tender moments
Consisted of her bitching about life
While I observed progressive behavioral nature at work.
It seemed only fair to befriend her to a friend as well
And my budding-director-roommate didn’t mind
When the talent agent and I
Were stoned out of our minds
He would explain his breakthrough script
With precise detail
Along with sharp jolts of shock in description
To denote the sharp-disturbing nature
Of his material
I’m still not sure how good the material was
But I do remember
How trippy we’d get…
“Three sides of a city
Are cordoned off with electric fences
One side’s left open
That’s where the cops enter through
Armed with shock-proof vests, batons
And pulse guns
This was shortly after the Private Citizen Firearm Ownership Abolishment Act”, the director read.
“When did this happen?”, enquired the talent agent.
“This story’s set in the future
It’s a Dystopian Society
This event was called The Civil Servant City Raid of 2030 A.D
Pay attention, will you?”, asserted our budding, yet impatient, director.
“Oh”, I say
I’m too surprised and delighted
To utter anything even remotely concise.
“The city hears a distant roar”, the director began to describe
“Like a thunderous maelstrom
Of clip-clopping hooves”, he continued…
“Like the sound of an immense ancient army
Until people realize
It was the power of the State
Making itself known
In shock vests and pulse guns
Inviting degenerates and misfits
And the civil-disobedient
To create trouble and havoc
If they dared
Until the throw of a harmless rock later
Causes and enforces the Law-abiders
Into action
Onward
Soldiers of Power and Oppression
With raised batons
And loaded armaments
To take care of those
Who haven’t resorted
To mandatory suicide
On the electrified fences yet.
Like a massive viral organism
Approaching suddenly, abruptly
The apocalyptic clip-clopping gets louder now
Intensified by screams of terror and anguish
Of the disenfranchised in society
To create, in it’s own respect,
A theatrical style
Of genuinely terrifying human horror
Like an abruptly placed opera in a Zombie movie...
Singed human cattle pile up in huddles
Near the foot of the fences
Casualties and Causalities alike
Until one of them has an idea
An idea
That could save some of them
Everyone’s probably going to die soon
So jump onto the fence, he says, kamikaze style
If the fences collapse
Because of the weight of dead bodies
Two fences erected at right angles to each other
Would eventually collapse
Forming a cleared thoroughfare to pass through
A path
Formed bordering the equal sides
Of an incomplete isosceles triangle."
“You’re still a nerd, aren’t you?”, I interrupted, laughing
“No”, he says, and continued with…
“Eventually, it works
From a limited city population of 400 people
Remain 18 Survivors
They try to live outside the law
Form a community
Escape the law
Create a new form of social existence
Not utopian in nature, perhaps
But Collective in consciences and goals
And Individualistic
In Thought. “
We were stumped
By this sudden gush
Of plethoric information
Until he explained
Why he’s going to use the said material
And in what context.
“The rest of the story”, he said, “describes the lives of those survivors
Their short lives similar
To Reality TV’s Escaped Convicts
Creating an alternate society
How they’re ultimately captured
And killed.”
To be fair
It started off innocent enough
Well
Maybe I was the only one convinced
The director’s idea might’ve been
About the world of Narnia
Or something out of a children‘s book
At least
This was what I gathered
From the stampede analogy
At the start of his descriptive pitch
I’ve got to start reading something else
Other than children’s fantasy
I remember thinking then
This was warping up my imagination.
Even to well-described passages.
Cut to three months later
Us roomies were invited
To the Jive Club
The talent agent had a client
Who landed a major deal
We got to the place
And heard whispers
Of the director’s unveiled script
Soon enough
We knew the dream project
Descended
Into the Nightmare Zone
Of getting made
By someone else
He confronted me
Of all people
Of stealing his script
For a personal financial share
He said nothing to the one
Who supplied his script to a Producer
I knew nothing about it at the time
But I discovered later on
That the talent agent and the director
Were perhaps more casual with each other
Than I imagined
Or knew about
So much for relationship-induced-general-awkwardness
After the director
Endured a very drunk night
Slumping, eventually, into frustrated exhaustion
I walk back home, alone
As I walked by the seaside
I heard a badly-driven car
Moving towards me
It slowed down to a halt somewhere near me
The headlights turned off
I stopped and turned
And watched the director looking at me intently
While I considered waving to him
He stepped on the gas
Running me over into unconsciousness
When I’m resuscitated
In an ambulance
I heard the story of a budding director
Attempting to murder me
and driving, inebriated
Losing control
Steering the driver and the car
Into the sea
Drowning
Without entirely understanding how
The Director couldn’t swim
I could
... would’ve tried to save him
If I wasn’t almost-terminally injured
And unconscious
Now
I exist in a coma
My body paralyzed for life
For some reason
Doctors don’t know I can understand and hear everything
Just can’t move
Or express anything with subtle lopsided facial twitches or speech or writing
To showcase my awareness
I’m wheeled around in a wheelchair some days
By volunteering college kids
Who want to prove their love of people
To whoever’s listening
By obsessing and shedding the odd tear
In the memory of hopeless cases
Like Me
In hospitals
How amazingly full of shit
No genuine observance
No genuine understanding
No genuine compassion
Just an exercise in hypocritical morals
I’m wheeled to the place where I watch the news
As if to make me watch something so annoying to my sensibility
That’ll enable me to jump out of a coma
To comment on things
That can’t be fixed
Unless people, in general, are fixed first.
I watch as the talent agent talks about the stolen script
On a breaking news story
- Live coverage of a conference somewhere -
Where she describes the story of the script
In detailed accuracy
You know...
The whole Mortified based-on-real-events garbage
Her actions affected two people diversely
One’s thought to be brain-dead by medical experts
The other’s something resembling a ship-wreck by now
I smile to myself
At the glaring inconsequence of setting things right
In this one instance
The truth might’ve finally been heard
But it doesn’t matter
As much it should’ve
Anymore…
END
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