(sarc.) o boy!

don't even ask...this is something i wrote when i was screwed up. even i don't get it

Asterisk

A dark, plaintive room dimly lit by an overhead lamp, dominated by a dusty table with medium-sized stacks of paper and a dusty desktop computer, and by it is *, sitting there with his face buried in his hands, the three-day stubble on his face like a thousand pinpricks against his palms – people almost always prefer working in confined, ill-lit spaces and complaining about them, don’t they? To all appearance this posture would have signified dejection or frustration of some sort wouldn’t it? Then our assumptions are thwarted and actuality is driven into our guts like a double-edged sword, making a dull slurping sound, and as we stand there, utterly out of breath, he takes a sheaf of papers and blows the dust off them, sneezing as the dust balls disintegrate and move into his nose.

This day is not like any other day, on which he would have been wandering about aimlessly - with an affected air of purpose – through the sections of his office – we shall call it that, regardless of what it might actually be. It wouldn’t make any kind of significant difference if we called it that so we shall permit this cloud of ambiguity to be sifted through, to our liking – and talking to people he hardly knew or to whom people hardly talked to simply to assure that he was there. Assure whom, you ask? That is a question we do not presume to answer. On this day, * is given a deadline, in the resolution of which he played a part. On this day, he is given ‘purpose’.

While we were absorbed in all this reflection, * has tried deciphering the script. He ‘tsk-tsks’ and we then hear the shrill beep as his computer boots up. He drums his fingers on his table as his antediluvian system runs his OS files and we almost expect his to clap his hands and whistle when the interface does come up, but we know better. Let’s go get some water, shall we? This might take a little while, I guess.

A while later, the staccato ‘tappity tap’ of the keyboard comes drifting out of the room and we go back in. We go and stand behind his chair as he transcribes the content of the sheaves, blaspheming all the while – no, he cannot see us. If he could he’d be the rigid perfectionist he wants to be, or at least attempt to. As we see him doing all this, the inevitable question enters our thoughts; – why? Because...that’s it...’because’ – what? Remarks pour out like un-hardened jelly from an upside down mould that has just been lifted just a wee bit, ‘because it’s his job.’ Well, now, is it really? To understand that, we must know what his job is, shouldn’t we? Simply put, it is to type in vast amounts of unfiltered data (ambiguity is key, here), making changes where necessary. Data is after all data so we needn’t mention that it is imperative to retain the ultimate point.

Let us now digress – for comprehension’s sake - and take a little trip into the not too distant past, the very same not too distant past where our character, we shall call him, was just like many others, clueless and of no importance. Popularity was there, yes, but still, unimportant. Down-to-earth, he was, but dependable, we do not know. Then occurred a series of events that helped in boosting his image, his cred, his ego, his head – ah! Rhyme in reason...suddenly, his centre of gravity was raised a little bit and became higher than all of ours, than all the ‘others’. Its funny how inevitability and circumstance are misinterpreted as, what shall we say, him/her/it self by the person. We should, of course, think that this chain of thought would be abandoned especially since he was just an actor in a sitcom, performing rehearsed manoeuvres with the occasional ad-libbing. But no, it is not only hot air that fills his head now, its also subjective objectified falsehood.

Ok so where were we? The point, right, so let’s continue...I need not have mentioned that the data was someone else’s but I guess I just did and now I’m too lazy to go back and change it. What IS the point here? A pseudo-solipsist who went horribly astray and ended up confined in a sanctum walled by nihilistic delusions? An idiot who fails to realise his non-purpose? An extremely intelligent person corrupted? Here, we fail to come to a conclusion. We cease to exist and ‘I’ crops in. I for me, I for irony..