So. What's your immediate geography - physical and psychic - right this minute, as you type. What can you see, hear, smell, touch, taste as you fire off your snappy epistles to the board? Can you touch anyone's tits with your claw?
I'm at work, 11:00 on a Monday.
Standard work clothes: black Dockers, stained (wore them last week a couple days, but not over the weekend), blue "Pro-Dive Australia" t-shirt under an unbuttoned, faded purple cotton/denim shirt, long-sleeved. White gold wedding band. White socks, dark brown veldskoen shoes (recently polished, but with small holes along each instep and with stitching coming loose). Around my neck is one of those hardware-store ball-chains, brass-colored, leading to my ID-card/passkey in my left breast pocket. I need this to go to the bathroom. Most people use those retractable key-chain belt-clip things around here.
I work in a newsroom -- a large, open space filled with labyrinthine rows of desks. I can see computer monitors for about 50 yards off to my right -- over my left is the doorway leading to the narrow entrance hallway & break room. Directly in front of me, about 20 feet away, is my editor's desk, at the end of the next row of desks. (The desks are oriented such that we each sit at the crotch of an L-shape, looking diagonally across our rows.) The desk next to his is dwarfed by a giant bouquet of pink and lipstick roses with babies' breath and some kind of small, yellow flowers. My grey-bearded managing editor is slightly closer to me -- I'm looking past a printer over his left shoulder. Everyone along that row of desks uses Macs with 17" monitors for layout & photo. I sit in the next row back, the middle-left of a 3x2 row of desks known as "writer's row," where everyone uses small Dell laptops.
There are papers everywhere, and everywhere there are various devices used to stack them. My desk is more cluttered than most.
Here's a crude attempt at mapping my desk: Each leg of the L is around 3.5 feet long. Starting from the left rear up to the dilapidated laptop, we have a wire "in basket" filled with magazines, letters, and fax cover sheets, behind two stacks of books about Nostradamus, a killer virus, some Jesuit/Marian prophecies and a Wired guide to the future. Next to the in basket are three plastic racks used to hold magazines upright -- all are nearly full of back issues of my tabloid, going back to the Nov 6, 2001 issue (the first after we had to flee the anthrax). There's a printout of a Salon article perched on top of that, a stack of old science magazines in front of it, some reader letters next to it, and an open folder under my left arm, with a clip called "Harnessing the Power of Poop" in it. It's about using human waste as a fuel source on deep space missions.
The writer next to me is using the back of those magazine racks to hang children's pictures (I know there's a printout of a photo of my daughter there -- oddly, I don't have one on my desk, but see her over there every day anyway.)
To my immediate right is a stack of printed papers covered with scrawled notes, half-hidden under two messy stacks of home-burned CDs and a really skanky, half-broken pair of in-yer-ear headphones. My pen is here. This is a very important thing to know. If the pen leaves this spot, panic ensues. Behind the CDs, a "toaster" for holding folders upright, although mine is crammed solid with magazines, forms and folded papers as well as various files.
Behind the phone, there's a calendar -- touristy thing, got for free from a Dai-minority restaurant in Beijing. Lots of colorful pictures of Dai (Thai) people, looking an awful lot like the kitschy Seminole reservation postcards I remember from my childhood. Same deal, I'm sure. Beyond that, a large manila envelope (crazy reader mail, put there by the office manager, an attractive, young Turkish surfer who faces me from her desk just across to my right), a stack of books about hunting monsters, demon possessions, a really bad novel and a collection of all the sayings of Jesus from every gospel ever. The stapler lives on top of this stack. My plastic "Big Daddy Flanigan's" cup, with lid and straw, filled with water. (Others drink coffee, I hit the cooler over and over.)
Finally, at the right-most, my lap-top case slumps over a couple Fortean Times magazines. On top of it, various things I printed this morning to take home -- a copy of a made-up story about a monkey swarm attack at a Hanuman temple, some guitar tabs. And a stack of kung-fu coasters a friend gave me that I'm going to try to scan later.
Behind everything, the sounds of paper moving, fingers hitting keys, staplers, printers, copiers, paper cutters, thumbtacks and paper-clips. If you can do it to paper, chances are it gets done here. And the murmur of conversation across desks, among the photo people (who do most of the phone work around here), my editor having a conversation from his seat with a writer behind me about the virtues of ibuprofen vs. generic headache medicine. This is why the headphones and CDs are here. Constant distraction. Now the Turkish office manager is opening a package of oreos for the snack table (in front of her desk, catty-corner to me). Noise, always, but temptation too -- to listen, to get up and eat, to leave for a walk alone down the hall.
Never to write, even about the Power of Poop.
Except, of course, on here. I think I'm going to walk out to the bathroom now. Then, more water. |
Have to say, it gives me pause that both Warewullf and I are becoming less beary, just when Beardom is becoming fashionable. Little cubby friends now beg us to take them to the Bear Bars. That can't be right...