Nine kinds of bad

I am or have been made out of blurs.

Lu·mi·nes·cence of elevatorbuttonlights

It is funny how when you are running along the lake, all of a sudden you see a princess riding a white horse in the distance, and then logic kicks in about 0.08 seconds later, and you realize that it is actually a small child and a sheepdog, running side-by-side. Princess or little girl, either way, it may be that she is off to save the universe's very last existing Symbol of Division (dot, over horizontal line, over dot), which is nearly extinct after falling into complete disuse, and also because of the increasing dominance of computer keyboard characters, and their impenetrable clique.

May be the universe's last surviving division symbol will seek to immortalize itself in the night sky, using stars. In which case, the first twilight line will come into existence, and the human race can oooh and awe about how there is now a twinkling linear form, which is also millions of light years away from us, unfathomably far, and so divisive, so so divisive are the remnants of feelings taken under the cold science we have neighbored. I am bitter about having to die before we ever discover things that are so far away, such that they are only meagre twinklings in an overhead hemisphere on a walk home at night.

A multiplication symbol is just a baby X.

Children, sheepdogs and spaceships. Princesses with their horses, and their brand new constellations. I do not know.

Linear stars would mean that gravity is not so stringent with its religions.

I do not know.

These are stars of the lid.

Last night, downtown Buffalo was abuzz with small children and golden pompoms, large children screaming obscenities, and ex-jocks offering me random high-fives. I was at the hockey arena, where no hockey teams were playing. There were only televisions, large and small and scattered. There were ten thousand of us. How do ten thousand people show up for an effort that is beyond all hopes, and where losing is the underlying expectation?

Buffalo wishes so much for something on which to have a communal glory about. It is very sad and beautiful, but then again I am a hockey fan.

The Buffalo Sabres won. The hockey team was three hundred miles away, but the roar of the crowd was right there, centered.

Stars of the Lid!

Another imaginary fire incident

This posting concerns my lack of urgency when dealing with fire alarm systems, which did not help themselves tonight either.

I was awokened by one of my fire alarms at approximately 1:45AM this morning, and I had been drinking the prior evening and my head was extremely achey and woozy upon being alerted, and I was feeling generally non-appreciative for having my life saved ahead of time.

My first instinct was to pull a chair up to the alarm making all of the racket, which I found was just near the entrance door to the apartment. It disappointed me to a great degree to find that the alarm was not a wall-mounted discus-type device, but rather an building-integrated, inlaid, high-intensity speaker, which I imagined I could even poke with a large awl multiple times, and it would have no effect on ceasing the piercing noise.

After giving up on destroying the alarm, I began to consider if perhaps there was a fire in the building.

Impossible!

Even given my witnessing of a building being devoured by fire in the middle of the night in July of 2001, after being awokened in only my boxer shorts, by a police officer.

I decided to peek out of my front door peep hole to see if other people on my floor were having urgency. The drug dealing slacker who lives across the hall proceeded to walk the incorrect way, towards the side of the building that had no elevator, let alone stairs.

I decided to put my chair back where it came from. And then I decided that the balcony would be a good place to stand to watch for the firetrucks, which came approximately ten seconds after I took my new position. Well done, Burlington Fire Department!

I decided to hover close to the wall and hide from view, for fear that the fire department might see me, and ask me to leave the building. I went to the bedroom and applied long pajama pants, just in case the situation were to turn.

I wondered if I should go down to ground level and exit the building, and wait in the parking lot, where I could see some of the other residents accumulating. I wondered, if I did, should I pack Linus along in my loving arms, because that would surely make him thrilled.

I stopped wondering about escaping to safety, and took a pee instead. Now the alarm had been going for ten minutes and was making me feel ill. I decided to take a picture of the fire engine truck from my balcony, from such a spot where the firefighters could not spot me. It was a "no-look" photograph. That is the picture here.

After examining the picture on my camera, I decided that no firefighters were visible, and I might be able to poke my head out to better gauge the situation. There were about nine residents sitting on the curb, looking cold and bored, but SAFE.

At about this point, the fire chief's SUV left the premises, and the fire engine truck shut off its lights. I knew there was nothing to fear. But why was it taking so goddamn long to shut off the alarm, so that we could go back to sleep?

This gave me a chance to console Linus for almost five straight minutes, since he was being ravaged by the alarm in even more nerve-wracking ways than I was.

Anyways, during this time I thought about how I should write into my blog about how well I obey orders that were supposedly ingrained into my memory when I was in elementary school, about how I am supposed to have the utmost amounts of urgency when faced with screaming fire alarms, and about how I should leave buildings and school buses in the most complicated possible manners.

And after about twenty minutes, a blessed firefighter finally found the switch to the alarm, and prompted it into the OFF mode. And that is that.

Now it has begun to rain.

Thanks for trying, old bat who left their stove on before going to bed.

About doing 46% of the work

My employment scenario grows increasingly frustrating.

Yesterday I had my mid-year review, because apparently it is already halfway through the year since the end of September, which is when fiscal years begin, because that is what capitalism prefers.

I went into my mid-year review prepared, with statistical analyses that I had gathered, which I did not have time to gather, but gathered anyways. I had a longstanding hunch that I was shouldering much more than my share of the incoming workload, which is supposed to be divvied up between five of us worthless beasts of burden. I used my surprisingly adept computationing skills to discover that I was, in fact, performing 46% of all of the work, while the other FOUR people were performing 54%. I was surprised that I did not require a great amount of mental restraint from throwing chairs and hitting people with them. Perhaps I was feeling even weaker than normal.

When I made a point to make my boss aware of this glaring statistical fact during my midyear review, it was politely and disingenuously empathized with, and I made sure to acknowledge that empathy politely and disingenuously in kind. It was deemed to be an aberration that will probably subside soon, even though it has been like this for six goddamn months.

To top it all off, I was marked with a "Meets Expectations", leaving me wondering what it takes to get a check within the "Exceeds Expectations" box, like I used to do effortlessly in my previous incarnations with this splendrous corporation.

All of this lack of appreciation leaves me a bit stale and bitter, and I am wondering if it is about time for my reputation and reliability to worsen, maybe exponentially. Tomorrow, for instance, is feeling more like a sick day everyday.

Thirteen months is too long to report to any given cushy chair. Tonight I will daydream about my second career path, which will involve maybe teaching Mongolian children how to watch television, or something equally altruistic, because I should wish my philanthropy to focus more on people than turbines, maybe.

Anyways it is terrible to be bothered enough to drag work into a blog, but that is the way it goes.