a note from the downtown office

The custodian lady at work is over 80 and won't pick up our trash if it's wet or has loose food. She trained the others to keep their trash clean. I resented her at first but eventually had to respect her impudence. She never checked my trash. I threw nothing away.

She was gone a while because she had a heart attack. She returned, and we picked up where we left off.

Watch your step at the office

At first I thought it was the screen: its glow embeds in your eyes, numbs your vision, warming your brain to a soft buttery spread only later to gel, caking your cranium with useless residual. But, no, it was not the screen. So I thought next, maybe the desk and chair. Spreading out before you a kingdom's worth of shrugged off, passed over trivialities to rule over from your wheeled, anonymous, adjustable office throne, a Bic Round Stic, your scepter. But it wasn't this, either. Although the sitting there, propped in front of the monitor didn't help. In the end it was me--the inevitable bend in the path I soldiered on, that path that affords such double 17-inch kingly views as this. As pointless the navigation, as mindless the destination.