Pajama Game

The markets are closed today for Good Friday, and I am thinking about closing myself too.

I am still creaking with a cold, a strange one that has proceeded not north-to-south as they normally do, but rather uphill, from lungs to nose. I have dosed myself liberally with over-the-counter drugs, which has given me a strange mix of lassitude and productivity. Yesterday I ”Worked from Home,” which is the concept by which we exercise the ”virtual office.”

I failed to change out of my sleeping clothes, skipped the commute, and the spit-shined visage with which I confront the world and bound the margins of daily madness.

Instead of hanging around the water cooler and making up people to call on the telephone, I sat at the computer all day, feverishly typing elaborate memoranda, some of which seemed to be well received.

I wondered at that. Were the readers in their jammies, too? Was this all a dream?

Without real life to distract me, I listened to the radio. The news, combined with the psuedophed, put me in a trance state. Terry Schiavo is slipping, maybe dead by Easter. I had an image of ancient Chief Justice Rehnquist, who looked unsettlingly like the Pope all morning.

There is a crisis in a country without vowels. Protesters swarmed around government buildings and the police stood by, as they did in Ukraine and Georgia, which have a pleasant mixture of consonants and vowels. The people claim corruption, and repression and fraud at the polls.

The Longtime President, a situational friend of both the Russians and the Americans, fled the palace with his savings book and family. This is the third time in just over a year that people-power has overturned the government of a former Soviet republic, and I have absolutely no clue as to what it portends.

Is it a victory for democracy, or the onset of chaos? Is it both?

I had the flat-bed scanner out so that I could digitize some Congressional testimony to insert into one of the detailed memoranda I worked on in my pajamas. I did not want to type the words that described the counter-terror initiative for the trans-Saharan region. I think I was suggesting a network solution for a land without water, I don’t know. My fingers flew across the keyboard, all the words highlighted in red and signifying that MicroSoft Word’s spell-check did not understand my intent.

I sent the memorandum to an extensive corporate distribution list, and then continued to scan documents. There was a partly forgotten folder of letters I had sent long ago.

The ancient carbon-copies were translated into OCR format, sometimes with curious results. I looked at them as pictures, GIF files from someone I knew long ago, a young man filled with braggadocio and hubris. I miss him, sometimes.

I finally slumped down in the late afternoon, unable to further compose. I could not sleep, though, as several telemarketers began to call my land-line, and business called on my cell. I finally roused enough to unhook the latter and turn off the former, find some additional psuedophed, and drift away into the twilight.

In the safe soft space between the eiderdown I felt the unmistakable feel of an IBM Selectric keyboard, and the crisp ”smack” of the type-ball on the paper. I felt myself looking back through the one-way mirror, hunched in the swelter of the Mission Planning spaces of a rugged gray aircraft carrier. He could not see me, though I was him, and his fingers moved with deliberation, not like we type today. I could see, over the flight-deck jersey he was wearing the words as they appeared on the paper:

”With any luck, by the time this reaches you, the Iran question will be happily resolved. If there is no luck, we may be the tip of the sword to purge the infidels of their recent madness. I want to tread the fine line between being alarming and nonchalant. As things stand, we are motoring north to the waters off Iran, as was planned all along. We will continue to do that, to demonstrate;.that the seas remain free, even for Imperialists such as ourselves.”

The young man looked up, and I turned away, not wanting him to see our future.

”Naturally, military action is the least profitable course of action, as it is virtually certain to get the hostages killed. We are simply too far from Tehran to achieve anything of note there, and the weapons from the coast inland are U.S. supplied (regardless of their present material condition) and quite formidable.”

Curious words, I thought, and as I drifted away I thought I could hear dully the sounds of ancient claxons.

Copyright 2005 Vic Socotra

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